1. I mean static documents plus decent search you can find the right documents.

2. Yes, but its difficult to get a chat bot to function well over the wide range of services a government offers and the wide range of users who need government services.

One of the most annoying chatbots I have ever come across was on a UK government site. The DVLA. "lets tell you what you already know and not answer the question".

Possibly something well designed might make it easier, but I have found most of gov.uk to be very usable and helpful.

How does the form factor of a chat bot affect the quality of a search running on a backend? It has the benefit of obviously having a semantic search affordance which a standard search field doesn't.