7 ms·

Hate Chatbots? You Aren't the Only One

66 points by lxm 2y ago

coldbrewed 2y ago
https://archive.ph/K5ovX https://archive.ph/K5ovX
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
mjamesaustin 2y ago
I've now encountered what are obviously ChatGPT-powered chatting tools on multiple product websites. Each time I asked the tool a question, it responded with completely unrelated garbage, in one case even spitting out fake tracking info for an order I never made. This looks SO BAD, I'm truly baffled that any company has signed on to use such a service.
- michaelcampbell 2y ago
  Ask Air Canada how they feel about them.
- malfist 2y ago
  I recently needed to reset a rachio device because it was tied to a previous owner and you can't do that yourself. Rachio has replaced their customer service with an LLM that can only link you help pages. 100% useless. If I hadn't been able to find their real phone number from Google I wouldn't have been able to use their device. Really made me question buying anything from them
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  I wonder how could they possibly fuck that up so bad. ChatGPT is a dream tool that can easily parse natural language into a fixed number of structured queries - which is the primary function of all the ordinary chatbots, and the one they suck at. Those companies got handled a magic, drop-in solution to the technical difficulties of the bot flow, and somehow managed to use it to make the problem worse. Takes some really special skills.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    It's a new tool. Give devs time. Bear in mind that accurate tool use is still a very new capability, one that many devs don't realize exists yet, and one that cheap models like GPT-3 have historically struggled with. With time best practices and common patterns will get established.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      I suppose maybe the businesses have different priorities than the users? Wouldn't be the first time. As a user, most of my interactions with pre-ChatGPT breed of chatbots (including "voice bots" on the phone) involved the robot having the capacity to help me at least partially, but failing to understand my request. Fixing that doesn't even require accurate tool use - it requires using LLM on input to parse it in place of whatever they're currently using, instead of directly as a chatbot; something even pre-GPT-3.5 completion models were somewhat good at. I'm all for giving people time with new technologies, but here, 1) somehow they managed to take what should be an out-of-the-box improvement and use it to make things worse, and 2) myself and people like me are on the receiving end of the problem. At scale, there's lots of extra real frustration being created, and lots of additional people-years wasted, through companies jumping on such tools to potentially save a buck by automating away a few jobs. Hell, it probably shows as healthy profit on the books, as it just further disempowers customers, who learn to take a beating instead of fighting, because what's the point anymore...
      - mike_hearn 2y ago
        Yeah, I hear you. I think you see using LLMs for parsing only as intuitive and obvious, but I bet most devs don't think of doing it that way, at least not at first. After all, the thing is right there, willing to talk to you, and the most obvious way to use them is to take the words generated and send them to the customer. Using LLMS to generate tool invocations that then generate templated words is a much more indirect use, and frankly up until recently is not always practical due to the amount of context window that all the tool descriptions and possible actions can take up (which must fit not only the 'training' for the model but also the customer's conversation so far). As tool use becomes more widespread and context window sizes go up, I bet we'll start to see blog posts where devs talk about how they made your approach work well, and then others will see it makes sense and start to copy it.
empath75 2y ago
I prefer chatbots in some contexts. I should, however, always know that I'm interacting with a chatbot and not a person and also be able to opt out of working with a chatbot.
- najork 2y ago
  Curious, which contexts do you prefer chatbots in?
  - empath75 2y ago
    When i know it's going to do what i want it to do.
paulddraper 2y ago
I've had good experiences. Sometimes they answer my question. Other times they don't, and I have to wait in the support queue for a meatbag to answer. Worth the risk of a wasted 25 seconds.
matrix87 2y ago
Funny. I sit next to someone at work on a distant team who spends all day in meetings talking about how chatbots for tech support are preferred over the real thing It's like some people have lodged themselves into this niche and want to bullshit some kind of demand for it into existence
- devin 2y ago
  Context always matters. I have no trouble imagining scenarios in which I would prefer a chatbot, and scenarios where I would prefer or even require a human. However, one way in which chatbots are often preferred: They cost less to the business. Whether they're good or not seems to be a secondary concern. So, if your coworker is describing what the people inside the business want, they're probably right!
  - autoexecbat 2y ago
    > I have no trouble imagining scenarios in which I would prefer a chatbot I'm baffled, which scenarios?
    - geraldhh 2y ago
      there are a lot of non-native speakers employed in the callcenter business.
    - devin 2y ago
      Any shallow decision tree where the nuance doesn't matter. An example might be: There's something wrong with my order -> wrong size -> order not shipped -> update size on order to small -> small out of stock -> cancel or backorder or There's something wrong with my order -> wrong size -> sorry, the order already shipped -> start a return You can argue that these kinds of things should be supported via direct web UI, and that's fine, but I've seen them backed by chatbots, and I would rather do it on the web than make a phone call for a boring decision tree.
  - matrix87 2y ago
    Let me add a little context: the use case is mostly support when people are facing infra issues And "preferrable" meant it was preferrable to developers specifically, which based off of my experience nobody wants it there, it's an annoyance at best Whether it saves cost or not: hiring people to manage the automated thing (including aforementioned bullshitter who is most likely expensive) or cheap front line support, I'm not sure
hubraumhugo 2y ago
This article could just as well be from 2016[0], when Facebook first launched chatbots for their Messenger. I played around with NLP tools like Dialogflow back then to build one of these. We've come a long way since, but some (UX and tech) challenges remain the same. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/29/why-do-chatbots-suck/?guccounter=1 https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/29/why-do-chatbots-suck/?gucc...
pyrale 2y ago
