24 ms·
My chatbot is dead – Why yours should probably be too
- detaro 6y ago> Chat bots work best where users already are. If your users are primarily spending time in messaging platforms where bots and micro-apps can be seamlessly embedded, great. Fully agreed with that. While for sure "boring" for many and not good as marketing tools, the best "chat bots" IMHO basically are inline commandline tools that help specific communities.
- Ennea 6y agoI'd just like to point out how absolutely terrible that simulated mouse cursor on that site is. Feels very sluggish and weird. Please don't do this.
- dheera 6y agoIt's also very alienating. Why is this even possible?
- p1necone 6y agoYou can get current cursor position, and you can render things at arbitrary positions on the screen. Making this not possible would probably unnecessarily restrict your ability to build even actually useful things. Although hiding the real mouse cursor probably shouldn't be allowed without a permission dialog imo.
- dheera 6y agoYep the following part is fine with me, it's hiding the mouse cursor that is alienating. I would have thought it to be OK for a website to pick from a few standard system cursors (pointer, hand, I-bar, move, resize, etc.) but not no cursor.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- corobo 6y agoIf this gets traction please remember to allow hiding cursor if the user has full screened something! -- person trying to watch a video without a lil pointer in the way
- dheera 6y agoOr maybe the browser should implement hiding the cursor after 10 seconds of inactivity if the user has full-screened something. If a website made your cursor disappear immediately upon full screen that would be freaky, as if you lost control of your machine, thus, I don't think the websites should have this capability.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- t0astbread 6y agoWhat about browser games (not necessarily fullscreen) that need to grab and hide your cursor to be playable?
- vincnetas 6y agoYes, but you can use custom cursor, including a fully transparent one.
- yoz-y 6y agoWeb now has full 3D engines running in it. You don’t want a mouse cursor flying around when playing Quake.
- shajznnckfke 6y agoThis site breaks other rules too. Zooming out doesn’t make the font smaller, but makes the column narrower while keeping the font the same size, reducing the amount of text per line (the opposite of what I wanted).
- netsharc 6y agoWanted to jump to the comments complain about this. Snark: Apparently anyone can call themselves UX/UI experts nowadays. I guess I shouldn't worry about getting qualifications and just slap that label onto my CV...
- tpxl 6y agoMy pet peeve these days is when people say UX when they mean UI. I understand it's connected, but it's not the same.
- draugadrotten 6y agoThis comment also shows this UX choice distracts from the message. Now we focus on that he's grabbing the mouse from us.
- tenryuu 6y agoYup, I didn't even bother to read the article. I went immediately to the comment section to complain. It's really weird that people actually spend hours and days on implementations like this because they and are seemingly the only people that actually find enjoyment in it. If you were to talk to your friends about it they would probably say "it's cool" but many of us are still going to say "Why?"
- BeniBoy 6y agoThat reminded me of this experiment [1]. Augment your CTR with simulated mouse cursor /s. But yes, the home page is unusable for me too.. [1]: https://javier.xyz/control-user-cursor/ https://javier.xyz/control-user-cursor/
- gmueckl 6y agoI can barely fathom that allowing this has even crossed browser developer's minds. This feature is just evil from the start and every browser feature, no matter how trivial or benign will eventually be abused.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago> This feature is just evil from the start and every browser feature, no matter how trivial or benign will eventually be abused. That's the problem, though. Motivated humans can weaponize anything. We spend too much time trying to stave off the impossible, instead of going after the abusers - which today often are the presumably legitimate businesses, as a lot of feature misuse became standard business practice.
- netsharc 6y agoI'm surprised it hasn't been. Someone should just implement this on an online store, so that your mouse doesn't appear to be over the "Buy now" button, but in actuality the click would register as clicking that button. Or better, the click would cast a vote for the candidate the developer prefers...
- 7786655 6y agoThis page works by hiding the mouse cursor and displaying an image that looks like it. So it's not like the browser developers deliberately added a feature to make this possible.
- mard 6y agoThe cursor in input field at the bottom is blinking too, making user think it's focused when in reality is not. It's quite disappointing that it took a Google UX design lead to come up with something like this.
