19 ms·

Chatbots have struggled to live up to the hype

280 points by imartin2k 10y ago

milquetoastaf 10y ago
Anyone know how Visabot has fared? https://visabot.co/ https://visabot.co/
ReverseCold 10y ago
I like chatbots a lot, very useful for translating text quickly or reminding someone else in the group to do something. The small games are pretty fun too, perfect for killing time when bored. There are also things which would otherwise have to have been a separate app. I don't want to download another app.
- Kiro 10y ago
  What kind of games?
  - ReverseCold 10y ago
    One button games, e.x. gamee.
- maaaats 10y ago
  Chatbots are useful for doing stuff with simple commands. Chatbots with AI where they try to have a "conversation" is often just a lot of hurdles to do something that should be trivial.
  - autokad 10y ago
    it reminds me of mIRC bots of the late 90s that would +o you in a channel upon joining, kick people who -o or kicked you, or did other simple reactionary things.
    - spike021 10y ago
      IRC bots still exist and are _relatively_ easy to write. Very useful things.
- 0x445442 10y ago
  >>There are also things which would otherwise have to have been a separate app. I don't want to download another app. I feel your pain. I'm tired of all these attempts to monitize data with apps, Web pages and adds. I'd rather have a single platform I could just type in weather @ 99999 to see the forecast. Kind of like SMS 10 years ago but with graphical and audio response capability. And yes, I'd pay money for the service.
  - slouch 10y ago
    That's Google. Your example weather query works today.
    - andybak 10y ago
      This is where I'm a bit baffled by the implication this is some hot new thing. I've been using Google as a smart command line for a couple of years now. The speech interface on my phone was an incremental improvement to this. There have been small improvements but the real breakthrough was a couple of years back when Google got good enough that i started typing search queries in plain English for most things.
make3 10y ago
They were promoted to go with the current AI hype, but none of the bots deployed actually use any AI because the technology isn't there yet
- Fricken 10y ago
  When the technology is there, I think it will be a big deal. Who knows how long that will take, though, mastering conversational language is getting into AGI territory.
moxious 10y ago
It's a bit disorienting to see this, and on the same day threads elsewhere in HN, with the HN collective wisdom that automation and AI is soon to bring an end to most kinds of human work
- exolymph 10y ago
  Not all uses of automation and AI are equal.
- serg_chernata 10y ago
  While I agree, I think the general consensus here is that automation will sooner impact factory and manufacturing work than helping someone order groceries via chat. As far as jobs are concerned.
- dang 10y ago
  > the HN collective wisdom that Most of us tend to anthropomorphize (or hivemind-ize?) the community, but it's divided on just about every controversial question.
- visarga 10y ago
  Problem is how to part rich people from the lion share of the money they are used to take. You can't have automation utopia without redistribution of wealth.
- mwfunk 10y ago
  I don't think that's the consensus at all. I don't think there is a consensus, honestly. The only people who would say such a thing are the same overenthusiastic (bless them, but still) CS undergrads and/or aspiring social media climbers who also post about how self-driving cars are already a solved problem that will be universal by 2020, or that we'll reach the singularity by 2035, or that Linux will inevitably devour Windows on consumer desktop PCs by 2005, or that by the 1960s every large first-world city will have a single skyscraper-sized computer with resources shared by all residents via teletypes in every home. Futurism is an extremely useful exercise as long as it's treated as a thought experiment based on current trends rather than actual prognostication. The median HN post is probably wiser or better informed than the median post to Slashdot or /r/programming or whatever, but at the end of the day it's still an Internet forum for anonymous tech enthusiasts, with all of the potential for bias and tunnel vision that that implies. You still have to wade through mountains of garbage to find gems of insight, there's just sometimes a little less garbage and a little more insight here than elsewhere. I don't say that to cast shade on HN, rather I think accomplishing something like "a little less garbage than proggit" is a freaking miracle and that's why I read HN every day.
arameghiazaryan 10y ago
Where Chatbots are useful? Best use cases?
- whorleater 10y ago
  Bringing forms to the masses. My parents will not for the life of them fill out an excel sheet or an online form for anything, but slap a chatbot in front of it that asks 1 question at a time and suddenly they're game.
  - phamilton 10y ago
    I identified the pain of simple data collection from customers years ago. I'd be very curious to see if chat bots actually helps, as every other attempt I've seen has been pretty rough.
    - swsieber 10y ago
      I would say yes. There was an article about a chat bot used to aid immigration: https://www.engadget.com/2017/03/28/immigration-chat-bot-can-help-you-with-the-h1-b-visa/ https://www.engadget.com/2017/03/28/immigration-chat-bot-can...
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  - weego 10y ago
    It's a tough one, I'm not convinced anyone should be consciously coached into the notion that sharing private identity information over chat is acceptable. Feels like a long tail to social engineering scams.
- olavgg 10y ago
  If you think about them as advanced search engines that pick up your question based on how the sentence is structured you can use them for following. Customer Service -- Login issues -- Information about products -- Walk them through problems Health -- Information retrival, pills, medicine -- Diagnosis, based on symptoms -- Getting an appointment with a doctor Finance -- Payment, (entity wants to pay entity sum) -- Counseling (legal, tax, pension, savings, investment) And there are a dozen more. Chatbots will work because they use an interface we humans already know well, natural language.
toolslive 10y ago
brings back memories of natachata. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natachata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natachata Rumour has it there was this one guy who wanted to marry her ;)
erikb 10y ago
I feel disappointed when I read articles like this. It seems the whole production side of the market doesn't get yet what it's supposed to do. But it's so obvious. If you chat with a bot you have near-human expectations. Yes it should be flexible and not just one-purpose. That's the reason for chatbots instead of a button. And if you can't provide that you need to use bots to make human labour cheaper, e.g. telephone bots who make support hotlines cheaper by getting some of the details out of the way before sending you to a human. Success will come to companies who can work in this gray area where bots and humans interact to provide a service together. I think Amazon did the same, when they started their suggestion engine, where actually humans would do the sorting at first, then supported by machine learning and finally they got replaced by pure software.
- mason55 10y ago
  The worst are the phone trees that have you type in all your info and then when you finally get to a human you have to repeat it all.
niftich 10y ago
The examples given are just embarrassing. What weather service doesn't understand zip codes, or, y'know, the name of an entire US state? Last year, I said: "Chatbots are a fancy name for when your API is accessible through some well-known IM service. They come with all of the monetization issues of APIs, but they're surfaced in an environment where you have no pre-existing relationship with the client, and you can't even charge them for access. This essentially limits the business model to where you give away the chatbot and make money some other way; or you recognize you have no business model and do it anyway." [1] The discoverability factor is amusing: apparently everyone complains about discoverability, just like they did with Apps and websites. First-comer Kik isn't big enough for advertisers, meanwhile, Facebook added bots just to have them and isn't doing anything to promote them because it realized it has all the users, and botmakers will give them business regardless. The discoverability question always boils down to "how will people find my stuff, in favor of my competitor's stuff?", which just proves that the chatboot "boom" is just like the app boom and the website boom before it [2]: a gold rush to make it big early, then as the dust settles, the roster of victors will have emerged and they'll maintain those rankings for years. Others can still establish niches for themselves, but they are deluded if they think runaway success is a realistic goal. All this means, as the article points out, that most of today's chatbots are just phone trees in text form -- which still has value, but is a lot less enticing as a get-quick-quick scheme. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309116#13309844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309116#13309844 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12863565#12867493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12863565#12867493
