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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

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.
  - andybak 10y ago
    > Until we have actual AI it will remain an obfuscated command line Well put, sir. I hadn't managed to put that into words quite as succinctly but you've pinpointed exactly my feelings and my reasons for skepticism. Unless you bother to read up on the commands that it accepts you find yourself greeted 50% of the time with "I don't know how to do that". Now we're on the same turf as any good UX problem - power-users (who have the incentive to learn an interface) vs casual users (who don't and shouldn't have to). Chat bots seem to be targeting the latter but they require the time investment of the former.
  - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
    > Until we have actual AI it will remain an obfuscated command line. I've never met a command line that wasn't obfuscated. Try learning Unix using only man pages as reference. With bots, you can at least expect reasonable responses to some natural-language requests.
  - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
    > Until we have actual AI it will remain an obfuscated command line. I've never met a command line that wasn't obfuscated. Try learning Unix using only man pages as reference. With bots, you can at least expect reasonable responses to some natural-language requests.
chillacy 10y ago
I think you're right that chatbots need to be way more conversational, but I don't think having every company re-implement Cleverbot would be beneficial. Certainly Siri does this, but that gets old after awhile, and it's annoying when siri thinks you're looking for a joke or something clever when you just want information. I think the parallel to real life is when you call customer support, or order food at Wendy's. The conversation is usually extremely railroaded towards one specific subject (though within that domain, you can dive deep, like "are the pickles super sour or are they more like fresh pickles" that chatbots can't do yet)
- jklinger410 10y ago
  I definitely agree with you on this. I think somewhere in the middle-ground is perfect, obviously. I think I should be able to ask your chatbot how their day is going, but I don't think I should be able to shitpost with it for 3 hours. The reason I bring up Chatbot is because they seemed to at least have the conversational part figured out. Also, Siri is really not such a part of this conversation because it is honestly the only chatbot that I can think of that accomplishes a portion of what we're talking about here.
  - behnamoh 10y ago
    Siri can't even tell jokes, while Cortana is capable of telling jokes, singing, and much more. These little things - even though programmed by some other person - can spice things up and make the bot look even more natural. Go home Siri.
    - eginhard 10y ago
      The other day, (French) Siri replied to "What are you doing this evening?" with "I'm playing hide-and-seek with Markov models".
      - jsemrau 10y ago
        This would have been a perfect example for the event domain I proposed to Apple. But they don't want it.
themagician 10y ago
They end up just being command line interfaces at the end of the day.
- WalterSear 10y ago
  That's what they should be: command line interfaces for people who don't use computers.
- jsemrau 10y ago
  I never thought about it in this way, but you are right.
WalterSear 10y ago
Having worked developing conversational interfaces for the last six months, I concur entirely. The wrong people are doing the wrong job, too fast and without any forethought, to capitalize on the tech news hype cycle more than anything else.
- jacinabox 10y ago
  I saw a recent article try to claim that conversational UIs were just like GUIs -- there are a handful of buttons, that you need to shoehorn into verbal commands.
  - WalterSear 10y ago
    That's what many people are trying to do, and why they are such a maudlin medium so far. IMHO, most are trying to shoehorn their UI into chat for no good reason. Conversational UIs are good for two things really - dealing with massively selection, and providing an interface for entirely naive users. Ultimately, I see them as much an extension of search interfaces as they are of messenger apps, insofar as given a potentially open-ended number of buttons (like restaurants in your area) it's easier to ask for them in english, despite the fact that the interface has anticipate all the issues that brings (you might not get it right, your request may be ambiguous etc) And, sometimes it's easier to use english to make a selection - particularly if you don't know how to do something that should be relatively simple, and is consequently relatively simple to describe in english ("Hotel room, turn on the lights." "I want to order a pizza."). Unfortunately, this takes both advanced natural language parsing, and equally advanced response generation. The later is much harder, and I feel generally neglected, by most chatbots and platforms, IMHO. This makes a lot more sense when using voice rather than text, but ultimately, hybrid voice/gui chat displays are what chatbots are going to evolve to. You will ask for something via voice and in addition to receiving audio responses, you will receive a stream of UI widgets in a chat window containing supplemental information and finer grained controls, such as sliders for the color/brightness of your hotel room light, or an options menu for your pizza order. Amazon Alexa and Google Now are already quietly doing this, for the most part, but it's going to become a much prominent part of the interaction over time.
make3 10y ago
Cleverbot is really just a gimmick, it's an empty toy
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jacquesm 10y ago
I built a super simple system a while ago that simply kept up the conversation as long as it was 'on track', the first time it would deviate it would engage a human on the back-end and record the answer extending the track just a little bit further. After a couple of months of training it it could keep up a conversation for a few minutes along most of the tracks that it had learned. To make it look more life-like I added random delays in answering and sometimes splitting an answer across two messages. Spelling errors were retained as well instead of being corrected. Of course that's not a 'bot', merely a recorder and replay but it was at least as effective as long as the conversation was kept relatively short.
- lowglow 10y ago
  "Human on the back-end" is called "Human in the loop" for anyone looking into this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-in-the-loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-in-the-loop
jonathankoren 10y ago
I sincerely doubt a gaming company would bring anything to the table. Simply because, no one wants an phone tree, and that's what games provide. The reason why 90% of chatbot companies aren't living up to the hype is because they're doing it wrong. Either it's an phone tree, or they're doing naive matching on regexps, or perhaps just throwing a bunch of data and trying to deep learn some intents. It's pretty amateurish. If you used more traditional NLP techniques, you'd get much further. The other problem with chatbots is that people have become accustomed to general chatbots like Siri, and so even if you say, "my chatbot only does X", you're still going to have people trying all sorts if stuff that's not X. ("Hey, banking bot! What's the melting point of lead?" "I only do banking question." "You suck banking bot.")
- tomtheelder 10y ago
  I don't think this is true, I think you are just overestimating the abilities of even the most advanced chatbot technologies. You get presented with a traditional conversation interface and you are expecting the level of communication you would get with an actual person, but all current consumer chatbots (including Siri/Google Assistant/etc.) fall horribly short in offering a seamless, fluid conversation. The result is a really unpleasant experience made worse by high expectations. We are just way, way off technologically.
WorldMaker 10y ago
I still think that the Jack Principles is one of the most useful UX documents in this arena and that it is a shame that it's gotten so hard to find. Originally designed for and lessons from the game company formerly known as Jellyvision (the game company part of that is now spun off into Jackbox Games), the Jack Principles was a briefly free resource during the late part of the IRC chat bot golden age in the 90s. The consulting firm that is left at Jellyvision still uses it as a part of their consulting, so they don't give copies away for free anymore. I'd love to see a new edition of the Jack Principles in textbook form, especially now that it is very relevant again.

