30 ms·

Chatbots were the next big thing: what happened?

• listentojohan 8y ago
  Thank god. Too often, they just work as a hindrance to get the help you need.
  • castlecrasher2 8y ago
    >Sorry, I didn't understand that.
    • dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
      It's a common scenario: you want to solve a problem by reading online help or contacting customer support and a window pops up "Hi it's Brian, can I help you?" Of course you know it's not Brian, it answers by spiting out some pieces of badly-prepared script, can't answer any specific question, and sooner or later you realize it's worse than useless as it only took your time you could use to actually solve the problem.
      • ealhad 8y ago
        >Sorry, I didn't understand that.
• untog 8y ago
  Users never wanted chatbots, really. But platforms wanted them because it meant yet another way to ensure content is locked away inside their platform. So, platforms shout to the high heavens, and everyone rushes to adopt they realise there is no audience.
  • bsbechtel 8y ago
    And customer service costs for companies could be reduced to basically zero.
• bpicolo 8y ago
  > An oversized assumption has been that apps are ‘over’, and would be replaced by bots That was never going to be the case for sufficiently complicated tasks with enough decisions to make. Same reason Google Home/Echo are awkward interfaces for almost anything other than getting music to start playing. GUIs on phones/desktop are tremendously productive because they're information rich and trivial to use. I can search, choose, customize, and purchase an item on Amazon in like 15-30 seconds flat. A bot isn't going to beat that for the general case.
  • weliketocode 8y ago
    I'm not so sure about never. Yeah, right now the home/echo/siri/etc seem completely worthless to me for all but the simplest tasks, but the idea is for the use cases to keep increasing. Tools do get better and better. Automation and AI will continue to improve. It's more a question of why chatbots haven't gotten there yet and what needs to be done differently.
    • bpicolo 8y ago
      Sure, my main thought is that it's an awkward interface for doing things that require choices specifically - it's slow for chatbots / voicebots to present available choices.
  • thanatropism 8y ago
    > other than getting music to start playing. Egg timers too. But stupidly, Siri only lets me have one simultaneous timer.
  • rahoulb 8y ago
    > GUIs on phones/desktop are tremendously productive They used to say that GUIs were toy interfaces and only CLIs could offer real productivity. I don't know where chatbots are going but I wouldn't expect the current state of the art to be anything like where they end up.
    • niftich 8y ago
• tartuffe78 8y ago
  When every tech journalism outfit is saying "<X> is the future." you can be sure it won't be.
  • gitgud 8y ago
    Kind of like when your taxi driver is giving you stock market advice. The most obviously useful technology, usually is only obvious in hindsight.
  • Angostura 8y ago
    There's lots of tech journalism that has fun pointing out how hilariously bad speech interfaces are.
• pjc50 8y ago
  I seem to remember these were the objections that were made at the time. The basic tech dates back to SHRDLU and ELIZA. In some ways this is similar to the partially-self-driving-car problem: if it's a mechanical interface where the human is in control it's fine, and if it's a hypothetical human-equivalent AI it's fine, but in the middle people forget to adapt to the limitations of the system. And the limitations are very severe as soon as you go outside the lines.
  • dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
    You see, it takes a huge amount of humility to admit that self-driving cars are possible, but we need several long years of supervised training to say we're actually there. Nobody would like that statement, people - including investors - want to have advanced tech here and now, they don't want vague and distant promises. That's why we deal with alpha and beta versions of everything now, including the partially-self-driving cars.
  • MarkMMullin 8y ago
    AsI recall, Terry Winograd later claimed SHRDLU was the beginning of the end of the strong AI trajectory, at least at that time. I believe he, or someone close, said the central weakness of the system was that when it failed, it did not have any understanding that it had failed, much less why. Seems this is the current SOTA in chatbots now, given the somewhat snarky examples in the article.
• tw1010 8y ago
  Perhaps even more worrying then that nothing came out of it: now all that money has flowed into the hands of short-term opportunistic thinkers who might amplify or incentivize even more hype driven companies in the next iteration of this mechanism. Sure, by no means are all of them bad apples (some just jumped on the bandwagon but will long term perhaps become the next Elon Musk), but I think a strong argument could be made that there are enough people of that ilk in the cohort to be worried.
  • jabgrabdthrow 8y ago
    If the chatbot revolution didn’t happen then did those people make a return? Or are you saying it’s the employees getting paid (who also piled onto the dad) who are now the ones with capital?
    • tw1010 8y ago
      The chatbot revolution didn't happen but there were plenty of companies sold, with founders who've now gone on to become investors (of the, I claim, possibly hype-jumping kind).
      • le-mark 8y ago
        Were they not all hype jumping before, as you say?
• gwbas1c 8y ago
  Whenever a company's phone is answered by an AI, it never does what I ask it to do. At that point I just push 0 and repeat "speak to a human." Why, oh why, would any rational person think that this kind of technology was about to suddenly take over everything? This is a typical example of groupthink delusions.
  • weiming 8y ago
    It's doubly-painful when some of these force you to speak out digits (like an account number) instead of entering them.
    • jenscow 8y ago
      whyyy???! It's not as though the tones are harder to recognise!
      • xenomachina 8y ago
        "Why don't you just tell me the name of the movie you've just selected?" But seriously, it's the same reason so many sites won't accept a credit card number with spaces in it. Someone writing from scratch the same thing that's been written a thousand times, but only thinking about the way they would use it (or the way they were told others would use it).
    • lozenge 8y ago
      In my experience they always accept dialled numbers.
      • epistasis 8y ago
        Oh, if only that had been my experience, I'd probably hate these things a lot less.
  • tenaciousDaniel 8y ago
    I do think that eventually these technologies will supersede trivial human transactions like customer service calls. The problem is that no one seems to understand the sheer difficulty of the problem. You have to create a machine that can realistically speak to a person, with all the nuance that entails. We're far further from that than AI marketers would lead us to believe.
• dwringer 8y ago
  On the other hand, I can think of at least two prominent elected officials (one at my state's level and one at the national level) who no longer speak in sentences that I can parse with my own mental model of English. The one from my state released a statement yesterday that seemed identical to the kind of thing one would get from a late '90s IRC chatbot that was trained on a big dataset of energy company press releases.
  • tw1010 8y ago
    Care to name them? I'd be curious to read what they've written.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • michaelbuckbee 8y ago
      I presume that the national level figure was Trump. Whose "nuclear sentence" has been much discussed: “Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.”
• korovyevski 8y ago
  Chatbots basically killed a startup I was working with a couple years ago. We had really nice apps, with a realistic exit strategy. Then came "The Pivot", and we were all working on chatbots. Didn't take long for me to leave that company, who went out of business not long after.
  • busterarm 8y ago
    The PTBs at my last place of employment wasted an enormous amount of cycles on chatbots, despite pleading that the available platforms to use all sucked.
  • anoncoward111 8y ago
    Interesting, was the picot made for a financial reason, a product/market fit reason, etc? Like, was the company in financial distress, and the first product wasn't doing well, so they said "I know! We'll make a chatbot!"?
