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That's a really interesting point. And it certainly would be phenomenal if we could interact with computers using natural language. At the same time, fascinati

by skewart 11y ago

That's a really interesting point. And it certainly would be phenomenal if we could interact with computers using natural language. At the same time, fascination doesn't necessarily make a person an active user of any particular product.

onion2k 11y ago
A person doesn't have to be an active user of a chatbot for it to be useful. Chat could be the ultimate discoverable API - with bots talking to one another.
- skewart 11y ago
  True indeed. > Chat could be the ultimate discoverable API - with bots talking to one another. This is something I've thought about a lot recently. It would be amazing if natural language becomes a viable protocol for machine-to-machine communication and machine-to-human communication. The real potential for bots may be in forming a massive network of specialized agents which talk to each other and collaborate to fulfill any single request. People could easily be part of this network too - a bot sends a person a text message asking a question and waits for the answer. Of course, just from the perspective of a lazy developer it would be great to be able to interact with APIs by writing requests in plain English instead of having to lookup endpoint docs.
- Matthias247 11y ago
  Or the ultimate undiscoverable API. It is quite similar to speech input in cars. If you don't know what is valid to say and what not you are quite lost and will probably only use a subset of the total available API. And writing/yelling random things against a device just to check if it will work is something that most people won't do. This applies to human users, but I think it would be similar for non-humans as well.
  - onion2k 11y ago
    It wouldn't be hard to build in tools to aid discoverability. A 'help' function that returns a list of features for example. That's pretty much what WSDL[1] tries to be, but that's really to hard to use well. If there were a much more flexible "natural language" interface to it then it'd make finding and consuming APIs both easier and more robust. I'm just musing on the possibility really. I'm absolutely sure there'd be difficulties in the technical implementation, and obviously it'd be quite inefficient compared to a known and well-defined API, but if it could be made to work the advantages may outweigh those problems. Plus, implementing it for humans goes 90% of the way to implementing it for computers too, so it's almost zero-cost if you're considering a chat interface to your service. It's something to think about anyway. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Services_Description_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Services_Description_Langu...

by skewart 11y ago

onion2k 11y ago

A person doesn't have to be an active user of a chatbot for it to be useful. Chat could be the ultimate discoverable API - with bots talking to one another.

skewart 11y ago
True indeed. > Chat could be the ultimate discoverable API - with bots talking to one another. This is something I've thought about a lot recently. It would be amazing if natural language becomes a viable protocol for machine-to-machine communication and machine-to-human communication. The real potential for bots may be in forming a massive network of specialized agents which talk to each other and collaborate to fulfill any single request. People could easily be part of this network too - a bot sends a person a text message asking a question and waits for the answer. Of course, just from the perspective of a lazy developer it would be great to be able to interact with APIs by writing requests in plain English instead of having to lookup endpoint docs.
Matthias247 11y ago
Or the ultimate undiscoverable API. It is quite similar to speech input in cars. If you don't know what is valid to say and what not you are quite lost and will probably only use a subset of the total available API. And writing/yelling random things against a device just to check if it will work is something that most people won't do. This applies to human users, but I think it would be similar for non-humans as well.
- onion2k 11y ago
  It wouldn't be hard to build in tools to aid discoverability. A 'help' function that returns a list of features for example. That's pretty much what WSDL[1] tries to be, but that's really to hard to use well. If there were a much more flexible "natural language" interface to it then it'd make finding and consuming APIs both easier and more robust. I'm just musing on the possibility really. I'm absolutely sure there'd be difficulties in the technical implementation, and obviously it'd be quite inefficient compared to a known and well-defined API, but if it could be made to work the advantages may outweigh those problems. Plus, implementing it for humans goes 90% of the way to implementing it for computers too, so it's almost zero-cost if you're considering a chat interface to your service. It's something to think about anyway. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Services_Description_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Services_Description_Langu...