- capableweb 6y agoDisappointing? At first, I was thinking that this designer was just a junior designer and they didn't know better, maybe learning how to implement designs so it's fine, we can't all be pros for day one. But now when I realize that this was made from someone at Google's UX team, it all makes sense. Interacting with this site feels exactly like interacting with the typical Google property, where all standards and expectations gets thrown out for something that probably looks pretty on the designers screen but is 80% off for everyone else.
- LukaD 6y agoThe site is an absolute usability nightmare. Why can't I have a scrollbar?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tenryuu 6y agoThis one's actually a bug https://twitter.com/azumbrunnen_/status/1318493410848890880 https://twitter.com/azumbrunnen_/status/1318493410848890880
- fucknugget 6y agoI was initially distracted by the cursor, thought it was horrible, then tried to read the text but realised I could barely focus on it give the ridiculous size. Just awful.
- metafunctor 6y agoLooks like it's trying to emulate how the cursor works on iPadOS. I can appreciate the experiment, and I think the execution here is quite good (doesn't feel sluggish at all to me). However, I agree that this just isn't something websites should do. On an iPad, the site shows it's own context sensitive cursor below the iPadOS cursor, for extra weirdness.
- hackerman123469 6y agoIt's very sluggish on a large monitor
- metafunctor 6y agoDoesn't seem to be about resolution — it works fine on my 5120 x 2880 monitor (macOS Catalina). I'd guess it's probably to do with hardware acceleration not being used, or something like that.
- Ennea 6y agoRather, no software re-implementation of a cursor will ever feel as fluid as the "hardware cursor". Might also be related to my screen refresh rate of 120 Hz in this case.
- tallanvor 6y agoYes, a lot of people tend to move the mouse down the screen as they're reading. Having the pointer highlighted and then turn into a cursor and keep following your pointer is extremely distracting. I really don't understand what the appeal is.
- theon144 6y agoYeah, I literally couldn't even read the article without switching to Reader Mode. For a UX professional, this sure is fancy but terrible UX.
- pier25 6y agoI agree. Feels super invasive. I just stopped reading after noticing this. It's almost as bad as websites customizing the CSS or scroll bars. Don't do that.
- Zaheer 6y agoI'm not sure why it took so long for people to recognize this. An overwhelming majority of chatbots I've used are utter rubbish and are better served through a regular interface (search, directory listing, etc). Everyone dreads call menus / phone trees - chatbots are largely the same except there are easier & better UX alternatives in an online medium.
- nikanj 6y agoBecause customers want to talk to a person, and executives don't want to pay for that person. Enter a slick salesman with a bogus "AI-based machine-learning customer service automation" spiel, and bob's your uncle
- chrisandchris 6y agoI had to call UPS because of a wrong delivery state a few weeks ago. I ended about in their automated phone system where you don‘t anymore press numbers but rather say what you would like. There‘s never an option to talk to a human. I ended up googling and found out a secret keyword to talk to an agent who one can directly say after choosing a language. I never have been connected faster to a human when calling a large companys hotline.
- matsemann 6y agoJust say shibboleet (jk)
- Ivoah 6y agohttps://xkcd.com/806/ https://xkcd.com/806/
- nikanj 6y agoMany of those systems are configured in a way that they connect you to a human if they can't figure out what you're saying. The audio from those calls is fed to a team of people who are responsible for teaching the system, so that the next model can be more accurate in directing calls. I once met someone who had been working that gig while in university. Apparently the vast majority of the recordings are boring and easy enough for a human to classify, but some are just people rattling off swear words, screaming, etc.
- _-___________-_ 6y agoWhy does my mouse cursor disappear when I move it over this website? It makes it virtually impossible to use...
- reificator 6y agoI can't get the page to load reliably enough to test, but I saw the same issue. Are you running the Dark Reader extension by chance? I think the author didn't test with Dark Reader, which is fair, but they override the cursor, which is not fair. Please don't do that, it's not as cool as you think it is and it breaks things for your users.