  • freddie_mercury 8y ago
    Sounds like the company was dead anyway and you are mistaking causation. Companies that are "alive" don't pivot. Companies that are dying people to avoid death. That the company had to pivot suggests the owners decided the exit strategy wasn't actually realistic.
    • rspeer 8y ago
      > Companies that are "alive" don't pivot. They can pivot into being a company that is alive, though. Remember that Slack was a pivot from an online game.
      • pbhjpbhj 8y ago
        I did not know that, any good rendition of that story available online?
        • rspeer 8y ago
• wjoe 8y ago
  I always found the chatbot idea odd, it felt like a step backwards in terms of interaction. We started out with very basic input methods to computers, like punch cards. Then we moved onto a command line interface where you could type in words. Then we eventually got GUIs, graphics, websites, all sorts of complex and nuanced ways to interact with a computer. To go back to interfacing with a program using written language seemed like an odd step. It's never been the most efficient way of doing something, and it requires very advanced technology to accurately understand what people are trying to say, in whatever slang, shorthand, or bad spelling/grammar they use. Besides, it's not really dead, the tech just moved to "voice assistants" rather than "chatbots" - really just spoken word rather than written word. And I'm not convinced that's the "revolution" most people are expecting either. I'll stick to clicking buttons and typing things into my terminal.
  • jhbadger 8y ago
    Yes, it kind of reminds me of those old text adventures where you had to guess what the computer would understand >get sword I don't know what "sword" is.
    • megaman22 8y ago
      The awful thing is that the old Infocom parser was better at figuring out what you are saying than many of these sexy new NLP systems...
    • the_af 8y ago
      The parser in text adventures got really, REALLY advanced. Some of the current interactive fiction (as the genre is now called) would surprise you.
      • asteroidb612 8y ago
        Have any recommendations?
        • the_af 8y ago
• deegles 8y ago
  The two biggest flaws with building chatbots are a) the lack of good tools to express chat flows at a higher level (no, modeling it as a graph isn't good enough) and b) no Natural Language Generation that's good enough to trust in production. The first one leads to subpar bots that can't respond to most things, the second means humans have to fill the 'long-tail' of potential responses by hand, which is impossible.
  • tootie 8y ago
    I think the biggest flaw is chat is just a black hole of a UI. Until the machine is a full AI, you have to be able to put boundaries and parameters on expected inputs. Otherwise, it's like putting a casual user in front of a Linux terminal and asking them to use a website via curl. Unless you give them very visible paths to interaction, you're done. The fact is, we have had that kind of thing for ages and it's called IVR.
    • jonathankoren 8y ago
      One of the best insights we had at Ozlo was putting prompt bubbles on our UI. They served two main purposes. First they showed what type of questions you could ask; and second, they showed how to ask a question. They provided guard rails so to speak. If you don’t really strong hints about what you can do — and at least recognize intents you can’t handle — you’re screwed. There is always some asshole who sees “Hi, I can tell you about restaurants and entertainment. What are you looking to do?”, and answers “What’s the atomic weight of boron in nanofirkins?”
• dyeje 8y ago
  It was painfully obvious to anybody who's used conversational UI in their daily life that this was not going to happen.
• erikb 8y ago
  I think all people with some technical insight could've told you that 3 years ago. But still I'm happy the world finally realizes it. Now it only(!) takes another 5-10 years until my employer figures it out. Some of these bigger companies just start to bet on chat bots, but of course will fail at the same hurdles as everybody else.
• kyleperik 8y ago
  > On the input side, it’s easier and faster to click than it is to type. I disagree with this. It may be easier, but it is in no way faster. For those who don't use computers very often I can see it being slower. But for people who use computers on a daily basis, for mice to still be a commonly used input device is disappointing. With constant context switches, moving an object across the desk with you wrist, while keeping your fingers in the same place to click, and carefully putting the cursor just in the right place isn't nearly as fast as the same interface using typing. Or comfortable for that matter. I'm not saying I disagree with the article as a whole. EDIT: typo
  • pjc50 8y ago
    Unfortunately that's an argument for CLIs, not "chatbots".
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • mbowcutt 8y ago
    The GUI makes a computer easy to use, while the CLI makes a specific job quick to execute.
    • kyleperik 8y ago
      I think that a combination of GUI with a keyboard can be great too. I think CLIs have stuck around for so long for their consistency. You type something and press return. The web on the other end of a spectrum is full of surprises and therefore requires something to be able to handle it's unpredictability. Who knows what is really going to happen if I press Tab here? Will it really bring me to the next field or some random link in the other side of the page? I wouldn't doubt that once the web finally settled down from this hype, people will find ways to get the full potential out of both GUI and the keyboard in a consistent way. The web is the only reason I need a mouse during work anymore.
      • 8y ago
• dangrover 8y ago
  I called this like 2 years ago. I am still waiting for better apps. http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps.html http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps....
• dchuk 8y ago
  It’s just like why all voice interfaces are shitty: no one has any idea what the thing can or cannot do. They have a hidden user experience but the interface makes it feel like you’re talking to a human, but it’s so far from being a human. These interfaces are almost like a dark pattern because of how bad they are.
  • monkeynotes 8y ago
    This, this, this!
  • mrtksn 8y ago
    For me, these AI solutions always feel like I'm talking to a very stupid person who has no idea what's doing but has a booklet in possession that may or may not have the information that I'm looking for. Just give me that booklet and I will figure it out,geeez... What a frustration to deal with these smart machines. With Siri or Google Assistant, you soon figure out few things that this very low intelligence person can do(like telling the weather or setting an alarm) and stick with it. This is also why I'm excited about iOS12 with all these Siri shortcuts, instead of pretending that we are talking to a smart being let's have a concrete list of things that can do. On the other hand I do believe that these voice interfaces have some potential, just the technology is not there yet. Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17265683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17265683
    • collyw 8y ago
      Maybe we should rename it to artificial stupidity.
    • _jal 8y ago
      > very stupid person who has no idea what's doing but has a booklet in possession When Siri first hit the Iphone and I was trying to figure out if it was useful for me (no), I named my phone Searle[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Chinese_room_thought_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Chinese_room_thou...
      • 8y ago
• michaelbuckbee 8y ago
  I think it's equally wrong to just write off chatbots. They are a User Interface tool that works in some areas and doesn't in others (and recently has been dramatically misapplied). Chatbots work well as an input when your hands are otherwise occupied: - driving/directions (Google Maps telling you where to go) - cooking (reciting a recipe) They work well when you're requesting a specific thing: - "Play Everlasting Light by the Black Keys" - "Add Eggs to my shopping list" - Responding to Answers in Jeopardy: "What is Syracuse?" They can work as an alternative CTA in certain narrow areas where they function like a traditional "wizard". I've seen some ecommerce stats for things like "Are you shopping for a Fathers Day Gift? Does your dad like sports? Does your dad like gadgets? Want to see some popular gift ideas?" Where they don't work: - complex NLP dependencies - data entry - when there is an expectation set that you're talking to a human.