- jsemrau 10y ago
  You are absolutely right. The only reason I built my Twitter event bot back in the day was to bring business to the app. And it actually works.
- TheCoelacanth 10y ago
  And as with all gold rushes, it is the people selling the pickaxes who are really making money off of it.
sorich87 10y ago
As a owner of a bot building platform (https://www.botamp.com https://www.botamp.com), it's very disappointing to read articles like this. All the hype around chatbots, the high expectations that will obviously never be met (at least not with current technology) are hurting adoption of these very useful tools. Actually, for this very reason we don't even have the word "chatbot" on our homepage. When people say things like "stay in contact with everyone who clicked on the ad to open a conversation with the bot", "Discovery is the biggest challenge", it shows that they just don't get it. No customer, ever, will open their Messenger just to hold a conversation with your chatbot. Customers don't actually want to "discover" your bot so that they can chat with it. Why would they want that? They have more important things to do with their lives. :) What customers want when they write to you on Messenger is finding information or performing a transaction. When you understand that, you can quickly see the benefit. E.g. add a bot that will instantly reply to frequently asked questions to decrease the load of your customer support team. And when the bot doesn't understand requests, don't make it say "sorry I don't understand", just leave the question and a human will reply later (and maybe send a message with expected timeframe for human response). When you have a chatbot which can replies to more than 30% of customer queries (for some of our users, we've seen bots reply to more than 90% of questions), it'll save plenty of money and time for your business. About discoverability, well, how did your customers find your Facebook page in the past? Why do we need a special way to "discover" now? Maybe for "game and entertainment chatbots" a bot store would work, but I just don't see how it would work for serious businesses. How can a business leverage bots right now? - quick data collection - instant answers to frequently asked questions - surveys and polls over chat - lead nurturing via Messenger (engagement rates > 70% compared to low read rate of email)
- dominotw 10y ago
  > - instant answers to frequently asked questions > - surveys and polls over chat I don't understand the bot part of this. First looks like a search box over faqs and second sounds like a web wizard survey .
  - sorich87 10y ago
    Look at Wikipedia definition of bot (or other definitions on the first page when searching Google) "Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone." I think "instant answers to frequently asked questions and surveys and polls over chat" (with some NLP to make it better) surely match that definition, no? I don't understand why everyone is so fixated on the AI/conversation aspect. :) With the current state of the technology, companies can benefit by using bots to enhance human-to-human conversations, not trying to replace them altogether.
jklinger410 10y ago
The developers of RPGs like Morrowind would be better suited at building chatbots than the companies currently trying, I think. Much like the examples in this article, I haven't seen any bots that can present information in a way that is easier than a normal interface, or that even counts as "conversational." Maybe I'm being an asshole when I say this, but it just doesn't feel like these chatbot companies have put in the sheer man-hours to work out conversations. They're feeding you the information they have, through a small number of prompts that they predetermine. 100% useless. Where are the creators of Cleverbot? Shouldn't they be using their platform to capitalize on this? That was the most conversational bot I'd seen so far and it came out forever ago.
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- 0x445442 10y ago
  >> Much like the examples in this article, I haven't seen any bots that can present information in a way that is easier than a normal interface... Funny, I see the interface of bots on a messaging platform as their only value. As for the AI/NLP, Meh. To me the possibility of replacing the umpteen apps and Web pages with a single consistent UI is the appealing part.
  - dxhdr 10y ago
    What's the consistent interface of bots? You need to know their supported commands to get anything done. Until we have actual AI it will remain an obfuscated command line. Interfaces like Siri are convenient because they actually use AI/NLP! In many ways this new generation of chatbot is worse than what we had 20 years ago in IRC -- at least then the functionality was clearly presented.
    - 0x445442 10y ago
      Yeah, I was speaking from a slanted point of view because I'm not the typical user. What interests me about them is their potential to be a more powerful terminal command line. One that can render graphical responses as well as text. I've grown very tired of all the differing UIS I must navigate on a daily basis.
techwizrd 10y ago
I work for GYANT[0], and we're building a chatbot for doing medical triage, patient follow-up, and answering health questions. We're young (launching this Thursday actually), but it's already been pretty successful in a number of countries (like Brazil) with a few hundred thousand users with minimal marketing. My girlfriend was able to use it without issues to go from "my throat hurts" to visiting a doctor in 24 hours because she likely has tonsillitis. The interest and response from the medical, the pharmaceutical, and the insurance communities have been very positive and they're approaching us left and right to bring this out to more users. Chatbots were probably overhyped and oversold to people. Not every platform needs to explode overnight and produce SV unicorns. I think there is immense value in chatbots as a platform, but expectations should be tempered. I've seen little to no overt marketing to regular users that they can ask a bot rather than looking for an app or website. Most users don't really want to download and learn another app and create another account for every little thing. Additionally, many budget phones in emerging markets have limited data, limited storage space, and minimal specs for downloading and running apps for every little thing. That said, this article is pretty terrible. It almost seems like they chose the worst possible examples to fit a given narrative. 0: http://gyant.com/english/ http://gyant.com/english/
- Eridrus 10y ago
  Why did you decide to build a chatbot, rather than a website/app? It seems like it should always be possible to provide a better experience in an app. So far I've heard only three compelling reasons: to support users without smart phones, to support voice interfaces or to be accessible through Slack etc.
  - techwizrd 10y ago
    We support voice interfaces and we can support other platforms such as Slack, Telegram (we used to support it actually), and more. Like I said earlier, most users simply Google their chief complaint (e.g., "my throat hurts") which lead them to sites of varying quality such as homeopathic sites and WebMD. These sites do more harm than good. Users are also reluctant to download apps when they just want answers such as health answers. Bots allow us to reach people all over the world no matter whether they are on their desktop, tablet, smartphone, or budget phone on every platform (iOS, Android, etc.). When I look at my girlfriend's phone, she has 95+ updates waiting and she's not looking to download more apps when a Google search would suffice. We've discussed building an app in the future to enable even more features, but it's not a high priority right now. We're competing against Googling what's wrong with you, and we have to be just as easy to get started with. The priority for us is answering people's health questions.
