Will Robots Replace Humans in the Contact Centre?

First line definitely yes. Second and third line depends on how creative and empathic the answer needs to be. If you can know that the client calling is a high value one at risk of walking away, you might want to offer the “human experience” instead of the chatbot.

Peter. Just my opinion. Yes, robots will replace human work in Call Centers. But, the real question is when and how much?. Those will replace some other repetitive job positions too, but they should give human professionals the opportunity to develop other characteristics as empathy (where robots can reach yet). I am involved in AI studies and AI is overpassing human accuracy by far in some domains (but General Artificial intelligence is still a utopia).

I understand that we are now still in the weak AI era, and that the Turing test is still far away to be passed by any talking machine. Besides semantics is a field of work much more underdevlopped than computing. We`ll see. Up to now, I would say NO. I enclose an amusing example of how we will be going back and forth https://retina.elpais.com/retina/2019/01/17/tendencias/1547731465_741426.html

Having had the experience of working with fully automated call centers, one must be prepared with the backlash from customer aggravation with the inability to reach a human.  With that said, it really is dependent on types of services/products you are involved in which should determine the level of robotics utilized in the call centers.