  • deanclatworthy 8y ago
    Did you even read the whole article? The author goes into this, how they work well in a limited domain etc. and where they don't work well.
    • michaelbuckbee 8y ago
      Yes, I did. What I was responding to was more the comments in the thread so far which mostly felt like dunking on how bad chatbots were, etc. And the article was overall hopeful about chatbots (presuming they got better NLP+AI), it didn't really get into examples, etc. that I was hoping to elicit from the HN audience.
  • wepple 8y ago
    I’m curious, are there any good Alexa/ghome apps that do recipes well As in, not just reciting but allowing me to ask how much of X is needed or what the next step is? That would be great
• m3kw9 8y ago
  News coming from a bot oriented site
• haylem 8y ago
  Actually, they may not be the "next big thing", but they're still a pretty huge deal. Especially for IT and ecommerce support. The support sector is estimated to a value of a few trillions of USD / year in the coming years, because of the progressive shift of large cohorts of customers to the cloud. The point is not to have chat-bots handle all cases, but if they can handle 80% of cases, which are generally trivial, then it'll good enough. Of course I hate talking to a bot just like anyone else, and being cornered into a dead-end discussion with one, or to be in an infinite loop, or in a situation where the bot has no answer and does not offer another path to resolution. But, from a business perspective, it's a rather sound approach to have people go through a bot first rather than have every single complaint clog an inbox. It doesn't scale so well.
  • pidg 8y ago
    HR support within organisations, too. I'm aware of some large organistaions currently investing in chatbots right now to help people find out how many vacation days they have left, find policies relating to their job etc. Though this issue might equally be resolved by intranet search engines no longer being painfully bad (e.g. ones powered by Microsoft Graph).
    • megaman22 8y ago
      Why does that need to be a chatbot, though? That seems like it should be something that could be a trivial CRUD website, with far less complexity.
    • Bucephalus355 8y ago
      Larry Ellison actually did a demo of an HR support chat bot at OpenWorld 2016 a few years ago. He used the chatbot to ask what his 2016 salary was going to be after taxes :/
  • ghaff 8y ago
    And they're often essentially an alternative for a first-level support person who is reading off a script and may not speak English very well. So even if chatbots are a fairly sucky experience most of the time, so is frontline support a lot of the time.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  Aren't they alive and well on Twitter?
  • fenwick67 8y ago
    I think what you're referring to are distinct from chatbots. Chatbots are meant to take input from a user and do a wide variety of tasks like a customer service representative would do, Twitter bots usually do just one thing.
• niftich 8y ago
  With the chatbot hype, there was a healthy number of skeptics throughout: people who wondered about the technical realities of delivering satisfying UX, ones who worried about unanswered questions about business models, and ones who figured out that this future would be most beneficial to gatekeeper-platforms who'd then act as discovery facilitators for users to select from among competing bots, rather than for botmakers themselves. It's no accident that Amazon and Google are currently leading in the consumer voice assistant market: they had large, pre-existing base of users and enough intrinsic first-party functionality to bootstrap their assistants into rudimentary usefulness, but then they built platforms where third-parties could compete for users the same way it happened for apps. In the app boom, aside from a few runaway hits, the only ones who reliably got rich were the platform-owners.
• zoloff1 8y ago
  Hi Seriously you suck! I’ll get that for you, just wait for me to not get it right.
• osrec 8y ago
  Having a chat with someone can be enlightening because the conversation can be engaging, can grow organically and the ensuing organic path can lead to insight. Chatbots, to me, just don't feel very organic - it's very much a request/response paradigm, often with a limited set of useful responses (perhaps I have just encountered the basic ones). If that's all we're getting, I'd much rather just hit buttons on a screen, than type an entire question in the hope that the bot understands it (when it doesn't, it's just an annoying guessing game). Plus, as other comments have mentioned, it's very hard to see what the bot is actually capable of. With a good screen based UI, the capabilities are much more obvious. If it's not fit for your purpose, you can just quickly move on.
• marban 8y ago
  First thing I do when I encounter a chatbot is to type 'Live Agent'
• lazyjones 8y ago
  It quickly became obvious that they were the most annoying and pointless UI feature since Clippy.
• kumarvvr 8y ago
  They flunked the Turing test. In a serious vein, they were more of an annoyance than help. Similar to the Paper Clip from Microsoft. (Sorry, don't remember the name)
  • pg_bot 8y ago
    Office Assistant aka Clippit aka Clippy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant
• 0x445442 8y ago
  IMHO the thing to get excited about is the potential for a somewhat ubiquitous UI to get my stuff done; not the NPL. Hopefully NPL will continue to improve and be leveraged more in the UI. But right now, the prospect of ditching the seemingly infinite number of GUIs I have to deal with between the web and mobile apps for tasks/bots in the messaging platform of my choice is what's peeked my interest.
  • wmeredith 8y ago
    I agree completely. Side note: It's "piqued" my interest... http://www.dictionary.com/e/pique-peak-peek/ http://www.dictionary.com/e/pique-peak-peek/
• jacksmith21006 8y ago
  The best one I have seen is going to start beta testing later this summer. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bd1mEm2Fy08 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bd1mEm2Fy08 Google Duplex Demo from Google IO 2018 - YouTube
• k_vi 8y ago
  I actively use chatbots on Telegram, but not so much on messenger. Telegram bots are predictable compared to messenger which relies heavily on NLP.
• clevergadget 8y ago
  The people that I know that heavily use chatbots are teens on discord and they use them a lot. They are more versatile than the old bots on irc, use them to play games, stream audio, images, access wikipedia... one bot we use actively translates between different languages across different channels. And they are popular! I think this is a case where the media sees possibility but adoption takes time.
  • ealhad 8y ago
    Sure, but those are usually not chatbots per se, but rather simple commands. The Wikipedia bot, for example, only performs a search on the website (and is less useful than the actual search when it does not directly find a page).
    • clevergadget 8y ago
      Oh, I guess since I was interacting with a bot in a chat I got confused. So in this case I guess it's just kids continuing their time honored tradition of mirc style bots...
• eurticket 8y ago
  For the longest time chat bots were a nuance, if you didn't need it it was there and if you did need it, it was there and it would take all day. Those unnecessary pauses to make it seem more human is such a waste of time.
• rehemiau 8y ago
  they just weren't
• olavgg 8y ago
  Disclaimer, I work for a chatbot startup that is doing really well in the Nordics. In two years we have grown from 3 employees to almost 100. Chatbots are a real big thing, our business is stronger than ever, end-users and our customers are engaged in this! We solve real business problems, we integrate the chatbot with existing business systems. With this is mind, chatbots are not perfect, but most end-users are forgiving and accept this. Chatbots are not a fad, its a real thing, and you will only see more of them in the coming years.
  • joliv 8y ago
    How does your chatbot startup address the issues with chatbots that have been raised in the article and in these comments? And how is it better than other GUIs?
  • darzu 8y ago
    Out of genuine curiosity, what real business problems do chatbots solve? The only ones I encounter are "customer support" bots, but I'm wondering if there are other uses that businesses and customers find value in.