oneplane 10y ago
They failed because it's not new nor is there a direct replacement market available. Just like video calls, it's not that it's not there, it's just not as 'wanted' as the creators of such tools think it is.
ThomPete 10y ago
Chatbots are sociable command lines. In some ways they are great because they make command line more popular in some ways the are completely useless as they turn something which should most likely be automated into a manual process.
- 0x445442 10y ago
  Yeah, as a developer that spends most of my day at the computer, the exciting thing about "bots" is the potential coelecensce of disparate UI paradigms
throwaway91111 10y ago
It's just a shitty interface to the same software people already use. What am I missing?
finchisko 10y ago
The way I see it, chatbots should be there to save companies money on first line of support by reducing number of personnel to customer interactions.. Like answering the most frequent questions and only if bot cannot answer those questions then it will redirect to real human. Not as replacement for the UI as they're used today. Also bots should be part of your website/app and not be integrated into third party service like fcb messenger. And companies should constantly check and improve the bot to better respond to FAQs (so developing bot is actually never ending process).
- andybak 10y ago
  Just like phone menus were meant to. Except they have become mostly universally loathed. I can just imagine how much more annoying a "cute" pseudo-AI will be when I just want to get through to a human being.
  - finchisko 10y ago
    let's say bot should be 90% confident that is still giving value to the customer. if not redirect to human.
    - Spivak 10y ago
      If you really believe you've created a bot that your users want to use then put it to the test. Advertise that they can get connected to a human by typing 'human' and see how popular it is. I would be impressed if a bot could get to 10%. I don't think you need a confidence metric, the humans using the bot will be happy to signal to you that they're not receiving value.
      - finchisko 10y ago
        I can only agree with that.
- exadeci 10y ago
  That's what I did for a client. When a client sends an email it's parsed by an AI to find things that could be answered automatically (because the user can't be bothered to read the faq) it replies to the user. It tells the user that it was answered automatically and ask him if it answers his question, if he says something negative it's forwarded to a human support
terribleplan 10y ago
Spoiler: People don't want to talk to chat bots to interact with a company. Same reason they get frustrated at IVRs.
- slouch 10y ago
  Interactive voice response (IVR) is a technology that allows a computer to interact with humans through the use of voice and DTMF tones input via keypad.
bedros 10y ago
I feel the AI hype is similar to the cleantech hype in the 2000's everyone jumped on bandwagon for FOMO (fear-of-missing-out)
olavgg 10y ago
Making a chatbot is really hard, because you need a lot of data and it needs to be of good quality. You cannot use a random chat message log and train your model, it will usually have way too much noise. Instead I highly recommend that you build it from scratch. Then you will start getting great results. You also have to use a proper spell checking algorithm and understand the basics of how a full text search engine actually works and know the purpose of using stop words and synonyms. I would love to present our virtual assistant "James" to the rest of the world, but we have only recently started to build english training data. Currently it only understands english with the use of synonyms, so it isn't working as well as it should. If you're interested in trying it out you can play with it on the webpage of one of the largest banks in Norway http://srbank.no http://srbank.no, the chat icon is at the bottom right. You can ask questions in English, but it will unfortunately only answer in Norwegian at this time, so you have to use google translate too see if it answered correctly. "James" do support language detection though, but we have just recently starting to add the english answers. In a few weeks and James will answer in English :-) Currently James can predict over 1500 intents related to banking and insurance. Here are some of the more complex questions James can handle: Want to open a savings account for my daughter Can I adjust the limit on my sons bank card What can you tell me about my pension Do you have a pension calculator? I was out drinking last night and lost my credit card If anyone says that chatbots aren't working and will never work, I can say this with real data to back me up, it works very well! The feedback we have gotten the last few months has been amazing! And I'm 100% sure that chatbots will become a big industry the next years. Complex UI's will finally be good riddance. Feel free to ask me anything if you have any questions.
- timac80 10y ago
  I tried the chatbot - I must admit I'm surprised how well it worked actually! Got me interested, I hope you don't mind a few questions: When you write 'built i from scratch' what do you mean? That you handcrafted all the data? How long did it take to develop this bot, and what technologies did you use?
  - olavgg 10y ago
    Yes, all the data we use to train our model on, is handcrafted by our AI trainers. What they do is figure out all the different questions that are most common to ask for each intent we want to predict. We have built a tool that helps them creating all these sentences, often we use templates with keywords. It is still under development, we started at the end of last summer. We use Torch and Python-NLTK.
dwighttk 10y ago
Misunderestimating the long tail
- altstar 10y ago
  What is misunderestimating?
  - dwighttk 10y ago
    reference to Arrested Development... Not a real word. But kinda works anyway.
jameslk 10y ago
The power of chat bots is in marketing. They compete with email marketing as a more responsive medium. This is because platforms like Messenger allow much greater interaction from the user than email. Most think of chat bots as a textual experience, but you can actually build entire UIs with Messenger that include images and buttons. In a way, it can be thought of as less frictional minimalistic website via chat. Eventually you will be able to buy things directly in chat, closing the loop entirely.
- whatevorama 10y ago
  Good point there is greater opportunity if bots were able to use visuals as opposed to just words.
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seibelj 10y ago
I worked for a year at a super hyped chat-bot company that raised a lot of money pre-revenue, pre-customers, etc. The difference between the press / marketing and the actual product built was incredible. Last I heard they are ditching everything they already built and starting over.
- iamacynic 10y ago
  aka it was a bullshit factory.
bluetwo 10y ago
Amazing that people pouring money into the latest buzzword have once again come up empty handed.
retox 10y ago
Where did all the hype over shitty chat bots come from? It seemed to fill up HN and every tech publication overnight. Now even Skype, an application for chatting with real people, has a bots tab. It was clear from the get go it was just another way to push ads.
23443463453 10y ago
Surprise, Silicon Valley's most recent snake oil didn't pan out. At least it seems the old new cons are being unmasked earlier these days.
whatevorama 10y ago
Geez I guess no one bothered asking users if THEY like chatbots? IMO chatbots are the online equivalent of getting an automated response from a phone line. like calling CVS pharmacy "press one" for pharmacy, etc... You get the point of it, but it's basically a tool that only benefits businesses because the user experience is very poor. I wonder why no one tries to make this whole bot thing have more of a personality? It seems so bland. If they modeled it after ONE person instead of using "data" to sound neutral, they would be more successful.
- jsemrau 10y ago
  >users if THEY like chatbots I certainly prefer chatbots over the menu selection when I call. But that's about it. Mose of the chatbots are similar rule based systems anyways.
