4 ms·

One thing i've been reading about is game AI that despite not being very technologically challenging, they are more designed to provide a certain experience for

One thing i've been reading about is game AI that despite not being very technologically challenging, they are more designed to provide a certain experience for the user/player be it fun, hard etc. I think a lot of modern AI misses this where they just make a better version of the automated phone redirecting thing (Dont remember the name for this). They should include more ways on actually designing the whole experience and make the users actually enjoy using the AI.

digi_owl 9y ago
Not sure if front line customer support is designed to be enjoyable (outside of outliers like Apple). All in all this makes me think of Manna, as customer support was pretty much already about humans following scripts with no allowance for deviation...
- forkLding 9y ago
  I think it helps in more ways than one, users might use it more which in turn improves the AI if its a learning system or in general because devs gets the product tested out more. Moreover, customer support will get more automated in the future and the differentiating factor will be how human or nice it feels to use which will in turn make the company stand out. I'm a good example. I hate it when I phone banks and they give me a lot of automated phone waiting and redirecting. It makes me not want to keep phoning in the future and also dislike the bank because the experience sucked. The caveat is of course now you have to put more work into it to create that experience but I believe its worth it. I wouldnt train customer support stuff before automation to be emotionless so why should they be emotionless after automation.
huhlig 9y ago
The problem is when you're holding a conversation were sitting at the edge of the uncanny valley. The nuances of human communication are many and subtle and most bots come across as uncannily creepy, or develop traits like Microsoft Tay did when she was on twitter. Getting chatbots to be both natural and capable is very difficult task and not something that anyone I know has actually reached. Most still fail a turing test if you give it properly and repeatedly.
- forkLding 9y ago
  I think we're putting too much thought into making it natural via stuffing more data. I would claim that game AI almost seems natural to some people even though some are basic FSMs but thats because they study the user and the experience first and add game design before creating the program. A lot of what people do now is create the AI program, feed data, train and then think about the user or not even think about the user and instead talk about recall or metrics etc.
  - ehnto 9y ago
    Game AI also has the benefit of knowing all possible constraints and configurations ahead of time, and having access to exact data carefully organised and labelled. A game character can only move in ways and to areas that the developers allow them to. Human speech and language itself is significantly more nuanced and also evolving over time.
    - forkLding 9y ago
      I agree with that, however with customer support, the issue should be that you should know what customer support is before you create an AI for customer support. I'm not suggesting fun general NLP-based AI but to make those constrained to a certain problem space better. Edit: I noticed I didnt clarify this before but I meant AI as in chatbots that were mainly for customer support or inquiries etc.
- ehnto 9y ago
  I wonder how necessary it really is for a conversation to be involved at all, if the bot can only have a set range of outcomes then what benefit over the traditional dial tone based selection does it add? It feels a bit like moving the car aircon controls to a digital touchscreen display, sure it sounded like progress, but it really just made things more ambiguous and harder to use.
  - Drakim 9y ago
    For the same reason Siri and Ok Google isn't just a long menu of 500 options. Having a tone dial menu works as long as there are only a few places to route you, and as long as all situations only have a handful of answers. Furthermore, you can have tricks like looking for keywords in your human speech to make sure the guy you get patched to has the expertise to help you. If you say "my router won't turn on" you won't be sent to a password reset monkey. At least, that's the theory.
mannykannot 9y ago
I do not care if I enjoy the experience or for empathy. What I want is a solution, and that requires the other side to understand the problem and the possible solutions. Automation is not there yet, and not close enough to make it work. Of course, you do not always get that from humans either, especially from companies that treat customer service as a cost to be minimized by hiring people to do nothing more than emulate a chatbot by following scripts: "Through some serendipity, I was connected to a human representative, but before I had time to utter my predicament, he told me “I shall put you through to the booking system” – and the infernal loop resumed."

digi_owl 9y ago

Not sure if front line customer support is designed to be enjoyable (outside of outliers like Apple). All in all this makes me think of Manna, as customer support was pretty much already about humans following scripts with no allowance for deviation...

forkLding 9y ago
I think it helps in more ways than one, users might use it more which in turn improves the AI if its a learning system or in general because devs gets the product tested out more. Moreover, customer support will get more automated in the future and the differentiating factor will be how human or nice it feels to use which will in turn make the company stand out. I'm a good example. I hate it when I phone banks and they give me a lot of automated phone waiting and redirecting. It makes me not want to keep phoning in the future and also dislike the bank because the experience sucked. The caveat is of course now you have to put more work into it to create that experience but I believe its worth it. I wouldnt train customer support stuff before automation to be emotionless so why should they be emotionless after automation.

huhlig 9y ago

The problem is when you're holding a conversation were sitting at the edge of the uncanny valley. The nuances of human communication are many and subtle and most bots come across as uncannily creepy, or develop traits like Microsoft Tay did when she was on twitter. Getting chatbots to be both natural and capable is very difficult task and not something that anyone I know has actually reached. Most still fail a turing test if you give it properly and repeatedly.

forkLding 9y ago
I think we're putting too much thought into making it natural via stuffing more data. I would claim that game AI almost seems natural to some people even though some are basic FSMs but thats because they study the user and the experience first and add game design before creating the program. A lot of what people do now is create the AI program, feed data, train and then think about the user or not even think about the user and instead talk about recall or metrics etc.
- ehnto 9y ago
  Game AI also has the benefit of knowing all possible constraints and configurations ahead of time, and having access to exact data carefully organised and labelled. A game character can only move in ways and to areas that the developers allow them to. Human speech and language itself is significantly more nuanced and also evolving over time.
  - forkLding 9y ago
    I agree with that, however with customer support, the issue should be that you should know what customer support is before you create an AI for customer support. I'm not suggesting fun general NLP-based AI but to make those constrained to a certain problem space better. Edit: I noticed I didnt clarify this before but I meant AI as in chatbots that were mainly for customer support or inquiries etc.
ehnto 9y ago
I wonder how necessary it really is for a conversation to be involved at all, if the bot can only have a set range of outcomes then what benefit over the traditional dial tone based selection does it add? It feels a bit like moving the car aircon controls to a digital touchscreen display, sure it sounded like progress, but it really just made things more ambiguous and harder to use.
- Drakim 9y ago
  For the same reason Siri and Ok Google isn't just a long menu of 500 options. Having a tone dial menu works as long as there are only a few places to route you, and as long as all situations only have a handful of answers. Furthermore, you can have tricks like looking for keywords in your human speech to make sure the guy you get patched to has the expertise to help you. If you say "my router won't turn on" you won't be sent to a password reset monkey. At least, that's the theory.

mannykannot 9y ago

I do not care if I enjoy the experience or for empathy. What I want is a solution, and that requires the other side to understand the problem and the possible solutions. Automation is not there yet, and not close enough to make it work. Of course, you do not always get that from humans either, especially from companies that treat customer service as a cost to be minimized by hiring people to do nothing more than emulate a chatbot by following scripts: "Through some serendipity, I was connected to a human representative, but before I had time to utter my predicament, he told me “I shall put you through to the booking system” – and the infernal loop resumed."