    • jasonmaydie 8y ago
      that's probably the industry where the original poster works in. If 80% of interactions are mundane and repetitive and can be done by a bot businesses will go for it to cut down on costs. The other 20% can be dealt with by a human if need be. I don't think 100% is/was the goal at all.
    • conradfr 8y ago
      I worked at an ISP years ago and they had a chatbot which prevented a lot of support calls, therefore saved a lot of money. And there was no AI, ML or anything, just basic database fulltext searches and tree-based questions and answers.
    • olavgg 8y ago
      Good question! Some things a chatbot excels at: Finding information quickly: no menus, no clicking around, no more searching. Customer facing chatbots are one alternative, but many of our clients also have internal chatbots for either HR stuff, or for finding internal information. One good example we see is onboarding new employees who benefit from a chatbot as they ask a lot of questions. Also they are not afraid of asking too many questions as they no longer fear that they are nagging nor asking "dumb questions". Automating processes: for example filling out the insurance form. Or filling out tax returns. Placing an order, getting status of an order. There are also a lot of HR tasks that gets automated. How many days of vacation there is left, business travel, arranging meetings, company benefits and so on. Think about it this way, a chatbot is a very advanced full text search engine that excels at filtering out most of the noise. That is also why they have another name, virtual assistants.
• EmilyHealth 8y ago
  http://everydayhappy7.com/2018/01/26/every-couple-things-relationship-last-long/ http://everydayhappy7.com/2018/01/26/every-couple-things-rel...
• DannyB2 8y ago
  Like self driving cars freeing humans from the tedium of driving while they could be doing productive things; applying AI to chatbots could free humans from ever having to chat online. Ever. Imagine how humans could do more useful and productive things. More time for study and contemplation. AI powered chatbots could relieve us from the burden of ever having to chat online.
• megaman22 8y ago
  The typical thing where a seemingly cool technology that is really hard to do correctly outside of a few toy examples gets overhyped.
• madeofpalk 8y ago
  'Next big things' are never the next big thing. What happened with Chatbots was the result of some very very poor 'ui translation' from Asian apps. The product designers and managers of the western world looked at 'mega chat apps' like WeChat and Line that have all these built in apps and interfaces and tried to replicate that. Instead somehow they thought they were textual chat interfaces (buy plane tickets in natural language) when in reality they all had their own GUI with buttons and things to press. Then all the businesses and agencies and consultants that thought they could cash in on this opportunity saw it and started pushing it even harder. There was never any real user problem that this was solving - just businesses trying to cash in.
  • darzu 8y ago
    > 'Next big things' are never the next big thing Counterpoints: web, mobile, cloud
    • Bucephalus355 8y ago
      Countercounterpoint: cloning, the semantic web, and fog computing
      • larkeith 8y ago
        That's not really a counterargument when the original claim was "never" and parent provided examples of times it did occur.
    • madeofpalk 8y ago
      Arguably, these things already had significant traction before they became 'big' properly. iPhone had I think quite a bit of a slow crawl into shaping the mobile landscape, and then there were all the precursor smartphones before that. AWS existed before THE CLOUD being being screamed by gurus, and really, 'The Cloud' has never really amounted to much more than the continuation of AWS EC2. They were never the next big thing - one night we woke up and they were already the current big thing. Definitely the smart people could sense that it was happening, but there weren't medium articles about it :)
• matte_black 8y ago
  Chatbots are an infantilization. Just give me a list of commands I can type straight in and quit with the fake human bit. Chatbots are basically command lines with some guidance for non expert users. Convenient when you don’t want to build a bunch of custom GUI for new features but often gives a worse user experience when the commands are dreadfully buried in long winded conversations.
• jbuild 8y ago
  I think we set the goals way to high. It seems like everyone expected "chatbots" to be in their final form right away. Currently, the best "chatbots" aren't really chatbots, but act of as sort of human backed, virtual assistant in a narrow but widening domain. For example, real estate. Most real estate companies have an insides sales agents that does lead qualification, sets appointments, etc. There's a company in the space doing this now and judging from their website, they are doing alright. https://structurely.com https://structurely.com I don't see one mention of "chatbot" on their page, it's always virtual assistant. Even just checking out their marketing material it looks pretty compelling. https://research.structurely.com/customers https://research.structurely.com/customers
  • njoens 8y ago
    Im the CEO @ Structurely. We made a deliberate decision not to call ourselves a chatbot, as the stigma around them is poor and didn't want to get lumped into that category. We decided that an A.I. assistant is more aligned with our product - which is backed by humans - but a very vast majority of our conversations are handled entirely by A.I. only. Every conversation here was 100% A.I. https://research.structurely.com/customers https://research.structurely.com/customers Good chatbot companies have to deliberately not call themselves chatbots. X.ai is another good example who calls their "chatbots" A.I. assistants on purpose.
• jmull 8y ago
  Well, any and every promising new thing gets overhyped. (because the press, and experts -- whether real or just self-claimed -- and enthusiasts have plenty of incentives to hype new things and few reasons not to) But that's independent of whether or not the new thing actually has merit. Even when the new thing really is the next big thing, the hype almost invariably runs far ahead of schedule. Personally, I think the jury is still out on chatbots.
• neya 8y ago
  For me, Chatbots felt like almost a violation of my privacy. Many marketing industry related sites would get your permission to send you an eBook, but would slowly after a couple of days drop you a random message about an upsell to their event/conference/webinar/coaching (some random high ticket value item) and it's terrible than email spam because email is not intrusive, but chatbots are VERY intrusive. Suddenly, my phone would buzz, my chrome would send me a notification and my watch would vibrate all at the same time only to find out that this shitty marketing firm had sent me something I don't care about. And the worst ones are the ones that keep sending you stuff with no way to opt out unless you resort to blocking them. These should be made illegal. Another case study - I worked with a large pizza chain to implement chatbots onto their site. In the end, I (although I knew I'd lose money) told them that their basic add to cart, checkout experience on their e-commerce site was far better than a chatbot asking you 101 questions to make a fg pizza. I didn't advice them based on just intuition, we actually setup Google analytics and saw that the conversion rates were far better on the E-Commerce site and that it was impossible for the IT team to keep up with the marketing team that kept running promotions which led to tons of edge cases for their ordering flow. So, another example of great technology, great potential, but destroyed by greedy marketers, poor implementations and businesses that simply want to ruin an otherwise perfectly customer work flow.
  • mikesabat 8y ago
    To your first point, Facebook has clear policy against sending a marketing message more than 24 hours after a user messages in. They just haven't been enforcing it. You can definitely report them in the app. With SMS, in the US, it is illegal if a company is sending unwanted texts. Covered in the TCPA - Telephone Consumer Protection Act ~2015. Any legitimate provider will automatically opt you out of the campaign if you reply STOP. You can also copy the text and forward it to the number that spells SPAM (7726). They will send a bounceback and ask you what number sent the message. It's super cludgy, but the carriers do seem to act on complaints, although it can happen slowly.