The issue I have with most chatbots, or voice assistants on helplines, is that they're designed to be a time waster before I receive actual help. Either A) I know what I want, and that I can't get it without human intervention, or B) I can't formulate my question, and chatbots do a terrible job to point the relevant doc to me. They seem optimized for situation C) where I need something that is easily understood/available, but am actually lazy to look it up, which doesn't really happen. And so, my typical chatbot interaction is me trying to speedrun through the bullshit in order to get to actual help. There was one notable exception, where the chatbot was actually there to ask 2-3 questions/give informations to prepare for the following human interaction, and made it in such a way that user saw the goal. I wish all chatbots were like that.
- ahzhou 2y ago
  While it may not happen for you, “too lazy to look it up” is the vast majority of CS requests. My understanding from talking to a couple of CS execs is that these have been a slam dunk in terms of ROI because CS agents don’t need to handle type C requests. I expect we’ll only see more as time goes on.
  - malfist 2y ago
    They're especially slam dunks when they don't provide you with a way to get out of the automated useless system. Looking at you Amazon
    - codeduck 2y ago
      shouting "speak to a fucking human" repeatedly seems to work, though i may be suffering from confirmation bias
      - freedomben 2y ago
        Actually this does sometimes work because some of the systems now have sentiment analysis baked in and can tell if the user is getting pissed off. I've used this a few times to get through as well.
noodlesUK 2y ago
I've worked on chatbots for a couple of years. I too have come to the conclusion that they're generally garbage from a customer perspective. Sometimes they can serve as a useful intake system for collecting information before passing someone off to an agent, but even then they tend to be less useful than just filling in a form. I think in most cases, a step by step form followed by a live chat would be better. Unfortunately there is a segment of the population that is completely incapable of filling in a form. These people should probably be passed off to human beings, but then those human beings are wasting their time dealing with similar issues constantly. LLM chatbots are even worse. They have great latitude to say convincing and incorrect information, but can rarely actually do anything. It would be much better to just publish a good knowledge base. I would say a pet peeve of mine is when you do end up having support staff that are human beings, but are not empowered/trained to actually solve customer problems sufficiently. From a business perspective a chatbot is a great replacement for that, because it also regurgitates a script without actually having to action any business processes.
- Swizec 2y ago
  > LLM chatbots are even worse. They have great latitude to say convincing and incorrect information, but can rarely actually do anything. It would be much better to just publish a good knowledge base. The problem of course is that users have all been trained that knowledge bases are terrible and will go straight to support without even bothering to look. Many users also don’t really want to become an expert in your thing. They just want someone to solve their problem and don’t care how For example: I could learn the ins and outs of quickbooks, but I don’t really wanna. The once or twice per year that the UI won’t let me easily do what I want – straight to support.
- burningChrome 2y ago
  >> Unfortunately there is a segment of the population that is completely incapable of filling in a form. I work in accessibility. Most of the forms I've worked with are horrendously bad for accessibility. Chat bots are even worse. People with vision or cognitive issues are an afterthought these days. As we've forced more and more people to use these poorly coded or poorly designed applications and moved away from allowing people to talk to an actual person, we are creating an internet that is increasingly less accessible to people who really need it. The sad thing is way too many devs I work with have no idea how to write semantic HTML any more. Just simple things like putting things in an unordered list seems beyond some of the frameworks and CMS they use.
dmitrygr 2y ago
The main problem is that everybody understands that the chat bots are there to add more obstacles between you and an actual human who might be able to help. The reasons are also also easy to understand and everyone knows them. Humans cost money. Predictably, people are infuriated when obstacles are between them and what they need done. In an ideal world, any company that sells anything would be required to have a phone number that is answered by a human. The maximum hold time would be limited by law and be required to be lower, the higher the cost of the items they sell. The punishment for violation would be jail time for the CEO, at a month per violation or so.
- CoastalCoder 2y ago
  > Humans cost money. Predictably, people are infuriated when obstacles are between them and what they need done. Another way to frame this: it's a fight over whose time might be wasted.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Well, one of the group is paid for that time. The other one is paying with their time, on top of what they already paid in money. With time being the one finite resource for everyone, stalling someone to make them go away feels unethical, when the alternative would be to just tell them to GTFO.
- deleted 2y ago
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- floundy 2y ago
  >The main problem is that everybody understands that the chat bots are there to add more obstacles between you and an actual human who might be able to help. Technically competent customers who have exhausted all means of self-solving the problem understand this. People that call or open a customer support chat for say, a routine return to Amazon instead of clicking a button might get upset at it but certainly don't realize they're why the bots exist. >The punishment for violation would be jail time for the CEO. Comments on this site read more like Reddit every day. :(
tracker1 2y ago
I'm absolutely hating the chatbot item search thing on Amazon... the answers are pretty useless to say the least. I swear google and Amazon are both getting significantly worse with time/age.
maxehmookau 2y ago
My biggest issue is that so many chatbots are utter trash, that when I come across one that is actually good and can solve my problem quicker than a human that I've already lost patience and don't want to engage with it. If chatbots really were good, and could solve my CS problems 90%+ of the time then I'd love them. But that doesn't happen, so I want to speak to a human please.
meiraleal 2y ago
I love chatbots, especially the ones I create and integrate with whatsapp. They provide a great user interface, probably the best for creating and maintaining workflows. I still believe the prime time for chatbots is yet to come.
- afro88 2y ago
  Can you give some examples?
  - meiraleal 2y ago
    Sure. I created a few CLI tasks that I use frequently. One of them creates and sub videos for me to post on instagram with optimized content from LLMs like captions, hashtag, description. Those videos are created using videos and images I get from whatsapp. So to create a new video I forward those media files to my bot which is running in my computer at home and it generates the video, description, hastags, caption and send to myself (I use 2 different numbers, one for me and one for the bot). This saves me many hours of work. This same chatbot also helps me manage my whatsapp groups.