- _-___________-_ 6y agoNot running Dark Reader, but am using uMatrix
- bluu00 6y agocustom cursor; dark bg - dark cursor; so yea; see how the cursor transitions when on text by flipping sideways to blue; idk I thought its 'cute';
- _-___________-_ 6y agoThe cursor is completely invisible for me, whether over text or links or anywhere else
- bluu00 6y agooh yess. look at this, :root { ... cursor: none !important } html { ... cursor: none !important } and this, * { cursor: url(cursor.19bbb4e3.png), none !important [0] } #cursor { background: rgba(200, 200, 255, .2); transition-property: width, height, border-radius, transform; transition-timing-function: ease-out; transition-duration: .1s; pointer-events: none; transform: translate(-50%, -50%); border-radius: 100%; position: absolute; left: -1000px; z-index: 99999; width: 36px; height: 36px } [-1] : https://azumbrunnen.me/main.39afc03c.css https://azumbrunnen.me/main.39afc03c.css [0] : https://azumbrunnen.me/cursor.19bbb4e3.png https://azumbrunnen.me/cursor.19bbb4e3.png He kinda messed up, mayb?
- dheera 6y agoI absolutely despise those pop-up "Can I help you" boxes on product websites (usually Intercom). It completely disrupts my flow as a reader in trying to understand the product. That attention disruption got so bad I blocked Intercom and their ilk via injected CSS rules. I really want to take it a step further and write a plug in to interface a chat bot with the human on the other end and waste their time so sites begin to learn to stop using that BS.
- belzebalex 6y agoI thought like you in the past. I only installed the Crisp chatbox (with no popup) on my SaaS and was very surprised with the results: I got more contact from users through it than through Email or Telegram. I got a lot of feedback and was able to help many potential customers. As developers who never need help, we tend to forget that some people might do, and that a Chatbox that annoys us can help them.
- dheera 6y agoSure, I love chat support interfaces and use them all the time. If I want support, that is. But not when I hit your site for the first time and just getting acquainted with your product. I just want to see your product materials at my own pace in peace. If you want me to see something different, change those materials to whatever you want your first impression to be. But don't accost me with a "can i help you" before I have even had 2 minutes to read your product description. That's almost like if a grocery store employee greets you at the door and follows you around as you browse the fruit section asking "can I help you" -- I'd probably leave that grocery store pretty quickly. Popups of all kinds, I despise. There should NEVER be any unsolicited modals. That includes chat boxes, "please subscribe to our newsletter", GDPR warnings, and all of them. They all interrupt my attention flow severely. If you're lucky, I will inspect your DOM and will block your modal with injected CSS/JS rules, reload, and keep browsing your site. If you're unlucky, I'll leave and look for other competing sites that are a more pleasant experience. I have clicked out of several sites before that had a stupid "can i help you" Intercom popup. On a few of those occasions I actually replied "no go away" before leaving the site, hoping that they would take the feedback for the future.
- baxtr 6y agoChatbots are dead, long live chatbots! I firmly believe we are going through the “through of disillusionment” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle). We need to figure out ways to really bring value to people and not just raise money for the next AI based Chatbot system!
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoI'm not a user myself, but assistants (Alexa, Google's, Cortana, etc) are chatbots and seem to be quite in swing. Not as hyped as last year, but still.
- arkitaip 6y agoGoogle Assistant actually works, especially it's speech recognition that has been near flawless for me. I can totally see it becoming an integrated feature in future housing constructions.
- bobm_kite9 6y agoThis is exactly right - and that initial website was written during the "peak of inflated expectations" part. I still think that chatbots provide an entirely new way of interacting with software. We're very used to dividing our desktop up into windows, and giving each process it's own two-dimensional real estate. Conversation-oriented UI design fundamentally is different to that: you are escaping the 2D arrangement and allowing applications to collaborate with teams of people in a totally new way. Here is something I wrote about that: https://riskfirst.org/complexity/Betting-On-RPA https://riskfirst.org/complexity/Betting-On-RPA
- jackdh 6y agoMirror and easier reading experience: https://outline.com/W892Rx https://outline.com/W892Rx
- croes 6y agoThanks
- cblconfederate 6y agoI 'll happily watch those infuriating bot popups die an agonizing, excruciating and painful death.