• whoisstan 8y ago
  I agree with the article in general when it comes to NLP, AI and the dull hype machine. But in certain domains well understood usage patterns in conversational interfaces have advantages over custom UI's. Conversational interfaces with micro UX elements, maps buttons images selectors ..., rather then text input. They advantage is a universal timeline. Be it booking a table in restaurant, ordering a car, searching for an article, all conversational interface allow you to go back in time in a uniform well understood way. By scrolling back. Also your interaction history is searchable. No need to introduce a new UX element for that.
• zby 8y ago
  A part of the job of a call centre operator is negotiation with the client - this is hard to do with a bot. Even more so that this is kind of hidden spec, because companies don't want to admit that the role of the call centre is to make it hard to get something from the company while pretending to enabling it.
• new_age_garbage 8y ago
  Marketing garbage. The power of imagination unbounded by technical knowledge is a beautiful thing.
• ankurdhama 8y ago
  Hype is nothing but unrealistic optimism and thats what the current world of tech is filled with. People see staged demo and the media start throwing wild speculations. I never ever get excited by any demo and thats what I suggest to people but I guess the whole stupid idea of "be optimistic" is so rampant in current culture that people just blindly start following anything.
• EmilyHealth 8y ago
  http://everydayhappy7.com/2016/11/28/boost-internet-connection-speed-3-times-simple-trick/ http://everydayhappy7.com/2016/11/28/boost-internet-connecti...
• geekjock 8y ago
  I'm the creator of a Slack bot (Pull Reminders). I ended up building a web UI to configure the bot rather than using slash commands. The main reason for this was that Slack's platform is still evolving and I thought it'd be difficult to build an intuitive experience/interface within Slack. I've seen other Slack apps do a pretty good job at this though. Check out Eventbot or GitHub's official Slack app. It's been fun figuring out how to tackle UX problems like onboarding and engagement with Slack as the primary channel (versus email). I think chat is replacing email for many teams and so there's a big opportunity to rethink traditional workflows with a "chat first" user experience.
• pX0r 8y ago
  Yet another tech that nobody wants. They are the next worst thing after the "allow notifications" pop-up that every landing page seems to be infested with these days.
• bennetthi 8y ago
  I'm surprised how most chatbots focus on a 1:1 interaction with the user and the bot. I find chatbots most productive and novel when you allow the one bot to interact with a group of users. For example, deploy bots, where each user can have the bot deploy as well as they can see the chat history to get context on what has been deployed.
• cphoover 8y ago
  Recently built a chat/comms. system for my last company. I think key to this user experience is automatically routing to a human when AI systems cannot determine intent. Most cloud products in this space now provide some way to determine a confidence measure. IE the default should be human interaction, unless an intent is certain and a simple remedial action can be taken. This kind of workflow does have the ability to increase efficiency, and improve customer experience if done correctly, but it can easily go wrong. For example, with my bank, automated telephone banking is often much more efficient and quicker, than talking to a human CSR/Banker, for moving money around in my accounts.
• goombastic 8y ago
  I think the big issue really for me personally has been that I know that these interfaces are clunky/inaccurate and I don't want to be talking out loud and giving out info in public spaces etc. If there is an option to type, I got for it the first thing. Anything else feels gimmicky.
• cirgue 8y ago
  Chatbots solve the same problem as a search interface, but in a way that is lower bandwidth, less intuitive, and mildly personally insulting (the attitude from the company using the chatbot seems to be 'our users totally will not mind wasting time trying to interact with a really shitty set of canned responses'). The bigger question for me is 'why did anyone think this was a good idea?'
• mikesabat 8y ago
  1. "Chatbots" is horrible branding. Especially with the hype coming near the unfortunate timing of Russian bots interfering in the US election. 2. "Chatbot" makes me think the user is leading the conversation. The bot is interpreting what the human says, and then the bot tries to respond appropriately. This leads to customer service or operations (like calling a car) use cases. These specific use cases are hard to pilot, hard to get right and really tricky to show value to the user or the company. I've never seen a compelling problem/solution/use case for customer service chatbots. The math doesn't work. 3. Messaging is a real channel. It has advantages over phone calls, email, direct mail and even face to face conversations. Chatbots just aren't the right concept for the messaging channel. Dentist reminders work great for instance. 4. If you like thinking about this stuff, I do a podcast all about messaging. It's called The Chat Bubble, and this episode is a good place to start if you want to go deep on FB Messenger. http://thechatbubble.com/2017/11/edit-content-the-playbook-overview-the-4-top-marketing-use-cases-for-facebook-messenger/ http://thechatbubble.com/2017/11/edit-content-the-playbook-o...
  • ntsh34nteu09 8y ago
    I'm curious about #3. I've done some online chats with tech support where I was chatting with a real person, and I found them infuriating. First there was the very fake small talk the reps are required to do. Then there are the long pauses between when I input information and when they react to it because they're clearly chatting with 4 or more different people at the same time. Then they don't really read what I wrote carefully and give answers that make no sense or that I've already said don't work. Like anything, it depends on how the person on the other end acts, but in my experience, they're set up to make the interaction repulsive.
• jonathankoren 8y ago
  There are/were two main problems with chatbots. 1) There’s a huge consolidation around Siri, Alexa, and Google. No one wants to download an app, and you’re never going to win against wake words. 2) Doing the NLU and intent modeling is really hard to get right. All too often, someone comes along, thinks all they have to do skis throw together some regexps or toss the neural net du jour over some text and it will all just work. It won’t. It doesn’t. It’s just really really embarrassing. Intelligent back off is a thing. Understanding when you don’t understand something is a thing. Conversation management is a thing. UX matters. Also, trying to fake chatbots with people, and then saying “We’ll just train up a model and get rid of those folks” was never going to work, because you’d always have to have people, because you set your bar at hard AI then. Sure, that’s a decent strategy of you already have a call center that you’re trying to cut costs on, but for a startup, that’s just hubris.
• mellamoyo 8y ago
  My city went to one to pay for water, trash pickup, etc. It's a horrible experience to use. It takes longer and is less efficient than just logging into a modern website and paying.
• muzani 8y ago
  I think for the most part, chatbots are just stupid. They're like the untrained outsourced call center employee, except that the untrained call center employee at least has 20 years of experience interacting with humans in a non laboratory environment. It's in the uncanny valley where it seems almost human like but a major turn off because it doesn't act like one. It's probably just better to have the bots act like robots instead of "chatting".
• floatingatoll 8y ago
  Chatbots have no ability to interpret unexpected responses, and are very infrequently trained correctly. My electric company has a good chatbot, because when I said: "The electric pole outside my apartment looks like it's going to fall over" It ended up using that sentence to determine that I should go to emergency on-call, which is all it needed to do; further parsing was irrelevant. But then I called Fedex this morning and told their chatbot: "My package has a delivery exception." And it simply couldn't wrap its head around the problem at all — apparently Fedex doesn't train it to recognize terms displayed to shippers! — and so I had to battle through the usual "operator, domestic, 1234" route. If you have a chatbot, be absolutely sure to train it on every word your company uses for official purposes. The electric company clearly recognizes "pole" + "falling" as an emergency, but Fedex doesn't recognize "exception" because their mindset is "which division of Fedex Multinational Conglomerocorp do you need", even though they directly asked "why are you calling".
