It wasn’t a meta-agent, however. My guess is people didn’t like the idea of only sometimes being used if Facebook thought they should route to them, no ability to control end user experience or brand loyalty, every random service would need to be world class at NLP, and other miscellaneous reasons associated with being just confined to a simple textual transaction.

There are also probably less examples of this than you’d think — restaurants and movies are 101, but where else does this go? Even getting the next obvious thing — concert tickets - all of the sudden requires picking seats, looking at photos of the venue, constraining different options, understanding how many seats are together, etc. Even with crappy UI of Ticketmaster you want the breadth of options and probably to comparison shop. Things quickly get out of hand, and unless you trust the agent to make decisions for you and explain it’s rationale, there are better interfaces than just text.