- r0b05 6y agoIt is possible that we are not there yet. Sure, the current experience sucks. We need a few leaps in Conversational AI to make chatbots more usable. It will take some time but hopefully we will get there.
- egberts1 6y agoClippy, the snidely, automated helping paper clip.
- kebman 6y agoHey, anyone remember Microsoft Clippy? Yeah, that's who I always think of when I see one of those "helpful" pop-up chatbots...
- jansan 6y agoAccording to Wikipedia Clippy's German name was "Karl Klammer". I used MS Office at that time but luckily do not remember that absolutely cringeworthy name. Holy shit, what were they smoking at Microsoft in the early 2000s?
- rattyc 6y agoNot sure about your chatbot, but your bloody website is dead mate. Keeps timing out for me.
- premek 6y agoyour scrollbar is dead
- rawoke083600 6y agoOhh how I hate chatbots ! It's the digital version of the "automated phone guidance thing". The "press 1 for sales, press 2 for accounts, press 9 to kill yourself" ! I think many of the "smaller" websites has been sold a lie ! I see "silly/useless bots" that only makes the customer mad instead of helping him. Just to show I'm not all hate and brimstone :) I found adding a "manned whatsApp" to your website is gold !
- crispyporkbites 6y agoChatbots suck, because AI just isn't good enough or empowered enough to actually help in 99% of requests. ChatBOXES on the other hand are amazing, a few reasons why: - You can't accidentally hang up and have to re-dial and wait on hold - There's an incentive for the company to respond while the customer is there, because they might disappear at any moment (unlike email) - There's a record in writing - It works with people with poor language skills - No hold music & you can see where you are in the queue - Support teams can scale by handling multiple conversations at once and using copy/paste from scripts, terms etc. - You can include hyperlinks, screenshots etc. to make things super clear or open up other tools (e.g. screen share) - Contact details, email address etc. can't be misheard - No bad signal / fuzzy line - You can data mine the requests to figure out common requests and optimize for them Long live the chatbox!
- sebslomski 6y agoGreat read, Adrian! I've been following your work since you launched the UX Bear. To sum up my experience with chatbots: I've had deeper conversations with clippy than with most chatbots. Still, I strongly believe that guidance is needed online, especially in E-Commerce. That's why I've recently (in fact, we are signing our seed round later today) created Neocom [1], which merges the good parts about chatbots with real expert knowledge. [1] https://neocom.ai https://neocom.ai
- kleiba 6y agoLet's not forget: in the greater scheme of things, chatbots really are still in their infancy. For those old enough to remember, picture the computer interfaces of yesteryear - say, the 80s - and ask the people who had to work with them back then how many of them enjoyed the experience. And I'm not talking about computer scientists and the likes, I mean your average office worker. Fast forward to 2020, and you cannot throw a rock with closed eyes without hitting some kind of "computer". Smartphones, tablets, laptops, everywhere. There is not just one factor that made this change come about but a lot: arguably, computers are generally more useful today than they were back in the day, and this is part capability and part usability. Both seem to still lack quite a bit in today's chatbots. I think a big hurdle has already been taken, though, by turning to voice rather than typing as the primary input modality. This wasn't possible just a decade ago because automatic speech recognition just didn't work well enough. But there's still lots to be desired today. Using a conversational UI where a simple button or a few clicks would suffice is utterly useless. As is, say, having your bot read out to you a long list of movies when you ask "what's showing in the theater tonight"? Traditional GUIs are much superior here. No, voice based interactions shine when they are about complex matters. Stuff that is too difficult or too cumbersome to express with other means. Perhaps because there a lot of different options combined in your query. Or because some inference is required on the chatbot side. Or because it's not a single query at all but -- shock! -- an actual dialog that will get you to your goal. A small and completely made-up example: User: I'm meeting Dana for dinner at 7, and perhaps we'd like to go and see a movie afterwards. What's on tonight? System: Where are you having dinner? User: In the West End. System: Super Marvels is playing in the Broadway at 9. User: Oh, no, Dana hates super hero movies. System: I see. What does she like? User: I don't know - comedies, I guess. Thrillers, maybe. System: Well, the Broadway is also showing Dark Waters at 9. So, this is obviously your standard ticket purchasing scenario, and you can do this perfectly fine today using any standard form-based app or website. But the point is that you don't want to go through the hassle of setting all the right parameters, such as time, location, genre etc. by hand -- especially when you're not really sure about some of them. Compared to a dialog like the above, today's conversational UI's are very simplistic. We're still with at least one leg in the stone ages. But there is real potential here but there's also a real risk that we'll never get there because once conversational UIs get a bad rep, then it's over. Like with any technology, if it is over-hyped with respect to what it can actually deliver (currently), it won't last. I think that is what the author of the above article has experiences. High expectations, low delivery. I, for one, hope that we can hold on and that conversational UI's won't go the way of 3D TV (goodbye...) or VR (niche), but at this point, I wouldn't know which way to put my money on.
