6 ms·

Chatbots need a personality

76 points by gregdale 9y ago

girzel 9y ago
> “I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems.” "M-x doctor" aside, try getting on #emacs and talking to fsbot. I swear I have seen some of the eeriest exchanges between human and robot in that channel – it's not an AI, of course, but man it fakes it well. As someone in the channel once said: "Someone's cheating on their Turing test..."
10-6 9y ago
"Your chatbot should be purposeful, reflective of your product’s voice, and simpatico with your users. One helpful design exercise is to produce an assistant persona and personality:" For a business, a "chatbot" or any feature similar to it needs to do one thing and that is solve the users problem(s). If the user wants to do X within the app or learn about Y, the chatbot needs to help the user with that efficiently and better than a human can for the feature to be successful. The "chatbot having a personality" comes second to "solve the users problem." If the users are completely happy with whatever chatbot they are using, then sure adding in some "personality" might be a good idea and increase engagement slightly, but a poorly-performing chatbot that can't help the user but has a personality isn't going to help the business at all.
- nerdponx 9y ago
  I don't know any users that are ever happy with any chatbot. The only exceptions I can think of are Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa, that's only because they respond to your voice and save you the trouble of typing or clicking, not because they have any intrinsic value as chatbots.
  - 10-6 9y ago
    I agree, a lot of chatbot projects seem to be built because of the hype + the team also gets to dabble with some "AI/ML." I think there are very few conversational agents or chatbots today that people use regularly, and of those I honestly don't think many people enjoy using them.
    - crooked-v 9y ago
      I'd much rather have a plain old index of help questions and answers than a chatbot to deal with.
      - jkestelyn 9y ago
        Building bots is hard: there are few tools available of any sophistication, leading to a vicious cycle of trial and error (with users getting the worst of it). Remember what the first websites looked like? Everyone was just making it up as they went along. We're in a similar situation today.
        nerdponx 9y ago
        And you know what? Some people are pining for those sites nowadays. The fact that you can write rich, computation-heavy applications and serve them over HTTP in a browser is amazing, but that doesn't mean every website needs to be a rich, computation-heavy application. Same with chatbots. They might have some valid use somewhere, but most of the ones I have seen so far are just there for the sake of being there.
        jkestelyn 9y ago
        Sure, but past performance is not a predictor of future results. Just because many of them are built poorly today doesn't mean they have to be built that way.
  - bamnet 9y ago
    Users are never happy with chatbots, but they can be happy with chat experiences if they never realize there's a bot behind the scenes.
    - bpicolo 9y ago
      Which, up to this point, is still never. Young kids can probably be happy with chat bots though?
  - losteric 9y ago
    I've often found that Alexa doesn't even save me that trouble. It's useful for the useless things that I wouldn't do manually. The things that took a lot of time take even longer with Alexa (if they're supported at all), and the small things ... great, changing the lights now takes 3 seconds instead of 5 seconds, so I do it twice as often. Voice is just a medium, what I really want is more powerful abstractions. Do more with fewer interactions. I don't want to ask Alexa what movies are playing nearby, that's as good as the 1985 moviefone service. I want to know whether there are movies worth watching, and have Alexa check movies/times/ratings/weather/traffic/my calendar and tell me "Yes - X is certified Fresh and <friend> recommended it on Twitter recently. It's playing at Y theater for $Z, you can walk there in time for the 8:00PM show. Would you like me to buy a ticket?"... I don't want to buy an HDMI cable from Amazon, I want a sample of physical/digital retailers with prices/ETAs/ratings... Voice, GUI, heck even CLI is fine. And when it comes to smart homes, I expect learning and proactivity. If I follow GSW, don't make me ask if they're playing, then ask to turn on the TV, then change the channels, then adjust the volume... learn that I care, ask if I care now, and get the game on ASAP if the answer is "yes".
- huthwr78 9y ago
  Agreed. The virtual equivalent of a Radioshack employee isn't the way.
  - CobrastanJorji 9y ago
    That's a sick burn but I think it needs updating now that there isn't such a thing.
    - huthwr78 9y ago
      Big box retail employee?
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  One could even argue what was so enraging about Clippy (and MS's recent foray into helpbots instead of actual support) was the personality-sans-utility. No, I don't want to forcibly converse with a brick wall that clearly doesn't understand my question and is chipperly excited about that fact, fuck you. So I went from loving my latest Windows 10 PC (-- second in a row that had been awesome, even!) to swearing off MS for years (again) in about 30 minutes of completely terrible bot-based customer support. I sincerely hope that strategy works for them, and they're gaining income somewhere to offset what they've lost from me. I don't think it will.
SrslyJosh 9y ago
Now you have two problems.
cirgue 9y ago
We do not yet have chatbots. What we do have are publicly-facing undocumented nondeterministic command line interfaces which expect the user to guess the right commands. This interface further insults the user by pretending to be a person.
