4 ms·

I'm not really seeing the chat-bot aspect they seem to have a crush on. What am I missing?

by hkon 10y ago

spartanatreyu 10y ago
Chatbots are awesome for two reasons 1. Moves away from emailing a company. Just think how many people today are messaging the facebook pages of companies instead of writing these long formal emails to get something. Conversational explaining just ends up being much faster and more convenient for many people. Look at the overall shift between phone calls -> text and internal business emails -> im/slack 2. Most non-technical people have trouble even being able to interact with a computer (somewhere between 60% - 80% of people still don't know how to google what they want and get it on the first try), moving to a conversational system (if it works right) can rapidly increase the amount of people you can interact with.
- dmreedy 10y ago
  >> if it works right this is the crux. Current-era chatbots, and chatbots for the forseeable future (barring some radical breakthroughs in the understanding of intelligence and natural language), are all the same terrible APIs people grapple with now, with an added layer of indirection because at least you can look up an API spec. Just because you can type out full sentences doesn't mean it's a conversation; it's still precisely the problem of API design, i.e., trying to imagine your user's use cases and writing brittle dialogue trees to accomodate them. Except now, the interface layer (Natural Language) is an extra layer of noise. Your analogy to business communication does not hold, because there's still a human being on the other end of the line in all those communication forms. At the very least, it's someone to scream at when you repeat the same thing 30 times and they don't understand. Instead of a steady refrain of "I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that; could you rephrase it ;)?"
  - candiodari 10y ago
    Have you ever been to a company helpdesk ? They are basically humans that provide phone(/chat in some cases) -> webfrontend functionality. Those humans are as locked to those "dialog trees" as you are. There may be an escalation path, but that can be done in chatbots as well. But yeah, needs to work well enough for it to be useful, and we're definitely not there yet. But part of the problem is like the RPG's in the text adventure games of the 90s. There's a few good ones, but everyone and their dog thinks they can just make something like that, and ... the results are less than pretty.
- hkon 10y ago
  Yes, but these are the benefits of chat/messaging. Not the benefits of bots. What value will bots add? Will the bots be autonomous agents, acting as a person on the other end?
DubiousPusher 10y ago
Yeah, I'm with you. If I can't get done what I want with an app after half a dozen taps, the app has already failed. The last thing I want, especially on mobile is to be typing out sentence long inquiries.

I'm not really seeing the chat-bot aspect they seem to have a crush on. What am I missing?

by hkon 10y ago

I'm not really seeing the chat-bot aspect they seem to have a crush on. What am I missing?

Chatbots are awesome for two reasons 1. Moves away from emailing a company. Just think how many people today are messaging the facebook pages of companies instead of writing these long formal emails to get something. Conversational explaining just ends up being much faster and more convenient for many people. Look at the overall shift between phone calls -> text and internal business emails -> im/slack 2. Most non-technical people have trouble even being able to interact with a computer (somewhere between 60% - 80% of people still don't know how to google what they want and get it on the first try), moving to a conversational system (if it works right) can rapidly increase the amount of people you can interact with.

dmreedy 10y ago
>> if it works right this is the crux. Current-era chatbots, and chatbots for the forseeable future (barring some radical breakthroughs in the understanding of intelligence and natural language), are all the same terrible APIs people grapple with now, with an added layer of indirection because at least you can look up an API spec. Just because you can type out full sentences doesn't mean it's a conversation; it's still precisely the problem of API design, i.e., trying to imagine your user's use cases and writing brittle dialogue trees to accomodate them. Except now, the interface layer (Natural Language) is an extra layer of noise. Your analogy to business communication does not hold, because there's still a human being on the other end of the line in all those communication forms. At the very least, it's someone to scream at when you repeat the same thing 30 times and they don't understand. Instead of a steady refrain of "I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that; could you rephrase it ;)?"
- candiodari 10y ago
  Have you ever been to a company helpdesk ? They are basically humans that provide phone(/chat in some cases) -> webfrontend functionality. Those humans are as locked to those "dialog trees" as you are. There may be an escalation path, but that can be done in chatbots as well. But yeah, needs to work well enough for it to be useful, and we're definitely not there yet. But part of the problem is like the RPG's in the text adventure games of the 90s. There's a few good ones, but everyone and their dog thinks they can just make something like that, and ... the results are less than pretty.
hkon 10y ago
Yes, but these are the benefits of chat/messaging. Not the benefits of bots. What value will bots add? Will the bots be autonomous agents, acting as a person on the other end?

DubiousPusher 10y ago

Yeah, I'm with you. If I can't get done what I want with an app after half a dozen taps, the app has already failed. The last thing I want, especially on mobile is to be typing out sentence long inquiries.