  • JackCh 8y ago
    I bet the electric company probably takes all instances of "electric pole" to be a probable emergency report, since that is probably the most frequent reason for somebody to be mentioning an electric pole and it's safer to default to assuming an emergency. I bet if you said something like "This electric pole isn't good for the aesthetic of my neighborhood, please bury your wires." it would assume that to be an emergency too (or maybe mentioning buried wires would take you to the "call before you dig" department...)
    • floatingatoll 8y ago
      Yes! Precisely correct, and as it should be. If I’m calling to discuss an electric pole, no computer system is going to react properly, no matter how many phone tree options it has. Better to risk a false positive of an aesthetic complaint now and then, than to have someone give up and hang up and then their house burns down later.
  • ryandrake 8y ago
    Your last example reminds me of buying a computer through Dell a while back. I could know exactly which model computer I wanted, but if I called them up to order it, they would insist that I first choose between “Consumer,” “Small Business,” and “Enterprise” before even allowing me to tell them what I wanted. Then if I guessed wrong, it was: “Sorry, the Small Business division doesn’t sell that model computer, that’s only for Enterprise customers!” I don’t know if they still do this but it was ridiculous.
• curioussavage 8y ago
  Hah chatbots. What a joke that trend was... I’m just surprised the hype lasted as long as it did
• thewhitestguy 8y ago
  I think everyone has called their bank or cable company at least once or twice and found themselves lost in a Kafkaesque loop of not being able to get done what they needed and have subconsciously written 'bots' off as incapable of helping them perform a task, and/or an executive excuse to put tens of thousands of call center employees out of work. Just because it's on a website and the dialpad is replaced with words doesn't mean it's different. Whether or not anyone wants to admit it, the whole "talking to robots" thing... I mean, the world is already empty and lonely enough without adding another layer of "inexorability" to the processes we engage in, in order to accomplish pretty basic tasks.
• p3llin0r3 8y ago
  We've had a better alternative to "chatbots" for a long time, it's called a command line. All of this obsession over "natural language processing" is annoying to me. I have a Google home, and it can't do even the most basic things and struggles to understand whenever I tell it to do something. It would be nice if I could just talk to my Google home as if it was a command line, with very explicit and specific commands that do powerful things. "Google take a note. Do the laundry." "Google play spotify on the living room speaker" etc. Instead the interface is an unhelpful mess that doesn't know how to help me get it to do what I want. I feel that it is the same with chatbots. Stop trying to process natural language, and give me a command prompt with good documentation and user on-boarding.
  • ryandrake 8y ago
    Actually I could see chatbots being useful if they behaved more like command line applications, with functionality known ahead of time and a language model that doesn’t change. Then I could just prepare a script and do something like: cat cancel_service.script | /use/bin/comcast_dialer and let the bot talk to my script and execute the needed task.
• krmmalik 8y ago
  I'm one that's not easily swayed by hype usually. I haven't jumped on the crypto bandwagon even, but I was working on a project midway through last year. It was a concept that would help people over come anxiety and depression so they could self-actualise and live a better life. The thing with many people -- from out experience -- was that they don't necessarily always want to speak to a professional but they do want to share what they're feeling with someone they can trust. That's often a friend, but unfortunately friends aren't always in the best place to advise and sometimes inadvertently can make the situation worse. So we decided to build a bot that was anonymous enough to create enough abstraction but friendly enough to help. The content was driven by experts in the field. Anyway. The whole concept just kept failing. We could barely get people past the first stage of questions. We tried so many different platforms, we did so many user studies and we kept trying to iterate but it just kept failing and all this time I did wonder in the back of my head if an app would have been a better idea. Now I know it would have probably at least been a better idea than a bot.
• intrasight 8y ago
  The discussions here (at least what I've read so far) have been about customer service bots. That's not where chatbots are going to be fun and interesting. Fun and interesting is the "expert in your ear" that we'll soon have.
• averageweather 8y ago
  David Cancel will probably still sell yet another company for 7+ figures eg https://www.drift.com/ https://www.drift.com/
• Myrmornis 8y ago
  Chatbots represent an extremely and unnecessarily pessimistic view of humanity. We are interfacing with a machine, that has a certain API. Now, we have two choices: (1) Assume humans are too stupid to be able to adapt their communication and learn something about what that API is capable of and what commands it understands. (2) Credit humans with the ability to do it; perhaps even evolve their communication abilities a little to go along with this brave new world populated by AIs. No intelligent human wants to talk to an API in natural language when they have some idea of the capabilities of that API and the commands it understands.
• LyalinDotCom 8y ago
  Chatbots were always a technology looking for a problem to solve and lets face it those of us reading HN knows exactly how that always turns out. There will be lots of chat bots in our future and already are but there is nothing "big" about it.
• elvirs 8y ago
  every 2-3 years a certain buzzword gets hot among silicon valley circles to be on its way to become the next big thing. usually after it mostly dies down in less than a year another buzzword will be propelled to the top. thats how silicon valley works, thats how they keep investor money flowing into the industry.
• megamindbrian2 8y ago
  "humans like talking to other humans" lmftfy, should be "humans don't like talking to computers all that much"
• docmars 8y ago
  They're awkward, and they often don't do what you expected or hoped. I think millennials especially are used to getting things done themselves since they're so accustomed to UIs that walk them through getting tasks done. There's a sense of finer control in user interfaces that chatbots have a hard time solving for.
• notadoc 8y ago
  There just aren't compelling use cases yet, though eventually the technology will improve and they'll resurface. This happens frequently in tech. On a similar note, I suspect in another few years we'll be reading an article titled: > "AR was the next big thing: what happened?"
• chatmasta 8y ago
  Chatbots were never the “next big thing” by any measurable metric other than artificial hype created by the companies trying to create a new platform for extracting revenue and data from users. For this argument to make any sense, there would need to be data that showed growing usage of chatbots, followed by a plateau and then a drop off. I’m not sure what that data looks like, but I’m pretty sure there was never a high growth phase where users were actually interacting with the chatbots. It was all hype created by Facebook and a few idiotic VCs who wasted money on what they thought would be the “next App Store.” I, and many others, were saying around the time of this hype that chatbots would never become a category defining product, simply due to inherent usability flaws in their design that have been discussed ad nauseum. The only people surprised that chatbots failed to become the “next big thing” are the people who mistakenly thought they ever would be. This assumption was never grounded in any real data of user desires or real problems. Chatbots were then, and are now, a solution looking for a problem. I’m not surprised at all.
  • potatoblaster 8y ago
    Yeah - AI in general sucks balls.