    - afro88 2y ago
      Ahh I see. The time saving part of having it as a chatbot is the way you can easily forward things to it for it to execute a workflow. I thought you meant more like a way of constructing or managing workflows.
Arthur_ODC 2y ago
I'm honestly at the point where I wish there were a built-in one-click filter for Hacker News to prevent anything related to Machine Learning, AI, Chatbots, etc, from showing up in the feeds here when I'm signed in.
burningChrome 2y ago
We went from having pre-answering services that you had to wade through huge decision trees to get to a real person. Now people seem to think chat bots are SO MUCH better? All we did was replace one horrible technology for another technology that does the same thing. Its not better, its not getting better and layering LLM's and AI on top of an already bad technology isn't the answer.
iainctduncan 2y ago
The AI hype means we have record number of companies confusing optimizing for their needs with optimizing for the customer. I have worked at one place that did this, and slowly but surely, everything they did to improve "scalability" chased the customers away. If you make me interact unnecessarily with a chat bot, I dislike your company more, instantly. If a competitor doesn't and you are largely interchangeable, I'm leaving. The fact that Gen AI cuts down your support costs by making support worse is a net negative to me, the customer.
klabb3 2y ago
How can people possibly be surprised by this? It’s just another layer of obstacles between you and someone might be able to help and take action. At the absolute best, it could be an alternative to sifting through poorly written help docs.
mbesto 2y ago
Honestly, this has massively changed with the introduction of ChatGPT. I've used an intercom (Fin) based support function on two separate occasions and they both got me the answer (and it was not in the knowledge base, it was clearly based on a previous support chat someone else had).
deleted 2y ago
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gregw134 2y ago
Technical support with Comcast yesterday: https://imgur.com/a/NJMEIkm https://imgur.com/a/NJMEIkm Their actual human support couldn't figure out my problem, but instead of admitting it they just turn on AI-chatbot mode, effectively hanging up on the customer. There's no UI indication you're not talking to a human anymore. Meanwhile the AI tries to engage in small talk and tells you to patiently wait while they're fixing your problem. Eventually an actual human came back and admitted they couldn't fix the problem and was escalating me to "tier-2 support", which turned out to be another chatbot. Incredibly dystopian experience. Meanwhile their engineers probably got a promotion for this and wrote an arxiv post bragging about their work: https://arxiv.org/html/2405.00801v2 https://arxiv.org/html/2405.00801v2
- krackers 2y ago
  Heavenbanning in practice.
threatofrain 2y ago
Has anyone seen some top-notch chat bots recent to the restaurant space for helping people do phone orders? Some people here describe uses of chatbot that are meant to basically thwart customers and waste time, but IMO chatbots are getting good enough to eliminate some customer service roles.
maxdo 2y ago
Weird argumentation. The ultimate differentiator is that LLM, with proper management, can give you a definite, exact answer to your very specific question. This is also a usability boost; it's like moving from a landline phone to a mobile phone from a usability standpoint. The entire chatbot history is a path towards making support better and more accessible because human agents cost a lot. In fact, the entire chatbot business has to compete with the cheapest human agents on the planet. You can clearly see NLP-gen bots evolution. From a basic how to reduce the load on human agents to cover the top 100+ questions by bot. The current LLM generation of bots will evolve into pre-AGI bots, which will be very informative and capable of answering 1000+ questions. The improvement is 100x, at least. This is HUGE. The numbers are just average, but the limiting factor were levels of efforts to manage these bots. People who wrote and read the article have a professional deformation/bias. We are all advanced Google search users or even represent businesses that depend on Google. The majority of the population on earth is still not very good at doing online research to just solve their basic problems. They trust phone calls, tiktok recommendations and sometimes chatbots, sure. They will prefer anything but not complex googling and digesting large amounts of information. LLM-powered bots are also much easier to manage, including capabilities of bots actually doing something, e.g., making requests to DB, etc. Even pre-AGI chatbots, with their 100x+ improvement, will cut a huge amount of what we use to call web2.0/3.0. LLM is just a vehicle that eventually standardizes content mechanisms. It will cover every aspect of content creation,update, moderation, analytics, and delivery, including, but not only delivery through a chatbot. Such a change will be as different as the pre-internet media vs the social media era. We used to think that the Western world is a cutting edge of every single trend globally. In fact only western world is still living in pre-chat world where websites are the main engine of information exchange. Look at Wechat, Telegram, and Line with their billions of auditory. LLM-powered chatbots will bring the lagging Western world, which used to be golden billion, into modern world reality. This article is just a mental resistance to what's imminent.
- gregw134 2y ago
  Nice sentiment, but are you using chatbots now and having a positive experience with them?
maxdo 2y ago
So people Love chatGPT , but they hate ... bots? The only difference between chatGPT and your support bot, is lack of maturity/investments to bring their unique knowledge to have similar quality of answers as chatGPT can answer you about your queries. The quality of the bot = money you spend * how god is the tech. prev gen bots are still essentially a programs written by human. Build a good bot is hard , sometimes require entire team of 10+ people working every day. Think of it on a scale : cheap no name brand - no support average brand - some support, almost 100% bots and documentation, super hard to get to human agent. apple brand - ok support with bots luxury brands - super knowledgable human been always ready to help It's clear that we don't have resources to deliver everyone support of a luxury brand. Luckily, we have LLM's will 100x improvements to deliver bots that are way way better. That will allow even small brands to have a very decent support. Chat interfaces will eventually eat western world Web 2.0, and the rest of the world is already in chat interfaces around the globe anyways.
- M95D 2y ago
  What we all had 30y ago is now a luxury. Good. Keep going...
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clgong 2y ago
Big question, what problem are we really trying to solve with customer support chatbots? Goes back to management and not the technology. I'm working on chatbots. Curious what would you like the bot to do when you contact customer support?