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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.
- andybak 10y ago
  > Until we have actual AI it will remain an obfuscated command line Well put, sir. I hadn't managed to put that into words quite as succinctly but you've pinpointed exactly my feelings and my reasons for skepticism. Unless you bother to read up on the commands that it accepts you find yourself greeted 50% of the time with "I don't know how to do that". Now we're on the same turf as any good UX problem - power-users (who have the incentive to learn an interface) vs casual users (who don't and shouldn't have to). Chat bots seem to be targeting the latter but they require the time investment of the former.
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago
  > Until we have actual AI it will remain an obfuscated command line. I've never met a command line that wasn't obfuscated. Try learning Unix using only man pages as reference. With bots, you can at least expect reasonable responses to some natural-language requests.
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago
  > Until we have actual AI it will remain an obfuscated command line. I've never met a command line that wasn't obfuscated. Try learning Unix using only man pages as reference. With bots, you can at least expect reasonable responses to some natural-language requests.

chillacy 10y ago

I think you're right that chatbots need to be way more conversational, but I don't think having every company re-implement Cleverbot would be beneficial. Certainly Siri does this, but that gets old after awhile, and it's annoying when siri thinks you're looking for a joke or something clever when you just want information. I think the parallel to real life is when you call customer support, or order food at Wendy's. The conversation is usually extremely railroaded towards one specific subject (though within that domain, you can dive deep, like "are the pickles super sour or are they more like fresh pickles" that chatbots can't do yet)

jklinger410 10y ago
I definitely agree with you on this. I think somewhere in the middle-ground is perfect, obviously. I think I should be able to ask your chatbot how their day is going, but I don't think I should be able to shitpost with it for 3 hours. The reason I bring up Chatbot is because they seemed to at least have the conversational part figured out. Also, Siri is really not such a part of this conversation because it is honestly the only chatbot that I can think of that accomplishes a portion of what we're talking about here.
- behnamoh 10y ago
  Siri can't even tell jokes, while Cortana is capable of telling jokes, singing, and much more. These little things - even though programmed by some other person - can spice things up and make the bot look even more natural. Go home Siri.
  - eginhard 10y ago
    The other day, (French) Siri replied to "What are you doing this evening?" with "I'm playing hide-and-seek with Markov models".
    - jsemrau 10y ago
      This would have been a perfect example for the event domain I proposed to Apple. But they don't want it.

themagician 10y ago

They end up just being command line interfaces at the end of the day.