  • hasbroslasher 8y ago
    I think there's a lot of hate in this thread for the bot concept. Yeah, most of these text-based bots are bad and useless. Expecting to chat with a computer over text and get meaningful results is a big request, and without the best of the best NLP researchers, you're not going to get anywhere. However, I do think there's some truth to this article - the rise of digital assistants in Google Home, Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, is, in a sense, the rise of the chat bot. You can text them and they'll do things. You can talk to them and they'll do things. You can even get them to schedule a haircut for you[0], as Google recently demonstrated. I think these bots are semantically identical to what we think of chat bots as doing. If you would've told me 3 or 4 years ago, that people would willingly let a "bot" into their home that listens to everything they say and talks back, I would've been skeptical, to say the least. Now, even my hippie roommate has one of these things. I still don't get it, but to claim that "bots are dead, long live humans" misses the mark about how fast speech to computer/computer to speech tech is evolving. Watch the video and be... amazed: [0]https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/8/17332070/google-assistant-makes-phone-call-demo-duplex-io-2018 https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/8/17332070/google-assistant-... So yeah, the idiot VCs missed the mark - this isn't going to be a consumer revolution, led by a few scrappy start ups, one-man teams, and dreamers. It's a revolution in data collection, human-computer interaction, and AI that's already been taking place behind the scenes at Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon for years, and will continue to as long as they hold the tech world's best AI talent.
• acct1771 8y ago
  Multiple bots were accused of racism, surely one reason for pumping the brakes.
• tjpaudio 8y ago
  This is crazy, people actually believed chatbots were going to catch on? My employer developed chat bots, but only so we could grab the associated PR from a few press releases to ride the hype. We knew no one was going to use them.
• ourcat 8y ago
  Nobody likes being duped by a non-human when you're looking for help. Rather like nobody likes to hear a recording down a phone line.
• selljamhere 8y ago
  In perfect timing, Bank of America released Erica, "your virtual financial assistant." https://promo.bankofamerica.com/erica/ https://promo.bankofamerica.com/erica/
• funwie 8y ago
  Airplane is not a bird Ship not a fish Car not a horse .... Computer is not a smarter human AI will never have human intelligence Chatbots will never be humans ... These and many other inventions are useful. They extend human capabilities. But will never be humans, unless we create a human (as opposed to giving birth).
• pweissbrod 8y ago
  I for one would LOVE to try a spoken UI for an email client. My thinking has always been that compromising sacrificing plain english with a more strict/limited set of mnemonic keywords would introduce a learning curve but with a bigger payoff in reducing confusion. Also emails delivered from this sort of interface need some means of indication that they were a spoken format, not typed such that the reader properly understands the context. To me, a verbal UI seems attainable by lowering the bar of what we expect from the AI. Lower the need for AI to interpret your requests from general english to limited keywords. Allow for an adjustable vocabulary for spoken word recognition to accomodate a smaller dictionary with less mistypings. Make it clear the produced content is dictated and not hand-written quality
• curo 8y ago
  Chat bot was terrible UX to begin with, because while you're at the screen, why not have a visual interface to show you all your options? Voice interfaces hold the promise of releasing us from the tyranny of screen time. I imagine walking the dog and replying to emails with my headphones. Might seem silly now, but would love that. NLP/NLG just isn't there.
• sriku 8y ago
  With most advanced interfaces or tech, people adapt their interactions to the tool as well. If the tool is capable of evolution, then there is perhaps an equilibrium point where people can be productive with the tool in an idiosyncratic way. This doesn't seem to be considered by people proposing AI agents. "Enactive cognition" - where cognition is compared to the way a cell and its environment mutually define the boundary between each other - is perhaps the model to pay attention to here.
• mnm1 8y ago
  Do you really have to ask? This AI merry-go-round has been spinning for decades now. I can't imagine people don't know the drill by now. We've all been riding this around, some of us our entire lives. The people who thought this was going to be the next big thing were just the latest fools to be fooled by this merry-go-round into thinking that AI is once again, just barely out of reach and reachable within a few years. As usual, they are proven wrong again and again because AI is so far from being useful for such tasks like having a conversation with humans. The bottom line is AI isn't there yet and probably won't be the next time the hype rolls around. Or the time after that. Or the time after that ... I should just write a loop here that likely won't break in our lifetimes or possibly anyone's.
• l4chong 8y ago
  conversation ui developer here and I know I might be biased. For sure there is a hype. People seems to think that chatbot/voice assistant will be the new platform. But really chatbot/voice assistant are meant to augment the current platforms. We can already see this with voice assistant integrated to mobile devices and in the near future VR's and robots. It will be interesting how it works out once everything gets standardized.
• sethammons 8y ago
  Chatbots, just like Alexa, OK Google, and Siri, are just terrible. Last night, "Alexa, show me new releases." Nothing. "Alexa, show me new movies." Nothing. "Alexa, what's new." "Today's news from NPR....". Damnit. In the time I spent trying to discover the hidden menu of voice control, I could have manually gone through known menus including typing with arrow keys.
  • anderber 8y ago
    I've found Alexa to be much, much worse than Google Assistant.
• techsin101 8y ago
  Just like many other here, I feel very smart now :D. My friend was all neck deep into hype. Yet never could explain how would he train the chatbot to learn all the facts about the business(es). And in end all chatbot could do is act like decision tree with some NLP to extent it could understand few variations. Which is great but very few limited business use cases, and poor use case for support unless you want your users to hate you.
• debt 8y ago
  The AI winter is upon us and its first casualty is the chat bot. After all, if AI is as ubiquitous and threatening as many are claiming, then why has the literal least complex implementation of it, a chat bot, failed completely?
• jaequery 8y ago
  I hate talking to a bot in general.
• kerng 8y ago
  Depends how you look at it, Siri, Cortana, Alexa,.. all are chatbots and they all are doing pretty well.
• CM30 8y ago
  Probably people realised that in many cases, a chatbot simply wasn't a good choice of interface for the product/service they were building. Yes, they can work well in some cases, like with help desk type support, sales, general gimmickry on chat rooms and forums, etc. But in a lot of cases, a traditional UI (whether visual or command line focused) is simply far more usable than a bot, and people/companies realised that. As much as it may sound old fashioned, talking to everyone is not necessarily better than using a keyboard/mouse/controller/whatever, and having a bot that has to figure out what you want with far less sophistication than an actual person makes it even worse. The technology isn't there yet for chatbots to be as useful as they need to be, and in many cases, bots and chat interfaces and what not simply aren't a good solution for the problem at hand either.
• billybolton 8y ago
  Chatbots are the next big thing. The reason they didn't take over is because NLP and AI sucks (and "sucks" is putting it very lightly). Current AI is stuck in a rut, and they don't even realize it. True innovation in AI will come, and surprise everyone, and like all innovations before, it will come from cutting edge scientific research.
• cocktailpeanuts 8y ago
  Chatbots were the "next big thing" just like how "Blockchain but not Bitcoin" is supposed to be the next big thing. It's just bunch of people who look at existing phenomenon that's working (people use chat a lot on the phone), and then trying to turn it into something completely different (if people chat a lot, that probably means people want to buy stuff over chat a lot!), powered by dumb money (stupid VCs in case of "chatbots", and stupid ICO crowds in case of "blockchains") The reason these things don't work is because the people who build these things don't truly understand why something is working, because the original product they tried to replicate was not easy to understand. Same reason why it's so hard for dumb electronic companies to copy Apple. They think they know, but all they're copying is the superficial stuff, and they never work.
