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I think everyone is thinking about chatbots and conversational interfaces backwards. Consumers should be the ones building chatbots to talk to brands not vice

I think everyone is thinking about chatbots and conversational interfaces backwards. Consumers should be the ones building chatbots to talk to brands not vice versa. The brands can use NLP and AI to partially automate much of the conversation, but it needs to be consumer driven... too much of the promise of chatbots requires breaking down barriers and as long as brands control their own experience and every bot is siloed, the real pain of consumers and current ecommerce wont be solved... Too much of technology today is focused on optimizing businesses and ends up the end users. Online advertising is a protection racket where publishers steal and hold customers hostage and sell them to the highest bidder...all the middleware is optimized around grabbing your piece of the advertising pie without caring about the end users or the advertisers...in the meantime, its just driving up costs to deliver value... We need a buyer driven market...we need long term visionaries who stop optimizing to business revenue and cost savings and optimize to GROWING THE OVERALL MARKET!!! optimize to what really serves customers and advertisers instead of these short aighted plays solving problems the previous startup created... We wouldnt need facebook ads if our competitors werent reaching our customers on google and we wouldnt need content marketing if publishers actually tried to serve advertisers instead of just trying to drive up their costs... These companies are thinking about everything backwards imho.

lsc 9y ago
>Consumers should be the ones building chatbots to talk to brands not vice versa. There was a lot of sci-fi ish talk, back in the day, about 'agents' or 'smart personal agents' or thinks like that; where we'd all have a team of semi-intelligent bots that would go off and do things on our behalf. It's interesting that we kinda have some of this now, but as you say, it's reversed; the agents are owned by the company that is trying to sell us something, so rather than negotiating for us, they negotiate against us.
pmontra 9y ago
> Consumers should be the ones building chatbots to talk to brands not vice versa. I agree with your general feeling, because they should act like invisible friends, looking at us and doing everything we need, best of before we even ask. Unfortunately it looks as feasible as "consumers should be the ones building a search engine to index the internet". Impossible unless some company offers it to them as a service, best if at no (apparent) cost. My dream in the 90s before the web was to get an assistant running on my hardware at home, somehow getting info about the world and talking to me. After the web it become clear that the assistant would have to interface the web and after the mobile phone (think old Nokias) its interface would be that. After the smartphone there would be a camera, a microphone, GPS, other sensors that I could trust because they would be sending data to my hardware and my software, not to some company that wants to exploit me. Unfortunately I worked on something else (web development) which was more profitable to me and everybody else did the same. We have things like Own Cloud but no Own Alexa. What we'll get in the next year are better versions of centralized services like Google Now, Alexa and Siri. Centralized services that we can't trust to behave in our best interest.

lsc 9y ago

>Consumers should be the ones building chatbots to talk to brands not vice versa. There was a lot of sci-fi ish talk, back in the day, about 'agents' or 'smart personal agents' or thinks like that; where we'd all have a team of semi-intelligent bots that would go off and do things on our behalf. It's interesting that we kinda have some of this now, but as you say, it's reversed; the agents are owned by the company that is trying to sell us something, so rather than negotiating for us, they negotiate against us.

pmontra 9y ago

> Consumers should be the ones building chatbots to talk to brands not vice versa. I agree with your general feeling, because they should act like invisible friends, looking at us and doing everything we need, best of before we even ask. Unfortunately it looks as feasible as "consumers should be the ones building a search engine to index the internet". Impossible unless some company offers it to them as a service, best if at no (apparent) cost. My dream in the 90s before the web was to get an assistant running on my hardware at home, somehow getting info about the world and talking to me. After the web it become clear that the assistant would have to interface the web and after the mobile phone (think old Nokias) its interface would be that. After the smartphone there would be a camera, a microphone, GPS, other sensors that I could trust because they would be sending data to my hardware and my software, not to some company that wants to exploit me. Unfortunately I worked on something else (web development) which was more profitable to me and everybody else did the same. We have things like Own Cloud but no Own Alexa. What we'll get in the next year are better versions of centralized services like Google Now, Alexa and Siri. Centralized services that we can't trust to behave in our best interest.