- olavgg 10y ago
  Have you ever called support over phone and waited a long time for a simple question? Annoying, yes? A chatbot can often answer that simple question immediately. So yes, people do like chatbots as long they at least manage to get most of the simple questions right. For example in our case, clients often have problems logging in. With our chatbot they can easily get a one time password sent to their phone. With a regular search/faq they would have never known about that, because they are often too frustrated with the UI experience for finding that information. With a natural language conversation, it is easier :-)
  - pricechild 10y ago
    Why not just send that OTP to their phone immediately if someone has trouble logging in?
  - pbreit 10y ago
    Seems like you're not addressing the root problem.
  - shriphani 10y ago
    can't a button saying "can't login" on your website solve this problem?
ganfortran 10y ago
And why is this News. They don't have a product to sell other than a toy demo. No chatbot company can offer an easy to understand, measurable interface for customers to customize towards their own usage case, with expected outcome. You can tell me in bareface that your product is magic, and when it doesn't work, it is due to the bad weather. Though, I think DL based NLP technique is the future, however, chatbot is not the right conveyor for that vision, much more like a lot of money hungry dudes riding the hype to monetize their demo technology.
reggieband 10y ago
One idea I've been mentioning whenever this sort of thing comes up are those 20-question bots. I remember several years ago being blown away by its ability to guess some extremely specific and random things. I always thought it would be an interesting interface for a "find" function in an OS. I think it might work as front-line support as well.
shard972 10y ago
Just don't tell congress about it.
cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
Whenever I get on one of those call center lines, I always try the command "Agent", instead of following their rabbithole of decision tree. These "bot" cult members say this time it's different because now we have deep learning and it's different from the shitty comcast/verizon call center lines where you have to walk down the decision tree. But the problem is 99% of these people have no idea what they are talking about. They probably saw the Lee Sedol match and thought AI has made some huge breakthrough almost like quantum computing. It hasn't. The accuracy has gotten better and that surely enables a lot of things, but this has nothing to do with what these idiots are trying to build. If you look at the type of people considered "experts" in the chatbot scene, you'll immediately understand how ridiculous this is. Most of them are non technical people who don't even know how to write a simple program. It's hilarious watching these "chatbot experts" talking about how the "old approach" to AI was all about stupid decision tree whereas "NOW with deep learning you can actually let the machine learn!" haha welcome to "machine learning".
dredmorbius 10y ago
A chatbot, voice or text, is a response generator, where responses are prompts, requested information, or state change (e.g., place order, cancel service). It's no more interactive than other tools, and the more divorced the interface from text, the more levels of complexity are thrown at it. Talking at a CLI interface is no more a "conversation" than typing at one. Despite the fact that interactive computer systems were called "conversational". (Don't believe me? There are books on the subject, from 1968: https://www.worldcat.org/title/conversational-computers/oclc/6755846 https://www.worldcat.org/title/conversational-computers/oclc... https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=kw%3Aconversational+computing&fq=yr%3A1900..1980+%3E&qt=advanced&dblist=638 https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=kw%3Aconversational+comput...) I've been thinking about world models and communication a great deal. In this context, talking (or typing) with a chatbot is a great deal like arguing with an idiot. If the chatbot's world model doesn't include the actions or questions you're trying to address, there's simply no way to get it to understand. Quite literally, its world doesn't include such things. Though unlike the proverbial wrestling with a pig, in this case, you're the one far more likely to be annoyed. Which gets to another major problem: such systems are constructed, and serve, the interests of their creators and clients: the companies which create them, frequently not the same as those who deploy them, the clients. Users' interests are at the bottom of the priority stack. Some weeks ago I had the pleasure of calling the local (and pathetic) newspaper company after our Sunday paper failed to arrive. I was greated, on three successive phone calls, to a several-minutes-long pitch for services I had absolutely no interest in, when trying to address a problem created by the company in the first place. To put it mildly, I was not pleased. And my standing recommendation to cancel the subscription (substituting it with a much superior national paper) seems to be bearing out. Chatbots which treat interactions as captive sales opportunities will, I suspect, not greatly enhance customer affinity to brands deploying such strategies.
puranjay 10y ago
Maybe it's because I am an introvert, but I have a simple question for estimating the success of any development: "Does this product reduce the number of social interactions I have to have? Does it let me do something without interacting with another individual?" Chatbots, because developers keep trying to make them more "human", fail the second part of the question. They "feel" like talking to a person at times, which is something I don't want. I'll just tap a few buttons instead.
joeyspn 10y ago
Unless chatbots pass the Turing Test they'll be perceived as a poor UX solution vs human interaction. I see them useful in chatops tho. We techies like automation, even if it's dumb, but non technical users expect much more...
Tepix 10y ago
I installed some obscure instant messenger app to try the latest and greatest Microsoft chatbot a couple weeks ago. Walked away very disappointed. The chatbot would give incoherent unfitting answers every three sentences or so. It was also unable to keep in mind what had already been written.
bovermyer 10y ago
Really, what we actually need are fully sentient artificial intelligences. At that point we get into some very interesting social questions, though.
127001brewer 10y ago
Does anyone else remember "Chatbots" on BBSes (of long ago)? Are these modern versions any better?
mattszaszko 10y ago
Chatbots are really just a way to push and pull messages on messaging channels, nothing more, nothing less. How much automation you put behind it is really up to you. And yes, many early examples forgot about their users. Yes, it is cool to write a bot that can do something cool for a fraction of use cases, but as always, solving a real problem trumps being cool. Now chatbots can be used as a content distribution channel (see publishers’ bots), app replacement (Swell is a great example, and they are in the next YC batch, congrats to them), but I’d like to point out how makers miss the point on arguably the largest use case for messaging in the business world today, customer service. Yes, most bots that address this domain can’t live up to the expectation either. And really, just think Job to be Done, the customer wants a quick, accurate and preferably personal reply to their question or issue, it is that simple. So what we (Bicycle AI) did to make our clients better at this Job is we are fusing human and AI for a faster, affordable and scalable solution for SMEs. I hear you say, wait, isn’t this like Digital Genius, well, nope, we integrate with Intercom for example and we have a team of AI supervisors who approve the answers suggested by our AI. This means our clients can provide blazing fast customer service for their customers 24/7 and according to their volumes. Simple as that. We use past conversation history and product docs to generate our suggested answers. We can go live pretty fast and can take care of around 60-70% of incoming conversations, escalating the complex cases after engagement. Aaand, we are in alfa stage with emails. So when it comes to harnessing automation in customer service, we believe that customers should not be the ones dealing with the rough edges.