- gandutraveler 6y agoRelate to OP here. I also built a travel chat bot[1] (now dead) in early stages of chatbot boom. Initially it felt like conversational UX is so much better. But very soon I realized I myself was not using what I built. What we don't realize is how efficient we have become using websites through that navigating through chatbot UX definitely feels waste of time. [1] https://www.itnry.com https://www.itnry.com
- febin 6y agoI am an engineer at a profitable chatbot company (HelloTars). I can't entirely agree with the points mentioned in this article. Yes, a chatbot is not ready to replace human support. However, there are other areas where they show good results. We have been helping customers with lead generation chatbots for the last four years. What we have learnt is customers would instead engage with a chatbot than filling up lengthy forms. Because chatbot nudges users to give information. Also in websites where you have a lot of information to convey, ex: banks, mortgages, etc. again chatbot makes sense. Because it helps give information that's selective to the customer. And they don't have to struggle through a lot of information presented to them at once. We have customers who use our chatbot link directly on google ads. We have also noticed our customers maturing over time and demanding more functionalities on the chatbots. To summarize, no chatbots are not dead. They are only beginning. However, you need to narrow down on a specific problem and solve it.
- zeepzeep 6y ago> To summarize, no chatbots are not dead. They are only beginning. Yes, there will likely be more chatbots in the future. And yes, THEN they will be usable. But no, it's not a good user experience yet. If a website needs a chatbot they: - Didn't put enough effort in organizing the website - Don't want to spend money on real support - Hate their customers
- gk1 6y ago> - Don't want to spend money on real support Nothing wrong with this. You can say this about practically any company using software for anything. Not spending money on people is the point of enterprise software.
- PeterisP 6y agoThe thing is, if you look at the stats for questions of real support, the vast majority of those questions are things that did not ever need "real support" - no matter how much or little support you're offering, half or more of the questions they get can be answered even by a "bot" that simply enters your query in a search engine and returns the first answer. So there is always the temptation to save costs of your support with a pre-filter, so that your support can talk to people who actually have a question or problem that needs to be talked about. It's the equivalent of "have you tried turning it off and on again?". This question must be asked, because it actually resolves a substantial portion of the issues - but it does seem quite wasteful to employ people to whom 30% of the calls ends with asking that question. Or, for other scenarios, reading verbatim one of the top answers from your FAQ page.
- anotheryou 6y agoMost chatbots are just bad: either just trying to get your mail-address because no support person is online or being a convoluted menu in the tiniest window. It would be fair to rule those out and look at more conversational chatbots that provide good guidance through form filling, understand natural language and maybe are even hybrids that can be taken over by humans when they fail themselves. A simple form of the hybrids is some pre-processing. The bot says "hello" and "whats your problem" or identifies your account and than human support staff jumps right in to the action.
- not_a_moth 6y agoAs a builder of chatbots and "conversational AI", non-annoying human-like chatbots are at least 20 years away, and ML approaches have not resulted in any improvements over basic symbolic reasoning approaches.
