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For use cases that are well-suited to a conversational interface, that's great, and new AI advances will make chatbots more powerful than they've ever been. Bu
by haswell 4y ago
For use cases that are well-suited to a conversational interface, that's great, and new AI advances will make chatbots more powerful than they've ever been.
But not every use case is a chatbot use case, and I think that's the key point of the article.
The sudden viability of a conversational interface that is good enough at having a fluid conversation to revolutionize the experience of that conversation does not suddenly make this interface the best fit for all use cases.
I still find it far more pleasant to browse to a page and see a list of clearly displayed options that I can absorb at a glance and get on to what I really need to accomplish in the moment.
Even a perfect conversationalist can't remove the extra friction involved in disclosing information. The question is whether that loss of efficiency is outweighed/nullified by a better overall experience.
- ghaff 4y agoEven if someone designed an awesomely sophisticated air flight search engine that knew my usual preferences and could search for me and respond to follow-up prompts, I'd probably still want to see the information displayed on a page rather than read to me for the most part.
- haswell 4y agoI think this might point to an opportunity to explore hybrid interfaces that allow you to just have a conversation while still having a visual representation of everything going on. But still agree with the sentiment here. There are applications that I cannot imagine ever wanting to interact with via a bot.
- dshah 4y agoThis is how I've been thinking about it. Hybrid interfaces that combine visual cues and output and natural language input.
- ghaff 4y agoThat's what I had in mind. Happy to talk to the computer but show me the results on a screen. If I'm typing in a freeform query, I'd generally just as soon say it instead. (Assuming I'm somewhere I can talk.)