The promise is decentralization and ppl starting to realize it is a good idea. The technology seems to be very sound, it is open-source, the transfer of Gitter to the Matrix foundation (?) brings a lot users, client apps are descent etc
I‘m not sure about ‚conversational‘ chatbots, they might work in a very narrow use-case only right now but using very task specific bots in e.g. Slack to automate tasks is definitely a great thing.
This is why I believe shownotes are so important. Include text, links, chapter marks/titles already in the podcast feed... transcripts via AWS/wit.ai or other cloud services...