- odomojuli 6y agoMy favorite chatbot experience lately has been support directing me to the chatbot, which then informs me that I am capable of resolving the issue of cancelling/refunding or making changes to my transaction. It just happens to be the case, that I ordered the wrong thing. Simple as that. As I travel to the appropriate link, there is none such ability or option. I relay the appropriate message to their customer service. Fast forward a day later, they were unable to reply to my message in time, they have already processed the order, and are actually begging me to accept the purchase because as a small company they are incapable of managing their customer service department. All in all, I felt bad that they would have lost a substantial amount on my cancellation or refund. But I can't help but feel the entire situation could have been avoided if they had eschewed the "benefit" of "automating" their customer service. I think a good reason Salesforce has been so successful is that they force users to abide by the one-reply system of following up on customers.
- arunaugustine 6y agoCan you please elaborate on Salesforce one-reply system? Never have used them but keen to understand how they do it better
- odomojuli 6y agoThey basically just force you to work within the pipeline of one-reply-per-person when following up on a customer in their CRM. Simple as that.
- DebtDeflation 6y ago>"The moment you create a chat bot is the moment you allow customers to have a conversation with your brand. Not with yourself, not with your friend, but with an uber entity—a symbol—that represents everything you and your team stand for. That’s not a step to be taken lightly." As opposed to a call center in an impoverished country staffed with subsistence wage workers with an average tenure in the job of something like 6 months or less? Companies talk a lot about CX and CRM until it's time to spend money on the front line workers who actually interact with the customers.
- Netcob 6y agoSome companies also have incredibly rigid scripts which manage to combine the worst from the worlds of chatbots and humans.
- rbreve 6y agoReplace mouse cursors is dead
- mlang23 6y agoI never understood that trend. Why is replacing badly structured content with low quality NLP an improvement to the user experience?
- kdtop 6y agoThe problem with chatbots is one of an unfulfilled promise, an unrealistic setting of user expectations. An empty Google search window doesn't pretend to be a human being -- although it is actually very powerful. Clippy, on the other hand, has a human face and pretends to be an intelligent agent, only to fail. So chatbots, when seeming to act like a human via natural language, are held in the user's mind to a higher standard. Siri, in my iPhone, seems to strike a better balance. It takes my spoken input and gives replies (albeit not great replies). But I never get the feeling that it is trying to carry on an extended conversation with me.
- thrav 6y agoThis is not true of all ChatBots. In fact, some companies outright discourage using theirs as such. USAA, for example, makes it abundantly clear that you’re talking to a robot, before beginning the conversation and provides multiple choice options for common support flows. I’m actually a big fan of theirs for things like travel notifications or ATM withdrawal limit increases.
- eloisius 6y agoPersonally, I despise these interfaces. It’s not “chat,” I’m being provided with option prompts and everything. Why squash it all into a linear, 1D chat dialog instead of just a regular web form to do a simple task like increase your withdraw limit?
- thrav 6y agoBecause the ChatBot squashes all those different pages and forms into one location. It takes the time and mental load of trying to locate features on the site or app off of me. Instead of navigating through 3 links to reach the form, having to search the newly loaded page each time, I answer 3 questions. In truth, I just type “ATM withdrawal limit” and the form begins, because it’s so obvious what I’m trying to do.
- eloisius 6y ago
- flarg 6y agoAll well and good - but NLP driven chat interfaces are still all the rage in enterprises and, from personal experience, they don't appreciate cheating with Eliza
- jsonne 6y agoFundamentally a chatbot solves an operators problem not a customers problem and thats why they fell out of style.
- whatch 6y ago(Not so patiently) waiting until banks and other service providers realise that
- moobsen 6y agoSo what you are saying is today's chatbots are useless? I agree in most cases, from my limited experience. But a chatbot which actually answers my questions would be great. I hope what we are seeing is the Through of Disillusionment[1] and soon will get support chatbots that are actually helpful. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle#/media/File:Gartner_Hype_Cycle.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle#/media/File:Gartner...
- code4tee 6y agoNot sure I’ve ever seen a chatbot that was actually useful. Not taking about things like Slack integrations where I can type commands to make things happen as that’s different. But actual chatbots have only ever left me with a lesser optinion of what ever company that was trying to force me to use their “AI assistant.”
