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.

翻译：人工智能（AI）在支持医疗服务方面的需求从未像近年来的全球疫情这样迫切。本文综述了近十年（2013-2023年）提出的医疗领域AI赋能聊天机器人的最新技术。聚焦AI赋能技术的原因在于其通过聊天机器人增强人机交互质量、减少对人机交互的依赖以及节约人力的潜力。我们的综述表明，目前有少数（商业）聊天机器人用于患者支持，同时还有其他（非商业）聊天机器人处于临床试验阶段。然而，该技术在患者安全和数据保护方面缺乏信任，且医疗工作者和专业人员对其益处缺乏广泛认知。此外，患者对聊天机器人自然语言处理（NLP）技能与人类相比的表现表示不满。尽管近期ChatGPT的引入提升了NLP技术的标准，但在未经过严格和彻底验证以确保其适用于辅助医疗这一"窄"领域之前，该聊天机器人无法在患者安全和医学伦理方面值得信赖。我们的综述建议，为了在公共卫生服务中部署和整合AI赋能聊天机器人，当务之急是：构建简单易用且安全的技术；通过以下方式增强技术信心：（a）通过重点培训和发展在医学界建立信心；（b）通过推广活动在患者和更广泛社区建立信心。