WalterSear 10y ago
That's what they should be: command line interfaces for people who don't use computers.
jsemrau 10y ago
I never thought about it in this way, but you are right.

WalterSear 10y ago

Having worked developing conversational interfaces for the last six months, I concur entirely. The wrong people are doing the wrong job, too fast and without any forethought, to capitalize on the tech news hype cycle more than anything else.

jacinabox 10y ago
I saw a recent article try to claim that conversational UIs were just like GUIs -- there are a handful of buttons, that you need to shoehorn into verbal commands.
- WalterSear 10y ago
  That's what many people are trying to do, and why they are such a maudlin medium so far. IMHO, most are trying to shoehorn their UI into chat for no good reason. Conversational UIs are good for two things really - dealing with massively selection, and providing an interface for entirely naive users. Ultimately, I see them as much an extension of search interfaces as they are of messenger apps, insofar as given a potentially open-ended number of buttons (like restaurants in your area) it's easier to ask for them in english, despite the fact that the interface has anticipate all the issues that brings (you might not get it right, your request may be ambiguous etc) And, sometimes it's easier to use english to make a selection - particularly if you don't know how to do something that should be relatively simple, and is consequently relatively simple to describe in english ("Hotel room, turn on the lights." "I want to order a pizza."). Unfortunately, this takes both advanced natural language parsing, and equally advanced response generation. The later is much harder, and I feel generally neglected, by most chatbots and platforms, IMHO. This makes a lot more sense when using voice rather than text, but ultimately, hybrid voice/gui chat displays are what chatbots are going to evolve to. You will ask for something via voice and in addition to receiving audio responses, you will receive a stream of UI widgets in a chat window containing supplemental information and finer grained controls, such as sliders for the color/brightness of your hotel room light, or an options menu for your pizza order. Amazon Alexa and Google Now are already quietly doing this, for the most part, but it's going to become a much prominent part of the interaction over time.

make3 10y ago

Cleverbot is really just a gimmick, it's an empty toy

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jacquesm 10y ago

I built a super simple system a while ago that simply kept up the conversation as long as it was 'on track', the first time it would deviate it would engage a human on the back-end and record the answer extending the track just a little bit further. After a couple of months of training it it could keep up a conversation for a few minutes along most of the tracks that it had learned. To make it look more life-like I added random delays in answering and sometimes splitting an answer across two messages. Spelling errors were retained as well instead of being corrected. Of course that's not a 'bot', merely a recorder and replay but it was at least as effective as long as the conversation was kept relatively short.

lowglow 10y ago
"Human on the back-end" is called "Human in the loop" for anyone looking into this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-in-the-loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-in-the-loop

jonathankoren 10y ago

I sincerely doubt a gaming company would bring anything to the table. Simply because, no one wants an phone tree, and that's what games provide. The reason why 90% of chatbot companies aren't living up to the hype is because they're doing it wrong. Either it's an phone tree, or they're doing naive matching on regexps, or perhaps just throwing a bunch of data and trying to deep learn some intents. It's pretty amateurish. If you used more traditional NLP techniques, you'd get much further. The other problem with chatbots is that people have become accustomed to general chatbots like Siri, and so even if you say, "my chatbot only does X", you're still going to have people trying all sorts if stuff that's not X. ("Hey, banking bot! What's the melting point of lead?" "I only do banking question." "You suck banking bot.")

tomtheelder 10y ago
I don't think this is true, I think you are just overestimating the abilities of even the most advanced chatbot technologies. You get presented with a traditional conversation interface and you are expecting the level of communication you would get with an actual person, but all current consumer chatbots (including Siri/Google Assistant/etc.) fall horribly short in offering a seamless, fluid conversation. The result is a really unpleasant experience made worse by high expectations. We are just way, way off technologically.

WorldMaker 10y ago

I still think that the Jack Principles is one of the most useful UX documents in this arena and that it is a shame that it's gotten so hard to find. Originally designed for and lessons from the game company formerly known as Jellyvision (the game company part of that is now spun off into Jackbox Games), the Jack Principles was a briefly free resource during the late part of the IRC chat bot golden age in the 90s. The consulting firm that is left at Jellyvision still uses it as a part of their consulting, so they don't give copies away for free anymore. I'd love to see a new edition of the Jack Principles in textbook form, especially now that it is very relevant again.