- J-dawg 6y agoAround the peak of chatbot hype, someone described them as "an obfuscated command line". In my experience that's exactly what they are; you end up second-guessing the machine and thinking "what do I need to type to get where I need to be". It's like playing one of those old text based adventure games. I can't remember a single encounter with a chatbot where a good search interface wouldn't have got me there faster.
- fallingfrog 6y agoCan we kill automated phone answering systems too? They’re always a waste of time. I used to work as a customer service rep once, and apparently we had some kind of voice menu that people had to go through to get to us, but either they didn’t implement the connection to the humans or it broke at some point because we had no access to whatever they told it by the time they got to a human. They all had to give it their account numbers and whether they were placing an order, calling about a past order, etc, but all that info was just discarded before we picked up the phone. Because it’s just as fast for me to just say, “how can I help you” and listen to the answer as it would be to try to have the computer relay that to me secondhand from what the menu system picked up. It just wasted a few minutes of their time before it tossed them all to us anyway. I assume every customer service voice menu is the same. Maybe the management felt that the customers time is worthless since they don’t have to pay for it.
- amelius 6y agoThere should be a law that says that any "bot" should be identifiable as such by the user.
- AnonC 6y agoWhenever I see an unsolicited (they’re always unsolicited) popup that I haven’t yet blocked for chat, I repeatedly tell it “Stupid bot” and “Useless bot” a few times. Hopefully some human sees those messages and it lifts their spirits. Till date I haven’t seen one chatbot that has been really helpful. It’s like the Internet version of a phone tree where you struggle to get to a human who may be able to help.
- shkkmo 6y agoFunnily enough, chat bots are thriving on discord. The key is that those chat bots don't try to implement a conversational UI, they utilize specific commands and are an easy way to add features and automate administrative tasks.
- arcatech 6y agoI created a slightly different kind of bot for my website (https://dwayne.xyz/utils/bot https://dwayne.xyz/utils/bot). It started as a bot for Twitch (Twitch bots usually only respond to a list of commands that start with !) and then I started to add it to other parts of my site. First, into my IRC server, then into the 1 on 1 (+1?) video/text chat rooms I added. The base commands are things like !help, !about, !coin (simulates a coin toss), and then I added a little NLP on top to translate to one of those commands. I feel like that works a lot better than a general conversational bot that most likely isn't gonna respond in meaningful ways to most queries.
- rafaelvasco 6y agoI mostly ignore them now. Tried to use some before. All worthless. AI rudimentary at best.
- nullIsAnObject 6y agoThe biggest problem with chatbots is that getting conversations right is hard... and expensive. To make one actually helpful, it requires extensive knowledge not just about the potential topics that customers could ask about, but also linguistics, NLU/P/Q, scripting, and the diverse technical environments that these tools will be interacting with. With all the drag-and-drop chatbot creation tools out there now, companies are being sold on the idea that ANYONE can make these chats, and as such don't see the benefit of hiring an experienced professional whose sole job it is to make these things work well. Instead, their creation is being left to existing help desk/HR/doc employees that lack said in-depth cross-functional knowledge, with predictable results. Sparse NLU models are poorly constructed, background tasks are hacky and frequently broken, and the resulting chats are stilted and disjointed at best. Which is why they're so frustrating. The tools to make good chatbots are complex, but they exist, and in the hands of someone who is trained in all of the requisite areas can be wielded to create something useful. It just costs money most companies don't believe is worth spending.
- robertmak363 6y agoHi Someone, i’ve been seeing a lot of people complain about their credit issues for a long time now i think it’s the right time to tell the secret of how i got my credit score increased in short period of time. It was with the help of an hacker Call Permanent Credit Repairer. Telling you my experience with him can never be as good has you experiencing it yourself. Contact him to fix your credit. Email Address; PERMANENTCREDITREPAIRER@GMAIL.COM. You’ll be back to thank me. Tell him i refer you
- robertmak363 6y agoI’ve been seeing a lot of people complain about their credit issues for a long time now i think it’s the right time to tell the secret of how i got my credit score increased in short period of time. It was with the help of an hacker Call Permanent Credit Repairer. Telling you my experience with him can never be as good has you experiencing it yourself. Email Address: (P E R M A N E N T C R E D I T R E P A I R E R) @ gmail . com