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My armchair theory as to why this is happening: it's driven mostly by developer needs. Although there are some interesting applications for chat interfaces, I t

by amasad 11y ago

My armchair theory as to why this is happening: it's driven mostly by developer needs. Although there are some interesting applications for chat interfaces, I think that the excitement is mostly hype. Developers jumped on this bandwagon because: - mobile app delivery sucks (Apple and Google are not trying to make it better, Facebook and Microsoft are but there is only so much you can do when you don't own the platform) - the web is still subpar for mobile and is not progressing fast enough - developers (understandably) want to get back the practices that became popular in the Web 2.0 era: continuous delivery, a/b testing, etc - running code on your own servers is much easier to develop, test, debug, and change - UIs are still hard to build. Things are slowly getting better but it's very expensive to hire good Frontend engineers and designers and you need to laboriously create UIs for every possible interaction - apps are too much of a commitment for users. Whether you are looking for something or just want to use something once you have to install an app and sign up for it just to try it. This app will then live on your home screen along with hundreds of other apps that you don't really use. The recent advances in NLP and some AI techniques made it possible to create good chat interfaces. Which is a much better developer experience. It's still unclear whether it's the best possible user experience.

ocdtrekkie 11y ago
It's actually really funny, because before I saw a lot of this hitting the news, I was working on my own home automation system, and trying to figure out a quick temporary solution to reach it from the outside world, without developing client apps. And I thought of email. A well standardized message queuing platform that could easily implement a basic text command interface. So I ended up with a rudimentary chat bot. (I could've done SMS, but didn't want to find and pay for a service for that.) And a few weeks before this announcement, I'd been thinking about how to handle queries to my chat bot my software didn't understand, and I was thinking "Hey, I wonder if I could have my bot ask Cortana stuff if it doesn't know". And Microsoft's picked up and really ran with this model with Bot Framework. Obviously they've been working on this behind the scenes for a while, I'm not trying to take credit for the concept by any stretch, but I thought it was funny that I had been thinking along those lines myself before I heard about this. Good UI isn't hard. Generally, it's simple and universally understood. I instantly understood where Microsoft was going here because I had the same thoughts. That being said, I want my system running mostly locally/self-hosted, so an Azure-based platform like Bot Framework probably won't work for my own system, though I might very well send requests to other bots using it.
- joshstrange 11y ago
  > Good UI isn't hard. Generally, it's simple and universally understood. I have to strongly disagree with that, it might be easy to spot good UI but it is not normally easy to make a good UI. As for SMS Twilio is dirt cheap $0.0075/message + $1/mo for a number also combining it with something like Wit.ai [0] to parse your text and you can get pretty far. [0] https://wit.ai/docs/http/20141022 https://wit.ai/docs/http/20141022
  - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
    That's a monthly fee and a per message fee I don't have to pay because I'm using email. :) Also, I get to use a open standard, which is another big plus.
- cableshaft 11y ago
  Had the same thought of using email as a queue, but for playing asynchronous games. Basically play-by-email, but you give the game login access to an email account and each email has a game id and an order id and it basically treats the email like a pipe. I felt this was one of the few ways you could insure the game could still be played in perpetuity after a company had gone away and their servers shut down, without requiring people to host a dedicated server. Obviously this wouldn't work with real time games, and players could potentially abuse the data being sent if you're not careful and/or don't encrypt the data, but I prefer making turn-based games anyway. Having worked for several small companies that have shut down, that's a concern to me (although you can't even download most of those games anymore since they were taken off their respective app stores).
  - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
    Exactly. If you need a way to send data across a network, queue it if your partner is unavailable, ideally make sure it works on a large number of platforms out of the box... Email is already there and it works. I found it interesting Microsoft Garage made an "IM client" that uses email in the backend recently. In some cases, I think all these new protocols we invented was reinventing the wheel, when we already had something that worked fine. Using it for games is a really neat idea. In a plaintext format, you could even space out things like a Scrabble board, using @ and & symbols for special blanks or such, and one user could be lower case letters, and the other could use capital letters. Dots for normal blanks. I love simple formats.

by amasad 11y ago

ocdtrekkie 11y ago

It's actually really funny, because before I saw a lot of this hitting the news, I was working on my own home automation system, and trying to figure out a quick temporary solution to reach it from the outside world, without developing client apps. And I thought of email. A well standardized message queuing platform that could easily implement a basic text command interface. So I ended up with a rudimentary chat bot. (I could've done SMS, but didn't want to find and pay for a service for that.) And a few weeks before this announcement, I'd been thinking about how to handle queries to my chat bot my software didn't understand, and I was thinking "Hey, I wonder if I could have my bot ask Cortana stuff if it doesn't know". And Microsoft's picked up and really ran with this model with Bot Framework. Obviously they've been working on this behind the scenes for a while, I'm not trying to take credit for the concept by any stretch, but I thought it was funny that I had been thinking along those lines myself before I heard about this. Good UI isn't hard. Generally, it's simple and universally understood. I instantly understood where Microsoft was going here because I had the same thoughts. That being said, I want my system running mostly locally/self-hosted, so an Azure-based platform like Bot Framework probably won't work for my own system, though I might very well send requests to other bots using it.

joshstrange 11y ago
> Good UI isn't hard. Generally, it's simple and universally understood. I have to strongly disagree with that, it might be easy to spot good UI but it is not normally easy to make a good UI. As for SMS Twilio is dirt cheap $0.0075/message + $1/mo for a number also combining it with something like Wit.ai [0] to parse your text and you can get pretty far. [0] https://wit.ai/docs/http/20141022 https://wit.ai/docs/http/20141022
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  That's a monthly fee and a per message fee I don't have to pay because I'm using email. :) Also, I get to use a open standard, which is another big plus.
cableshaft 11y ago
Had the same thought of using email as a queue, but for playing asynchronous games. Basically play-by-email, but you give the game login access to an email account and each email has a game id and an order id and it basically treats the email like a pipe. I felt this was one of the few ways you could insure the game could still be played in perpetuity after a company had gone away and their servers shut down, without requiring people to host a dedicated server. Obviously this wouldn't work with real time games, and players could potentially abuse the data being sent if you're not careful and/or don't encrypt the data, but I prefer making turn-based games anyway. Having worked for several small companies that have shut down, that's a concern to me (although you can't even download most of those games anymore since they were taken off their respective app stores).
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  Exactly. If you need a way to send data across a network, queue it if your partner is unavailable, ideally make sure it works on a large number of platforms out of the box... Email is already there and it works. I found it interesting Microsoft Garage made an "IM client" that uses email in the backend recently. In some cases, I think all these new protocols we invented was reinventing the wheel, when we already had something that worked fine. Using it for games is a really neat idea. In a plaintext format, you could even space out things like a Scrabble board, using @ and & symbols for special blanks or such, and one user could be lower case letters, and the other could use capital letters. Dots for normal blanks. I love simple formats.