280 points by imartin2k 10y ago

Anyone know how Visabot has fared? https://visabot.co/ https://visabot.co/

I like chatbots a lot, very useful for translating text quickly or reminding someone else in the group to do something. The small games are pretty fun too, perfect for killing time when bored. There are also things which would otherwise have to have been a separate app. I don't want to download another app.

Kiro 10y ago
What kind of games?
- ReverseCold 10y ago
  One button games, e.x. gamee.
maaaats 10y ago
Chatbots are useful for doing stuff with simple commands. Chatbots with AI where they try to have a "conversation" is often just a lot of hurdles to do something that should be trivial.
- autokad 10y ago
  it reminds me of mIRC bots of the late 90s that would +o you in a channel upon joining, kick people who -o or kicked you, or did other simple reactionary things.
  - spike021 10y ago
    IRC bots still exist and are _relatively_ easy to write. Very useful things.
0x445442 10y ago
>>There are also things which would otherwise have to have been a separate app. I don't want to download another app. I feel your pain. I'm tired of all these attempts to monitize data with apps, Web pages and adds. I'd rather have a single platform I could just type in weather @ 99999 to see the forecast. Kind of like SMS 10 years ago but with graphical and audio response capability. And yes, I'd pay money for the service.
- slouch 10y ago
  That's Google. Your example weather query works today.
  - andybak 10y ago
    This is where I'm a bit baffled by the implication this is some hot new thing. I've been using Google as a smart command line for a couple of years now. The speech interface on my phone was an incremental improvement to this. There have been small improvements but the real breakthrough was a couple of years back when Google got good enough that i started typing search queries in plain English for most things.

make3 10y ago

They were promoted to go with the current AI hype, but none of the bots deployed actually use any AI because the technology isn't there yet

Fricken 10y ago
When the technology is there, I think it will be a big deal. Who knows how long that will take, though, mastering conversational language is getting into AGI territory.

moxious 10y ago

It's a bit disorienting to see this, and on the same day threads elsewhere in HN, with the HN collective wisdom that automation and AI is soon to bring an end to most kinds of human work

exolymph 10y ago
Not all uses of automation and AI are equal.
serg_chernata 10y ago
While I agree, I think the general consensus here is that automation will sooner impact factory and manufacturing work than helping someone order groceries via chat. As far as jobs are concerned.
dang 10y ago
> the HN collective wisdom that Most of us tend to anthropomorphize (or hivemind-ize?) the community, but it's divided on just about every controversial question.
visarga 10y ago
Problem is how to part rich people from the lion share of the money they are used to take. You can't have automation utopia without redistribution of wealth.
mwfunk 10y ago
I don't think that's the consensus at all. I don't think there is a consensus, honestly. The only people who would say such a thing are the same overenthusiastic (bless them, but still) CS undergrads and/or aspiring social media climbers who also post about how self-driving cars are already a solved problem that will be universal by 2020, or that we'll reach the singularity by 2035, or that Linux will inevitably devour Windows on consumer desktop PCs by 2005, or that by the 1960s every large first-world city will have a single skyscraper-sized computer with resources shared by all residents via teletypes in every home. Futurism is an extremely useful exercise as long as it's treated as a thought experiment based on current trends rather than actual prognostication. The median HN post is probably wiser or better informed than the median post to Slashdot or /r/programming or whatever, but at the end of the day it's still an Internet forum for anonymous tech enthusiasts, with all of the potential for bias and tunnel vision that that implies. You still have to wade through mountains of garbage to find gems of insight, there's just sometimes a little less garbage and a little more insight here than elsewhere. I don't say that to cast shade on HN, rather I think accomplishing something like "a little less garbage than proggit" is a freaking miracle and that's why I read HN every day.

arameghiazaryan 10y ago

Where Chatbots are useful? Best use cases?

whorleater 10y ago
Bringing forms to the masses. My parents will not for the life of them fill out an excel sheet or an online form for anything, but slap a chatbot in front of it that asks 1 question at a time and suddenly they're game.
- phamilton 10y ago
  I identified the pain of simple data collection from customers years ago. I'd be very curious to see if chat bots actually helps, as every other attempt I've seen has been pretty rough.
  - swsieber 10y ago
    I would say yes. There was an article about a chat bot used to aid immigration: https://www.engadget.com/2017/03/28/immigration-chat-bot-can-help-you-with-the-h1-b-visa/ https://www.engadget.com/2017/03/28/immigration-chat-bot-can...
- deleted 10y ago
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- weego 10y ago
  It's a tough one, I'm not convinced anyone should be consciously coached into the notion that sharing private identity information over chat is acceptable. Feels like a long tail to social engineering scams.
olavgg 10y ago
If you think about them as advanced search engines that pick up your question based on how the sentence is structured you can use them for following. Customer Service -- Login issues -- Information about products -- Walk them through problems Health -- Information retrival, pills, medicine -- Diagnosis, based on symptoms -- Getting an appointment with a doctor Finance -- Payment, (entity wants to pay entity sum) -- Counseling (legal, tax, pension, savings, investment) And there are a dozen more. Chatbots will work because they use an interface we humans already know well, natural language.

toolslive 10y ago

brings back memories of natachata. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natachata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natachata Rumour has it there was this one guy who wanted to marry her ;)

erikb 10y ago

I feel disappointed when I read articles like this. It seems the whole production side of the market doesn't get yet what it's supposed to do. But it's so obvious. If you chat with a bot you have near-human expectations. Yes it should be flexible and not just one-purpose. That's the reason for chatbots instead of a button. And if you can't provide that you need to use bots to make human labour cheaper, e.g. telephone bots who make support hotlines cheaper by getting some of the details out of the way before sending you to a human. Success will come to companies who can work in this gray area where bots and humans interact to provide a service together. I think Amazon did the same, when they started their suggestion engine, where actually humans would do the sorting at first, then supported by machine learning and finally they got replaced by pure software.

mason55 10y ago
The worst are the phone trees that have you type in all your info and then when you finally get to a human you have to repeat it all.

