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> 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 w

> 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
  The reason the productivity of CLIs was often extolled is because throughout most of interactive computing's lifetime, CLIs and scripting have been intertwined. It was possible and commonplace to invoke parameter-oriented CLIs from another process, and use the CLI as a perfectly adequate API, while other interface paradigms like TUIs and GUIs never quite achieved such ease of programmatic manipulation.
  - yoz-y 8y ago
    CLIs are still vastly more productive for repetitive tasks and are quite passable as an API. For one-off things GUIs are usually better.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- larkeith 8y ago
  The key here, I believe, is that CLIs are still vastly more productive for purposes on which you're familiar with the pertinent commands; GUIs are generally better for discovery of new functionality and one-off tasks. Chatbots and NL interfaces in general are thus far a failure because they neither improve on these purposes nor provide a third, unique benefit. I could see them being useful for consolidation of services (instead of comparing eight puzza places' sites, go to one third-party pizza chatbot), but there's a very, very long way to go.

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
The reason the productivity of CLIs was often extolled is because throughout most of interactive computing's lifetime, CLIs and scripting have been intertwined. It was possible and commonplace to invoke parameter-oriented CLIs from another process, and use the CLI as a perfectly adequate API, while other interface paradigms like TUIs and GUIs never quite achieved such ease of programmatic manipulation.
- yoz-y 8y ago
  CLIs are still vastly more productive for repetitive tasks and are quite passable as an API. For one-off things GUIs are usually better.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
larkeith 8y ago
The key here, I believe, is that CLIs are still vastly more productive for purposes on which you're familiar with the pertinent commands; GUIs are generally better for discovery of new functionality and one-off tasks. Chatbots and NL interfaces in general are thus far a failure because they neither improve on these purposes nor provide a third, unique benefit. I could see them being useful for consolidation of services (instead of comparing eight puzza places' sites, go to one third-party pizza chatbot), but there's a very, very long way to go.