- rightos 9y ago
  I've never seen one of these (well, minus the really stupid AIM and Skype spam bots), where do you find them? Are they on the sites that constantly nag you to click through to live support on every page? The few of those that I have used all seemed to be real humans.
  - adrianN 9y ago
    Some companies replace their HR websites with chatbot interfaces.
  - Steer 9y ago
    https://shopbot.ebay.com/ https://shopbot.ebay.com/ (you need to log in to try it out)
    - rightos 9y ago
      > (you need to log in to try it out) I was expecting you meant login to eBay... nope, you need a facebook account to muck with that.
- olavgg 9y ago
  I know that many on HN really dislike chatbots because they don't understand their super special case. As a chatbot maker, with several different chatbots that are live, I can tell you that I've seen the data. Which concludes that chat bots do work, and our clients agree. Chatbots will be everywhere the coming years. Some of our clients have over 5000 intents, which cover quite a lot of the business, still it is important to let the chatbot be humble and connect the user to a human when it is too difficult to help.
jkestelyn 9y ago
"Your chatbot should be purposeful, reflective of your product’s voice, and simpatico with your users" Agreed 100% but IMO, this is not a function of "personality" but rather a function of deeply understanding user intents. A bot cannot be purposeful if its own designers don't know its purpose from a user-centric perspective. (Disclaimer: I work on Chatbase, a service for analyzing and optimizing bots)
tomc1985 9y ago
Am I the only person on earth who wants my interactions with technology to simple, effective, and straightforward? I want to give simple, straightforward commands and receive a terse confirmation or explanation as a result. Tech is so blessedly, unfailingly logical and we stupid humans have to sully that to make some of us feel happier, and not more effective :(
codinghorror 9y ago
“What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” -- oh man this is a fantastic quote. So true. AI will surely destroy humanity!
choward 9y ago
I couldn't disagree with article more. I don't want a damn chat bot. I want a way to solve my problems that's not pretending to talk to person. I don't what to have to guess a string to enter to get the results I want. Give me some sort of real UI. I can't see how a chat bot could be more effective than good documentation with good search functionality.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  It's not: There's just a massive failure of leadership in tech companies (well, in general), so rather than deal with real challenges, they smother themselves in carbon-monoxide statistics -- things that don't set off alarms, but destroy the business through misoptimization.
- userbinator 9y ago
  I (fortunately) haven't had to interact with an online chatbot, but in the case of voice ones, shouting a few expletives usually gets me a real human. I wonder if the same thing works here.
- mikesabat 9y ago
  Once the word "bot" is used, I pretty much discount the entire experience. A bot cannot "be more effective than good documentation with good search functionality." Messaging has potential as a channel, but "bots" are a misstep. Faking a personality makes it even worse. Pretending to understand the user is just utterly transparent. Messaging is good at collecting data, prompting response, reminding people and triggering actions like calls or clicks. None of the strengths are bot-based.
cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
The problem is not that your chatbot needs a personality. The problem is you implemented chatbot in the first place so you don't have to directly deal with customers.
- wiz21c 9y ago
  spot on! I remember Bezos showing an ugly table in his office, saying "we want the customers to know we spend money on what counts for them". I wonder how one could justify the bots...
acangiano 9y ago
In my course on chatbot building (shameless plug https://cognitiveclass.ai/courses/how-to-build-a-chatbot/ https://cognitiveclass.ai/courses/how-to-build-a-chatbot/) I cover some of these important design decisions and recommend creating a prompt that, while concise, removes the guesswork. Giving it a name and injecting personality is a good idea, but you should announce that the user is talking to a chatbot. In fact, two of the worst chatbot design flows, in my opinion, are: 1) Having the user try to figure out whether they are talking to a real person or a chatbot 2) Prompting the user to ask you anything (e.g., "Hi, how can I help you?") rather than guiding them on the scope.
xorgy 9y ago
A notable distinction is to be drawn between a personality (indefinite subject) and personality (adjective).
Steeeve 9y ago
Chatbots are like IVR systems and phone trees. It's a neat idea, but they are a pain in the ass, nobody likes them, and their benefit over a human is marginal in a best case scenario.
- megy 9y ago
  I think they are great, I can load them up in one window, keep working, respond when necessary, and get my problem solved. Much better than a phone call where I have to wait 30 minutes, and can't cut and paste.
  - smt88 9y ago
    Are you confusing chat bots with live chat with a human?
- vadimberman 9y ago
  Unfortunately, the IVRs persisted. It's going to be more complex for chatbots though because they will have to compete with other automated solutions that are proven to work to some degree, including phone trees.
cproctor 9y ago
I feel bad for human customer service workers. It's already a job that demands a lot of emotional labor, without customers shouting "representative!" at them.