niftich 10y ago

The examples given are just embarrassing. What weather service doesn't understand zip codes, or, y'know, the name of an entire US state? Last year, I said: "Chatbots are a fancy name for when your API is accessible through some well-known IM service. They come with all of the monetization issues of APIs, but they're surfaced in an environment where you have no pre-existing relationship with the client, and you can't even charge them for access. This essentially limits the business model to where you give away the chatbot and make money some other way; or you recognize you have no business model and do it anyway." [1] The discoverability factor is amusing: apparently everyone complains about discoverability, just like they did with Apps and websites. First-comer Kik isn't big enough for advertisers, meanwhile, Facebook added bots just to have them and isn't doing anything to promote them because it realized it has all the users, and botmakers will give them business regardless. The discoverability question always boils down to "how will people find my stuff, in favor of my competitor's stuff?", which just proves that the chatboot "boom" is just like the app boom and the website boom before it [2]: a gold rush to make it big early, then as the dust settles, the roster of victors will have emerged and they'll maintain those rankings for years. Others can still establish niches for themselves, but they are deluded if they think runaway success is a realistic goal. All this means, as the article points out, that most of today's chatbots are just phone trees in text form -- which still has value, but is a lot less enticing as a get-quick-quick scheme. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309116#13309844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309116#13309844 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12863565#12867493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12863565#12867493

jsemrau 10y ago
You are absolutely right. The only reason I built my Twitter event bot back in the day was to bring business to the app. And it actually works.
TheCoelacanth 10y ago
And as with all gold rushes, it is the people selling the pickaxes who are really making money off of it.

sorich87 10y ago

As a owner of a bot building platform (https://www.botamp.com https://www.botamp.com), it's very disappointing to read articles like this. All the hype around chatbots, the high expectations that will obviously never be met (at least not with current technology) are hurting adoption of these very useful tools. Actually, for this very reason we don't even have the word "chatbot" on our homepage. When people say things like "stay in contact with everyone who clicked on the ad to open a conversation with the bot", "Discovery is the biggest challenge", it shows that they just don't get it. No customer, ever, will open their Messenger just to hold a conversation with your chatbot. Customers don't actually want to "discover" your bot so that they can chat with it. Why would they want that? They have more important things to do with their lives. :) What customers want when they write to you on Messenger is finding information or performing a transaction. When you understand that, you can quickly see the benefit. E.g. add a bot that will instantly reply to frequently asked questions to decrease the load of your customer support team. And when the bot doesn't understand requests, don't make it say "sorry I don't understand", just leave the question and a human will reply later (and maybe send a message with expected timeframe for human response). When you have a chatbot which can replies to more than 30% of customer queries (for some of our users, we've seen bots reply to more than 90% of questions), it'll save plenty of money and time for your business. About discoverability, well, how did your customers find your Facebook page in the past? Why do we need a special way to "discover" now? Maybe for "game and entertainment chatbots" a bot store would work, but I just don't see how it would work for serious businesses. How can a business leverage bots right now? - quick data collection - instant answers to frequently asked questions - surveys and polls over chat - lead nurturing via Messenger (engagement rates > 70% compared to low read rate of email)

dominotw 10y ago
> - instant answers to frequently asked questions > - surveys and polls over chat I don't understand the bot part of this. First looks like a search box over faqs and second sounds like a web wizard survey .
- sorich87 10y ago
  Look at Wikipedia definition of bot (or other definitions on the first page when searching Google) "Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone." I think "instant answers to frequently asked questions and surveys and polls over chat" (with some NLP to make it better) surely match that definition, no? I don't understand why everyone is so fixated on the AI/conversation aspect. :) With the current state of the technology, companies can benefit by using bots to enhance human-to-human conversations, not trying to replace them altogether.

jklinger410 10y ago

The developers of RPGs like Morrowind would be better suited at building chatbots than the companies currently trying, I think. Much like the examples in this article, I haven't seen any bots that can present information in a way that is easier than a normal interface, or that even counts as "conversational." Maybe I'm being an asshole when I say this, but it just doesn't feel like these chatbot companies have put in the sheer man-hours to work out conversations. They're feeding you the information they have, through a small number of prompts that they predetermine. 100% useless. Where are the creators of Cleverbot? Shouldn't they be using their platform to capitalize on this? That was the most conversational bot I'd seen so far and it came out forever ago.

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0x445442 10y ago
>> Much like the examples in this article, I haven't seen any bots that can present information in a way that is easier than a normal interface... Funny, I see the interface of bots on a messaging platform as their only value. As for the AI/NLP, Meh. To me the possibility of replacing the umpteen apps and Web pages with a single consistent UI is the appealing part.
- dxhdr 10y ago
  What's the consistent interface of bots? You need to know their supported commands to get anything done. Until we have actual AI it will remain an obfuscated command line. Interfaces like Siri are convenient because they actually use AI/NLP! In many ways this new generation of chatbot is worse than what we had 20 years ago in IRC -- at least then the functionality was clearly presented.
  - 0x445442 10y ago
    Yeah, I was speaking from a slanted point of view because I'm not the typical user. What interests me about them is their potential to be a more powerful terminal command line. One that can render graphical responses as well as text. I've grown very tired of all the differing UIS I must navigate on a daily basis.

techwizrd 10y ago

I work for GYANT[0], and we're building a chatbot for doing medical triage, patient follow-up, and answering health questions. We're young (launching this Thursday actually), but it's already been pretty successful in a number of countries (like Brazil) with a few hundred thousand users with minimal marketing. My girlfriend was able to use it without issues to go from "my throat hurts" to visiting a doctor in 24 hours because she likely has tonsillitis. The interest and response from the medical, the pharmaceutical, and the insurance communities have been very positive and they're approaching us left and right to bring this out to more users. Chatbots were probably overhyped and oversold to people. Not every platform needs to explode overnight and produce SV unicorns. I think there is immense value in chatbots as a platform, but expectations should be tempered. I've seen little to no overt marketing to regular users that they can ask a bot rather than looking for an app or website. Most users don't really want to download and learn another app and create another account for every little thing. Additionally, many budget phones in emerging markets have limited data, limited storage space, and minimal specs for downloading and running apps for every little thing. That said, this article is pretty terrible. It almost seems like they chose the worst possible examples to fit a given narrative. 0: http://gyant.com/english/ http://gyant.com/english/

Eridrus 10y ago
Why did you decide to build a chatbot, rather than a website/app? It seems like it should always be possible to provide a better experience in an app. So far I've heard only three compelling reasons: to support users without smart phones, to support voice interfaces or to be accessible through Slack etc.
- techwizrd 10y ago
  We support voice interfaces and we can support other platforms such as Slack, Telegram (we used to support it actually), and more. Like I said earlier, most users simply Google their chief complaint (e.g., "my throat hurts") which lead them to sites of varying quality such as homeopathic sites and WebMD. These sites do more harm than good. Users are also reluctant to download apps when they just want answers such as health answers. Bots allow us to reach people all over the world no matter whether they are on their desktop, tablet, smartphone, or budget phone on every platform (iOS, Android, etc.). When I look at my girlfriend's phone, she has 95+ updates waiting and she's not looking to download more apps when a Google search would suffice. We've discussed building an app in the future to enable even more features, but it's not a high priority right now. We're competing against Googling what's wrong with you, and we have to be just as easy to get started with. The priority for us is answering people's health questions.

oneplane 10y ago

They failed because it's not new nor is there a direct replacement market available. Just like video calls, it's not that it's not there, it's just not as 'wanted' as the creators of such tools think it is.

