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I develop Alexa skills and I agree with the article. Another point that is missing is that the technology hasn't "closed the loop". We have great ASR and NLU av

I develop Alexa skills and I agree with the article. Another point that is missing is that the technology hasn't "closed the loop". We have great ASR and NLU available, but responses still need to be built by hand or templated. This is the major reason bots feel so unnatural. I think there's a lot of opportunity for robust Natural Language Generation solutions to help build voice apps and chat bots that can operate more flexibly. Also, there's a need for a more declarative, high level programming language to describe how you can interact with a bot. Defining them as trees or graphs isn't flexible enough. I've had promising results from experimenting with concepts from Ceptre (https://github.com/chrisamaphone/interactive-lp https://github.com/chrisamaphone/interactive-lp). Fortunately there are a lot of startups experimenting in this space, I think we'll see the most effective practices replicated quickly.

mannykannot 9y ago
In my experience, the major reason bots feel unnatural is that they quickly reveal their lack of actual understanding of anything, with the mean time to Turing-test failure being not much longer than the preliminaries (such as getting your account #.) Actually, maybe 'unnatural' is not the quite right word, as I have had some human customer service that is no better in this regard (or perhaps they were actually some of the better chatbots?)
Cumulonimbus 9y ago
I would also posit, that the chatbots are not armed with the ability to actually solve problems. I'd use a chatbot, if it could understand that X is a fraudulent transaction, and to have it cancelled. Instead I get , "Would you like to return your item?" -- NO, it's fraud. It seems either the engineers responsible, or the upper management have made it an order to not allow higher functioning bots. Im guessing they're using the bots as yet another layer of obfuscation to get people to go away, just as companies used "longer than expected" delays on phone lines to get people to leave.
splatcollision 9y ago
Agree on the need for a declarative high level language. Something akin to Markdown, but for chatbot flows.

mannykannot 9y ago

In my experience, the major reason bots feel unnatural is that they quickly reveal their lack of actual understanding of anything, with the mean time to Turing-test failure being not much longer than the preliminaries (such as getting your account #.) Actually, maybe 'unnatural' is not the quite right word, as I have had some human customer service that is no better in this regard (or perhaps they were actually some of the better chatbots?)

Cumulonimbus 9y ago

I would also posit, that the chatbots are not armed with the ability to actually solve problems. I'd use a chatbot, if it could understand that X is a fraudulent transaction, and to have it cancelled. Instead I get , "Would you like to return your item?" -- NO, it's fraud. It seems either the engineers responsible, or the upper management have made it an order to not allow higher functioning bots. Im guessing they're using the bots as yet another layer of obfuscation to get people to go away, just as companies used "longer than expected" delays on phone lines to get people to leave.

splatcollision 9y ago

Agree on the need for a declarative high level language. Something akin to Markdown, but for chatbot flows.