We’ve long been promised a future augmented by intelligent helpers, of the type depicted in movies like “Her”: benevolent digital beings who remove some of the chaos of modern existence by organizing our lives, all the while offering emotional support through chipper encouragement and cute jokes. Sometimes, these helpers turn on us, as in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Either way, artificial intelligence represents the manifestation of humanity’s biggest hopes and fears for technology. But for now, it can help us order Domino’s in a different window on the same device we would normally use to order Domino’s.

Commerce seems to be the primary preoccupation of the booming chatbot universe. There’s Operator, an all-around assistant bot created by a founder of Uber; Assist, which lets people reserve hotels and concert tickets by text; and x.ai, which books appointments. In April, Facebook announced that it was introducing chatbots to its Messenger app, so that the company’s 900 million users can order food and get the news, simply by “chatting” with the bots on their contact list. Like Facebook’s, most of these bots work right inside messaging apps; it’s like texting with a concierge, or if Siri birthed a litter of smarter, faster and nimbler offspring — ones you can issue orders to silently and who never get tired, or creeped out, by the nature of your requests.

Outsourcing work to bots sounds ideal to me. My attitude toward technology is fueled by a desire for efficiency — and by laziness. In college, while my friends got into D.I.Y. hobbies like woodworking and sewing, I joked that I was ready for the D.I.F.M. — do-it-for-me — revolution. And yet for all the hype, none of these bots seem to work that well yet. Over the last few weeks, I’ve played with a handful and have struggled to make much use of them. I recently needed to make a reservation for a work lunch. I fired up Operator to find me a table, and it quickly sent back a pleasant but unhelpful reply — declining my request, as it didn’t yet have that capability.