76 points by gregdale 9y ago

> “I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems.” "M-x doctor" aside, try getting on #emacs and talking to fsbot. I swear I have seen some of the eeriest exchanges between human and robot in that channel – it's not an AI, of course, but man it fakes it well. As someone in the channel once said: "Someone's cheating on their Turing test..."

10-6 9y ago

"Your chatbot should be purposeful, reflective of your product’s voice, and simpatico with your users. One helpful design exercise is to produce an assistant persona and personality:" For a business, a "chatbot" or any feature similar to it needs to do one thing and that is solve the users problem(s). If the user wants to do X within the app or learn about Y, the chatbot needs to help the user with that efficiently and better than a human can for the feature to be successful. The "chatbot having a personality" comes second to "solve the users problem." If the users are completely happy with whatever chatbot they are using, then sure adding in some "personality" might be a good idea and increase engagement slightly, but a poorly-performing chatbot that can't help the user but has a personality isn't going to help the business at all.

nerdponx 9y ago
I don't know any users that are ever happy with any chatbot. The only exceptions I can think of are Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa, that's only because they respond to your voice and save you the trouble of typing or clicking, not because they have any intrinsic value as chatbots.
- 10-6 9y ago
  I agree, a lot of chatbot projects seem to be built because of the hype + the team also gets to dabble with some "AI/ML." I think there are very few conversational agents or chatbots today that people use regularly, and of those I honestly don't think many people enjoy using them.
  - crooked-v 9y ago
    I'd much rather have a plain old index of help questions and answers than a chatbot to deal with.
    - jkestelyn 9y ago
      Building bots is hard: there are few tools available of any sophistication, leading to a vicious cycle of trial and error (with users getting the worst of it). Remember what the first websites looked like? Everyone was just making it up as they went along. We're in a similar situation today.
      - nerdponx 9y ago
        And you know what? Some people are pining for those sites nowadays. The fact that you can write rich, computation-heavy applications and serve them over HTTP in a browser is amazing, but that doesn't mean every website needs to be a rich, computation-heavy application. Same with chatbots. They might have some valid use somewhere, but most of the ones I have seen so far are just there for the sake of being there.
        jkestelyn 9y ago
        Sure, but past performance is not a predictor of future results. Just because many of them are built poorly today doesn't mean they have to be built that way.
- bamnet 9y ago
  Users are never happy with chatbots, but they can be happy with chat experiences if they never realize there's a bot behind the scenes.
  - bpicolo 9y ago
    Which, up to this point, is still never. Young kids can probably be happy with chat bots though?
- losteric 9y ago
  I've often found that Alexa doesn't even save me that trouble. It's useful for the useless things that I wouldn't do manually. The things that took a lot of time take even longer with Alexa (if they're supported at all), and the small things ... great, changing the lights now takes 3 seconds instead of 5 seconds, so I do it twice as often. Voice is just a medium, what I really want is more powerful abstractions. Do more with fewer interactions. I don't want to ask Alexa what movies are playing nearby, that's as good as the 1985 moviefone service. I want to know whether there are movies worth watching, and have Alexa check movies/times/ratings/weather/traffic/my calendar and tell me "Yes - X is certified Fresh and <friend> recommended it on Twitter recently. It's playing at Y theater for $Z, you can walk there in time for the 8:00PM show. Would you like me to buy a ticket?"... I don't want to buy an HDMI cable from Amazon, I want a sample of physical/digital retailers with prices/ETAs/ratings... Voice, GUI, heck even CLI is fine. And when it comes to smart homes, I expect learning and proactivity. If I follow GSW, don't make me ask if they're playing, then ask to turn on the TV, then change the channels, then adjust the volume... learn that I care, ask if I care now, and get the game on ASAP if the answer is "yes".
huthwr78 9y ago
Agreed. The virtual equivalent of a Radioshack employee isn't the way.
- CobrastanJorji 9y ago
  That's a sick burn but I think it needs updating now that there isn't such a thing.
  - huthwr78 9y ago
    Big box retail employee?
SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
One could even argue what was so enraging about Clippy (and MS's recent foray into helpbots instead of actual support) was the personality-sans-utility. No, I don't want to forcibly converse with a brick wall that clearly doesn't understand my question and is chipperly excited about that fact, fuck you. So I went from loving my latest Windows 10 PC (-- second in a row that had been awesome, even!) to swearing off MS for years (again) in about 30 minutes of completely terrible bot-based customer support. I sincerely hope that strategy works for them, and they're gaining income somewhere to offset what they've lost from me. I don't think it will.