ThomPete 10y ago

Chatbots are sociable command lines. In some ways they are great because they make command line more popular in some ways the are completely useless as they turn something which should most likely be automated into a manual process.

0x445442 10y ago
Yeah, as a developer that spends most of my day at the computer, the exciting thing about "bots" is the potential coelecensce of disparate UI paradigms

throwaway91111 10y ago

It's just a shitty interface to the same software people already use. What am I missing?

finchisko 10y ago

The way I see it, chatbots should be there to save companies money on first line of support by reducing number of personnel to customer interactions.. Like answering the most frequent questions and only if bot cannot answer those questions then it will redirect to real human. Not as replacement for the UI as they're used today. Also bots should be part of your website/app and not be integrated into third party service like fcb messenger. And companies should constantly check and improve the bot to better respond to FAQs (so developing bot is actually never ending process).

andybak 10y ago
Just like phone menus were meant to. Except they have become mostly universally loathed. I can just imagine how much more annoying a "cute" pseudo-AI will be when I just want to get through to a human being.
- finchisko 10y ago
  let's say bot should be 90% confident that is still giving value to the customer. if not redirect to human.
  - Spivak 10y ago
    If you really believe you've created a bot that your users want to use then put it to the test. Advertise that they can get connected to a human by typing 'human' and see how popular it is. I would be impressed if a bot could get to 10%. I don't think you need a confidence metric, the humans using the bot will be happy to signal to you that they're not receiving value.
    - finchisko 10y ago
      I can only agree with that.
exadeci 10y ago
That's what I did for a client. When a client sends an email it's parsed by an AI to find things that could be answered automatically (because the user can't be bothered to read the faq) it replies to the user. It tells the user that it was answered automatically and ask him if it answers his question, if he says something negative it's forwarded to a human support

terribleplan 10y ago

Spoiler: People don't want to talk to chat bots to interact with a company. Same reason they get frustrated at IVRs.

slouch 10y ago
Interactive voice response (IVR) is a technology that allows a computer to interact with humans through the use of voice and DTMF tones input via keypad.

bedros 10y ago

I feel the AI hype is similar to the cleantech hype in the 2000's everyone jumped on bandwagon for FOMO (fear-of-missing-out)

olavgg 10y ago

Making a chatbot is really hard, because you need a lot of data and it needs to be of good quality. You cannot use a random chat message log and train your model, it will usually have way too much noise. Instead I highly recommend that you build it from scratch. Then you will start getting great results. You also have to use a proper spell checking algorithm and understand the basics of how a full text search engine actually works and know the purpose of using stop words and synonyms. I would love to present our virtual assistant "James" to the rest of the world, but we have only recently started to build english training data. Currently it only understands english with the use of synonyms, so it isn't working as well as it should. If you're interested in trying it out you can play with it on the webpage of one of the largest banks in Norway http://srbank.no http://srbank.no, the chat icon is at the bottom right. You can ask questions in English, but it will unfortunately only answer in Norwegian at this time, so you have to use google translate too see if it answered correctly. "James" do support language detection though, but we have just recently starting to add the english answers. In a few weeks and James will answer in English :-) Currently James can predict over 1500 intents related to banking and insurance. Here are some of the more complex questions James can handle: Want to open a savings account for my daughter Can I adjust the limit on my sons bank card What can you tell me about my pension Do you have a pension calculator? I was out drinking last night and lost my credit card If anyone says that chatbots aren't working and will never work, I can say this with real data to back me up, it works very well! The feedback we have gotten the last few months has been amazing! And I'm 100% sure that chatbots will become a big industry the next years. Complex UI's will finally be good riddance. Feel free to ask me anything if you have any questions.

timac80 10y ago
I tried the chatbot - I must admit I'm surprised how well it worked actually! Got me interested, I hope you don't mind a few questions: When you write 'built i from scratch' what do you mean? That you handcrafted all the data? How long did it take to develop this bot, and what technologies did you use?
- olavgg 10y ago
  Yes, all the data we use to train our model on, is handcrafted by our AI trainers. What they do is figure out all the different questions that are most common to ask for each intent we want to predict. We have built a tool that helps them creating all these sentences, often we use templates with keywords. It is still under development, we started at the end of last summer. We use Torch and Python-NLTK.

dwighttk 10y ago

Misunderestimating the long tail

altstar 10y ago
What is misunderestimating?
- dwighttk 10y ago
  reference to Arrested Development... Not a real word. But kinda works anyway.

jameslk 10y ago

The power of chat bots is in marketing. They compete with email marketing as a more responsive medium. This is because platforms like Messenger allow much greater interaction from the user than email. Most think of chat bots as a textual experience, but you can actually build entire UIs with Messenger that include images and buttons. In a way, it can be thought of as less frictional minimalistic website via chat. Eventually you will be able to buy things directly in chat, closing the loop entirely.

whatevorama 10y ago
Good point there is greater opportunity if bots were able to use visuals as opposed to just words.
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seibelj 10y ago

I worked for a year at a super hyped chat-bot company that raised a lot of money pre-revenue, pre-customers, etc. The difference between the press / marketing and the actual product built was incredible. Last I heard they are ditching everything they already built and starting over.

iamacynic 10y ago
aka it was a bullshit factory.

bluetwo 10y ago

Amazing that people pouring money into the latest buzzword have once again come up empty handed.

retox 10y ago

Where did all the hype over shitty chat bots come from? It seemed to fill up HN and every tech publication overnight. Now even Skype, an application for chatting with real people, has a bots tab. It was clear from the get go it was just another way to push ads.

