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Question to HN. How do you feel about chatbots? Every time I encounter one, I backtrack and search for a phone number or email or twitter or anything else. To
by kuzehanka 8y ago
Question to HN. How do you feel about chatbots?
Every time I encounter one, I backtrack and search for a phone number or email or twitter or anything else. To me, chat bots are an opaque interface on top of a flowchart with no discoverability. Might as well just give me the damn flowchart.
I feel like chatbots are an innovation in the field of cost reduction for businesses, but a huge step back in terms of customer experience. What are your opinions?
- dreen 8y agoYep, basically. We had a few chatbot products for some pretty popular media brands, they noted little to no engagement. Alexa, on the other hand, seems to get engaged a lot, even though in theory it suffers from the same problem.
- mlwhiz 8y agoI agree. They do reduce customer experience. Most of the websites that employ these are using it in some form of an IVR Anyways when I end up calling such sites I get stuck with IVR. And I like it better to type than pressing numbers on the phone and listening to that automated and slow voice.
- conanbatt 8y agoThats a massive selection bias! I've used chatbots multiple times. Its just that they are flow specific.
- dreen 8y agoDid I say I'm speaking for all applications using chatbots? No, I related a specific experience/product/company. Of course it's biased! Chatbots can be useful, but this just wasn't the case for our audience (which is very mainstream oriented)
- conanbatt 8y agoI referred particularly to the success of Alexa: people that buy Alexa choose to use it. I agree with the lukewarm results of chatbots in most applications.
- pavlov 8y agoIf I were Global Dictator of UX, I'd mandate that every chatbot accept an "eject" or "escape" command. This would take the user to a plain old HTML form with the information already filled out to the extent that was provided within the chat.
- LawnboyMax 8y agoI really enjoyed https://woebot.io/ https://woebot.io/ for a few months. I was really surprised at its depth when I kept on discovering new flows after weeks of interacting with it daily. But that kind of chatbot is surely an exception. And Andrew Ng is the chairman of WoeBot, so I expected it to be good quality.
- mlwhiz 8y agoIt seems good. Will check up on it
- 131012 8y agoThe big difference here is that the bot is the product. (An interesting one at that!) What I find utterly annoying is a chatbot popping on some software webpage, reducing my field of view and interrupting my progress toward the documentation/download/career/whatever section. In this case I find it an overly hyped widget that I absolutely do not need.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- karthikvellanki 8y agoThere are specific use cases for which chatbots are great. Lemonade insurance is great application of a chatbot. What could have been a traditional application form has been made significantly better by a contextual chatbot. It's also definitely better than talking on the phone. I guess the meta learning is, if the answers are discrete values and the follow up questions are contextual, chatbots can be great.
- PurpleRamen 8y agoMost Chatbots I know are just an interactive search for a website/documentation. If it works, good, saves the trip to google; if not, I can still ask the bot for other ways to communicate. Why bother with a human when when it just costs more time?
- ekovarski 8y agoTo me, chatbots are the next incarnation of IVRs. Their only purpose is to widen the gap between you and an actual human in a support context. And I wish people would stop saying their bots have AIs. I've had more meaningful conversations with a dog than a bot. :)