• jabagawee 8y ago
  To me, chatbots were nice because: - I could navigate them much faster than I could navigate a phone tree. - They were very accessible in the sense that I wouldn't have to install a custom app but instead use a platform that I am very likely to be on already. As a developer, this also allowed me to set up an unlock-my-door app for my friends much easier.
• pmart123 8y ago
  Chatbots are a feature, not a product. I'm not a customer, but I would say Lemonade seems to have successfully used a chat-style bot as the main feature to onboard new customers. To me, I see context-driven "Google" searches such as WolframAlpha as more valuable than holding a text-style conversation with a bot.
• tzahola 8y ago
  Chatbots are the Juicero of user interfaces.
• dboreham 8y ago
  Probably because you need real (strong) AI.
• white-flame 8y ago
  Any time a HN discussion gets as big as this, it's because he content is controversial and people are arguing. I don't think I've seen this many replies in unison. It's an amazing testament to how poorly these systems work at all levels.
• alexmorse 8y ago
  no, no they weren't
• 5DFractalTetris 8y ago
  I have someone to chat to and they're aren't a bot, and maybe they have like a lifetime of experiences from a nation I will never really know and cannot really imagine. It's cool and I have utmost respect for it. I've worked with humans from places where food is considered sacred and given away for free, places where the Volkswagen is almost the only auto to be found, and humans who have survived genocides. They are worth a premium, sirs!!
• orb_yt 8y ago
  There's a lot of discussion here about hype, but I think many are overlooking exactly why expectations were so high. Downloads of new mobile applications have been decreasing in growth steadily for years now[0]. Instead, user's spend more time inside their existing applications, particularly messenger applications. Take a look at just a few of their user bases: - Facebook Messenger - 1.2B+ [1] - Whatsapp - 1B+ [2] - Kik - 300m [3] Considering that writing a single bot that was capable to connecting to all of these platforms was trivial, it gave the developer access to a new and very significant user base. Add to this the fact that Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Slack and others, with a combined market cap in the trillions, were simultaneously contributing to the support of chatbots in one way or another. It's a classic rendition of the Hype Cycle[4]. We're probably somewhere in the "Trough of Disillusionment", but give it a few years and we'll get to the "Plateau of Productivity", and chatbots will probably make their way to a more useful purpose. [0]: https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/29/forget-apps-now-the-bots-take-over/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/29/forget-apps-now-the-bots-t... [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/12/messenger/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/12/messenger/ [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/1/10889534/whats-app-1-billion-users-facebook-mark-zuckerberg https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/1/10889534/whats-app-1-billi... [3]: https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/11/kik-already-has-over-6000-bots-reaching-300-million-registered-users/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/11/kik-already-has-over-6000-... [4]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle#/media/File:Gartner_Hype_Cycle.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle#/media/File:Gartner...
• scottlocklin 8y ago
  I think the only way you could think this was "the next big thing" is if you never did M-x doctor in an emacs buffer. LSTMs do reasonable cocktail talk if you want someone to answer your emails for you as an agent, and expert systems shells are actually useful for navigating legal documents and insurance forms (with a ton of human intervention). Otherwise, it ain't really a problem that needs solving.
• kesor 8y ago
  Slack stopped promoting their "thing" as much as last year, which is why you don't hear much about chatbots anymore.
• throwawayqdhd 8y ago
  Chatbots were the next big thing before VR was the next big thing before 3D printing was the next big thing before... You get the point. Crypto is the next big thing right now and like all these "big things", it's going to fall flat on its face as well
• xg15 8y ago
  I wonder if, if someone released a study showing that using rainbow colours in your marketing emails increases your perceived humanness by 40%, we'd see a phase where all marketing emails come in bright rainbow colours and I could create a simple filter rule to get rid of them.
• dragondar 8y ago
  To my mind chatbots are the great way to improve your marketing strategy. For example, our company provides different AI data analysis API’s for businesses, such as multilingual summarization, news aggregation, sentiment analysis, data extraction and etc. We are using chatbot https://www.summarizebot.com https://www.summarizebot.com as a part of our marketing strategy. And this works. Potential clients in Slack and Facebook are using our chatbot and after getting interested in our SaaS solutions. The conversion rate in Slack is quit good since a lot of businesses are using it. The strategy is being successful since out potential leads are able to see and use our main technologies in the bot. Chatbot for us is like smart demo of our existing technologies and features.
• imagetic 8y ago
  I'm unable to recall a single instance in my life where an automated system was more useful than talking to a human or having great documentation. From phone directory systems to automated help-desk responses, I've spent more time in recent years trying to get around an automated hurdle to talk to a human than waiting on a forum response in 2004 or sitting on hold back in the days of 1-800 help numbers. Chatbots were a predictable failure. Maybe I'm just older now. Settled in my ways so to speak. But I've dedicated my professional life my tradecraft of media production and publishing. At some point the technology tools stopped focusing on improving life or solving the problem. - The first VR movement was WAY too premature. - 3D TV's were DOA. - 4k+ / High resolution is a drastically misused/misunderstood medium and technology. - The current VR movement just simply doesn't have a platform that can support the level of processing and bandwidth needed to be worthwhile. - Apple has lost it's way. - I don't even know what Google actually does now, but I cared more when the search engine was amazing. - There's too much media, not enough curation. - Blogs and personal websites were the golden age of great information - RIP copy editors - Social Media is a game of smoke and mirrors - WHO IS CLICKING ON ALL THESE ADS?!? Nobody I know, yet the big players are making billions? Are the ads worthless? Are we going to wake up one day to see the internet crashing and burning the same way cable television is? Don't get me started on newspapers. - AR is back? Why?!? - I'd love for RSS to make a comeback, if there was anything left to subscribe to. - AI seems to be the future but I've yet to be impressed. The things that are promising are far out of reach from everyday users that it just seems far far away at this point. - Fortnight seems to have hit the nail on the head.
• rajacombinator 8y ago
  Chatbots, like most tech buzzwords, were always a scam. The only question was if you (investor/exec/“researcher”) were dumb enough to fall for it.
• slifin 8y ago
  Feels like they moved to blockchain
• xtiansimon 8y ago
  This article sets chatbots as endangered, and then works very hard to reset their context. I'm don't work within an industry where chatbots were a solution. From this naive position, what are the exemplary examples of chatbots?
• ankit219 8y ago
  Chatbots can only work if they learn to communicate in the millennial language using emojis and acronyms - basically more urban dictionary than dictionary. The older generation, preferred talking to people over searching, or typing a message even if the talking meant they were on hold for 20 mins. Alexa solved for those with a voice based interface, as did google, and people realized that talking to a bot is better than typing. With the voice to text conversion equaling human capabilities, chatbots went down simply to be replaced by a newer and more easy to use technology. Only difference being that they did not get the time to be ubiquitous or become the next big thing as predicted. The evolution of the service, and CX was ultimately slower than what was expected and hence they are replaced/not popular anymore.