23443463453 10y ago

Surprise, Silicon Valley's most recent snake oil didn't pan out. At least it seems the old new cons are being unmasked earlier these days.

whatevorama 10y ago

Geez I guess no one bothered asking users if THEY like chatbots? IMO chatbots are the online equivalent of getting an automated response from a phone line. like calling CVS pharmacy "press one" for pharmacy, etc... You get the point of it, but it's basically a tool that only benefits businesses because the user experience is very poor. I wonder why no one tries to make this whole bot thing have more of a personality? It seems so bland. If they modeled it after ONE person instead of using "data" to sound neutral, they would be more successful.

jsemrau 10y ago
>users if THEY like chatbots I certainly prefer chatbots over the menu selection when I call. But that's about it. Mose of the chatbots are similar rule based systems anyways.
olavgg 10y ago
Have you ever called support over phone and waited a long time for a simple question? Annoying, yes? A chatbot can often answer that simple question immediately. So yes, people do like chatbots as long they at least manage to get most of the simple questions right. For example in our case, clients often have problems logging in. With our chatbot they can easily get a one time password sent to their phone. With a regular search/faq they would have never known about that, because they are often too frustrated with the UI experience for finding that information. With a natural language conversation, it is easier :-)
- pricechild 10y ago
  Why not just send that OTP to their phone immediately if someone has trouble logging in?
- pbreit 10y ago
  Seems like you're not addressing the root problem.
- shriphani 10y ago
  can't a button saying "can't login" on your website solve this problem?

ganfortran 10y ago

And why is this News. They don't have a product to sell other than a toy demo. No chatbot company can offer an easy to understand, measurable interface for customers to customize towards their own usage case, with expected outcome. You can tell me in bareface that your product is magic, and when it doesn't work, it is due to the bad weather. Though, I think DL based NLP technique is the future, however, chatbot is not the right conveyor for that vision, much more like a lot of money hungry dudes riding the hype to monetize their demo technology.

reggieband 10y ago

One idea I've been mentioning whenever this sort of thing comes up are those 20-question bots. I remember several years ago being blown away by its ability to guess some extremely specific and random things. I always thought it would be an interesting interface for a "find" function in an OS. I think it might work as front-line support as well.

shard972 10y ago

Just don't tell congress about it.

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago

Whenever I get on one of those call center lines, I always try the command "Agent", instead of following their rabbithole of decision tree. These "bot" cult members say this time it's different because now we have deep learning and it's different from the shitty comcast/verizon call center lines where you have to walk down the decision tree. But the problem is 99% of these people have no idea what they are talking about. They probably saw the Lee Sedol match and thought AI has made some huge breakthrough almost like quantum computing. It hasn't. The accuracy has gotten better and that surely enables a lot of things, but this has nothing to do with what these idiots are trying to build. If you look at the type of people considered "experts" in the chatbot scene, you'll immediately understand how ridiculous this is. Most of them are non technical people who don't even know how to write a simple program. It's hilarious watching these "chatbot experts" talking about how the "old approach" to AI was all about stupid decision tree whereas "NOW with deep learning you can actually let the machine learn!" haha welcome to "machine learning".

dredmorbius 10y ago

A chatbot, voice or text, is a response generator, where responses are prompts, requested information, or state change (e.g., place order, cancel service). It's no more interactive than other tools, and the more divorced the interface from text, the more levels of complexity are thrown at it. Talking at a CLI interface is no more a "conversation" than typing at one. Despite the fact that interactive computer systems were called "conversational". (Don't believe me? There are books on the subject, from 1968: https://www.worldcat.org/title/conversational-computers/oclc/6755846 https://www.worldcat.org/title/conversational-computers/oclc... https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=kw%3Aconversational+computing&fq=yr%3A1900..1980+%3E&qt=advanced&dblist=638 https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=kw%3Aconversational+comput...) I've been thinking about world models and communication a great deal. In this context, talking (or typing) with a chatbot is a great deal like arguing with an idiot. If the chatbot's world model doesn't include the actions or questions you're trying to address, there's simply no way to get it to understand. Quite literally, its world doesn't include such things. Though unlike the proverbial wrestling with a pig, in this case, you're the one far more likely to be annoyed. Which gets to another major problem: such systems are constructed, and serve, the interests of their creators and clients: the companies which create them, frequently not the same as those who deploy them, the clients. Users' interests are at the bottom of the priority stack. Some weeks ago I had the pleasure of calling the local (and pathetic) newspaper company after our Sunday paper failed to arrive. I was greated, on three successive phone calls, to a several-minutes-long pitch for services I had absolutely no interest in, when trying to address a problem created by the company in the first place. To put it mildly, I was not pleased. And my standing recommendation to cancel the subscription (substituting it with a much superior national paper) seems to be bearing out. Chatbots which treat interactions as captive sales opportunities will, I suspect, not greatly enhance customer affinity to brands deploying such strategies.

puranjay 10y ago

Maybe it's because I am an introvert, but I have a simple question for estimating the success of any development: "Does this product reduce the number of social interactions I have to have? Does it let me do something without interacting with another individual?" Chatbots, because developers keep trying to make them more "human", fail the second part of the question. They "feel" like talking to a person at times, which is something I don't want. I'll just tap a few buttons instead.

joeyspn 10y ago

Unless chatbots pass the Turing Test they'll be perceived as a poor UX solution vs human interaction. I see them useful in chatops tho. We techies like automation, even if it's dumb, but non technical users expect much more...

Tepix 10y ago

I installed some obscure instant messenger app to try the latest and greatest Microsoft chatbot a couple weeks ago. Walked away very disappointed. The chatbot would give incoherent unfitting answers every three sentences or so. It was also unable to keep in mind what had already been written.

bovermyer 10y ago

Really, what we actually need are fully sentient artificial intelligences. At that point we get into some very interesting social questions, though.

127001brewer 10y ago

Does anyone else remember "Chatbots" on BBSes (of long ago)? Are these modern versions any better?

mattszaszko 10y ago

Chatbots are really just a way to push and pull messages on messaging channels, nothing more, nothing less. How much automation you put behind it is really up to you. And yes, many early examples forgot about their users. Yes, it is cool to write a bot that can do something cool for a fraction of use cases, but as always, solving a real problem trumps being cool. Now chatbots can be used as a content distribution channel (see publishers’ bots), app replacement (Swell is a great example, and they are in the next YC batch, congrats to them), but I’d like to point out how makers miss the point on arguably the largest use case for messaging in the business world today, customer service. Yes, most bots that address this domain can’t live up to the expectation either. And really, just think Job to be Done, the customer wants a quick, accurate and preferably personal reply to their question or issue, it is that simple. So what we (Bicycle AI) did to make our clients better at this Job is we are fusing human and AI for a faster, affordable and scalable solution for SMEs. I hear you say, wait, isn’t this like Digital Genius, well, nope, we integrate with Intercom for example and we have a team of AI supervisors who approve the answers suggested by our AI. This means our clients can provide blazing fast customer service for their customers 24/7 and according to their volumes. Simple as that. We use past conversation history and product docs to generate our suggested answers. We can go live pretty fast and can take care of around 60-70% of incoming conversations, escalating the complex cases after engagement. Aaand, we are in alfa stage with emails. So when it comes to harnessing automation in customer service, we believe that customers should not be the ones dealing with the rough edges.