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Ding, ding, ding!!! I've been beating this drum for a few years now. The interesting thing about chat bots is the UI not natural language processing. I think p

Ding, ding, ding!!! I've been beating this drum for a few years now. The interesting thing about chat bots is the UI not natural language processing. I think people are completely overwhelmed by the massive lack of consistent UI the Web has brought us. I also think the more "apps" that could be brought into platforms like Telegram, the happier users would be. There's also evidence of this in China where 100's of millions of people use WeChat for a large percentage of their needs.

jstarfish 8y ago
Really? It seems that with the advent of Bootstrap and responsive design, website UIs are more consistent and generic than ever before. Every corporate landing page is a jumbotron/full-width image, followed by three columns of bullshit, followed by a few rows of random glyphicons and more vague nonsense to cross the minimum text SEO threshold, and a footer. The early internet was a much wilder place. Frames or no frames? Tables for layout or not? Dare we use an imagemap? Fuck it, let's do the whole thing in Flash. It was chaos. Now, one thing that has also come to pass is websites with straight up cryptic UIs. Buttons no longer have labels. We have hamburgers and hieroglyphs. I think that might be more of a driving frustration.
- 0x445442 8y ago
  I'd agree with you when you're talking about websites that are, for the most part static and just conveying information. But when you're talking about actual web applications designed to get work done I think things are wildly disjointed. If I were to show you the web apps I interact with regularly, both personally and professionally, you'd see what I'm talking about.
  - jstarfish 8y ago
    Fair enough. I had not considered apps :)
collinmanderson 8y ago
I realize it’s called “WeChat”, but isn’t it super popular because all of the mini UI-driven apps inside of it? I don’t get the impression that people really talking to bots much using that app. They’re either chatting with humans or interacting with UIs. http://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/ http://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/
- 0x445442 8y ago
  At the very least all those mini UIs are cornered into a more standardized system just from the limitations presented by the chat environment. On the other end, most of the functionality can be driven from textual commands the way SMS "apps" used to be. Of course the elephant in the room to this entire thread is advertising and analytics, which IMO is the biggest reason the web has devolved so badly. I mean it's much harder to generate revenue if you're just serving me textual content that I'm interested in.

jstarfish 8y ago

Really? It seems that with the advent of Bootstrap and responsive design, website UIs are more consistent and generic than ever before. Every corporate landing page is a jumbotron/full-width image, followed by three columns of bullshit, followed by a few rows of random glyphicons and more vague nonsense to cross the minimum text SEO threshold, and a footer. The early internet was a much wilder place. Frames or no frames? Tables for layout or not? Dare we use an imagemap? Fuck it, let's do the whole thing in Flash. It was chaos. Now, one thing that has also come to pass is websites with straight up cryptic UIs. Buttons no longer have labels. We have hamburgers and hieroglyphs. I think that might be more of a driving frustration.

0x445442 8y ago
I'd agree with you when you're talking about websites that are, for the most part static and just conveying information. But when you're talking about actual web applications designed to get work done I think things are wildly disjointed. If I were to show you the web apps I interact with regularly, both personally and professionally, you'd see what I'm talking about.
- jstarfish 8y ago
  Fair enough. I had not considered apps :)

collinmanderson 8y ago

I realize it’s called “WeChat”, but isn’t it super popular because all of the mini UI-driven apps inside of it? I don’t get the impression that people really talking to bots much using that app. They’re either chatting with humans or interacting with UIs. http://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/ http://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/

0x445442 8y ago
At the very least all those mini UIs are cornered into a more standardized system just from the limitations presented by the chat environment. On the other end, most of the functionality can be driven from textual commands the way SMS "apps" used to be. Of course the elephant in the room to this entire thread is advertising and analytics, which IMO is the biggest reason the web has devolved so badly. I mean it's much harder to generate revenue if you're just serving me textual content that I'm interested in.