SrslyJosh 9y ago

Now you have two problems.

cirgue 9y ago

We do not yet have chatbots. What we do have are publicly-facing undocumented nondeterministic command line interfaces which expect the user to guess the right commands. This interface further insults the user by pretending to be a person.

rightos 9y ago
I've never seen one of these (well, minus the really stupid AIM and Skype spam bots), where do you find them? Are they on the sites that constantly nag you to click through to live support on every page? The few of those that I have used all seemed to be real humans.
- adrianN 9y ago
  Some companies replace their HR websites with chatbot interfaces.
- Steer 9y ago
  https://shopbot.ebay.com/ https://shopbot.ebay.com/ (you need to log in to try it out)
  - rightos 9y ago
    > (you need to log in to try it out) I was expecting you meant login to eBay... nope, you need a facebook account to muck with that.
olavgg 9y ago
I know that many on HN really dislike chatbots because they don't understand their super special case. As a chatbot maker, with several different chatbots that are live, I can tell you that I've seen the data. Which concludes that chat bots do work, and our clients agree. Chatbots will be everywhere the coming years. Some of our clients have over 5000 intents, which cover quite a lot of the business, still it is important to let the chatbot be humble and connect the user to a human when it is too difficult to help.

jkestelyn 9y ago

"Your chatbot should be purposeful, reflective of your product’s voice, and simpatico with your users" Agreed 100% but IMO, this is not a function of "personality" but rather a function of deeply understanding user intents. A bot cannot be purposeful if its own designers don't know its purpose from a user-centric perspective. (Disclaimer: I work on Chatbase, a service for analyzing and optimizing bots)

tomc1985 9y ago

Am I the only person on earth who wants my interactions with technology to simple, effective, and straightforward? I want to give simple, straightforward commands and receive a terse confirmation or explanation as a result. Tech is so blessedly, unfailingly logical and we stupid humans have to sully that to make some of us feel happier, and not more effective :(

codinghorror 9y ago

“What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” -- oh man this is a fantastic quote. So true. AI will surely destroy humanity!

choward 9y ago

I couldn't disagree with article more. I don't want a damn chat bot. I want a way to solve my problems that's not pretending to talk to person. I don't what to have to guess a string to enter to get the results I want. Give me some sort of real UI. I can't see how a chat bot could be more effective than good documentation with good search functionality.

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
It's not: There's just a massive failure of leadership in tech companies (well, in general), so rather than deal with real challenges, they smother themselves in carbon-monoxide statistics -- things that don't set off alarms, but destroy the business through misoptimization.
userbinator 9y ago
I (fortunately) haven't had to interact with an online chatbot, but in the case of voice ones, shouting a few expletives usually gets me a real human. I wonder if the same thing works here.
mikesabat 9y ago
Once the word "bot" is used, I pretty much discount the entire experience. A bot cannot "be more effective than good documentation with good search functionality." Messaging has potential as a channel, but "bots" are a misstep. Faking a personality makes it even worse. Pretending to understand the user is just utterly transparent. Messaging is good at collecting data, prompting response, reminding people and triggering actions like calls or clicks. None of the strengths are bot-based.

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago

The problem is not that your chatbot needs a personality. The problem is you implemented chatbot in the first place so you don't have to directly deal with customers.

wiz21c 9y ago
spot on! I remember Bezos showing an ugly table in his office, saying "we want the customers to know we spend money on what counts for them". I wonder how one could justify the bots...

acangiano 9y ago

In my course on chatbot building (shameless plug https://cognitiveclass.ai/courses/how-to-build-a-chatbot/ https://cognitiveclass.ai/courses/how-to-build-a-chatbot/) I cover some of these important design decisions and recommend creating a prompt that, while concise, removes the guesswork. Giving it a name and injecting personality is a good idea, but you should announce that the user is talking to a chatbot. In fact, two of the worst chatbot design flows, in my opinion, are: 1) Having the user try to figure out whether they are talking to a real person or a chatbot 2) Prompting the user to ask you anything (e.g., "Hi, how can I help you?") rather than guiding them on the scope.

xorgy 9y ago

A notable distinction is to be drawn between a personality (indefinite subject) and personality (adjective).

Steeeve 9y ago

Chatbots are like IVR systems and phone trees. It's a neat idea, but they are a pain in the ass, nobody likes them, and their benefit over a human is marginal in a best case scenario.

megy 9y ago
I think they are great, I can load them up in one window, keep working, respond when necessary, and get my problem solved. Much better than a phone call where I have to wait 30 minutes, and can't cut and paste.
- smt88 9y ago
  Are you confusing chat bots with live chat with a human?
vadimberman 9y ago
Unfortunately, the IVRs persisted. It's going to be more complex for chatbots though because they will have to compete with other automated solutions that are proven to work to some degree, including phone trees.

cproctor 9y ago

I feel bad for human customer service workers. It's already a job that demands a lot of emotional labor, without customers shouting "representative!" at them.