  Artificial Intelligence (AI) for supporting healthcare services has never
been more necessitated than by the recent global pandemic. Here, we review the
state-of-the-art in AI-enabled Chatbots in healthcare proposed during the last
10 years (2013-2023). The focus on AI-enabled technology is because of its
potential for enhancing the quality of human-machine interaction via Chatbots,
reducing dependence on human-human interaction and saving man-hours. Our review
indicates that there are a handful of (commercial) Chatbots that are being used
for patient support, while there are others (non-commercial) that are in the
clinical trial phases. However, there is a lack of trust on this technology
regarding patient safety and data protection, as well as a lack of wider
awareness on its benefits among the healthcare workers and professionals. Also,
patients have expressed dissatisfaction with Natural Language Processing (NLP)
skills of the Chatbots in comparison to humans. Notwithstanding the recent
introduction of ChatGPT that has raised the bar for the NLP technology, this
Chatbot cannot be trusted with patient safety and medical ethics without
thorough and rigorous checks to serve in the `narrow' domain of assistive
healthcare. Our review suggests that to enable deployment and integration of
AI-enabled Chatbots in public health services, the need of the hour is: to
build technology that is simple and safe to use; to build confidence on the
technology among: (a) the medical community by focussed training and
development; (b) the patients and wider community through outreach.

Artificial Intelligence;Robotics