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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
by 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 agoI 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 agoOne 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?”