66 points by lxm 2y ago

coldbrewed 2y ago

https://archive.ph/K5ovX https://archive.ph/K5ovX

deleted 2y ago
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mjamesaustin 2y ago

I've now encountered what are obviously ChatGPT-powered chatting tools on multiple product websites. Each time I asked the tool a question, it responded with completely unrelated garbage, in one case even spitting out fake tracking info for an order I never made. This looks SO BAD, I'm truly baffled that any company has signed on to use such a service.

michaelcampbell 2y ago
Ask Air Canada how they feel about them.
malfist 2y ago
I recently needed to reset a rachio device because it was tied to a previous owner and you can't do that yourself. Rachio has replaced their customer service with an LLM that can only link you help pages. 100% useless. If I hadn't been able to find their real phone number from Google I wouldn't have been able to use their device. Really made me question buying anything from them
TeMPOraL 2y ago
I wonder how could they possibly fuck that up so bad. ChatGPT is a dream tool that can easily parse natural language into a fixed number of structured queries - which is the primary function of all the ordinary chatbots, and the one they suck at. Those companies got handled a magic, drop-in solution to the technical difficulties of the bot flow, and somehow managed to use it to make the problem worse. Takes some really special skills.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  It's a new tool. Give devs time. Bear in mind that accurate tool use is still a very new capability, one that many devs don't realize exists yet, and one that cheap models like GPT-3 have historically struggled with. With time best practices and common patterns will get established.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    I suppose maybe the businesses have different priorities than the users? Wouldn't be the first time. As a user, most of my interactions with pre-ChatGPT breed of chatbots (including "voice bots" on the phone) involved the robot having the capacity to help me at least partially, but failing to understand my request. Fixing that doesn't even require accurate tool use - it requires using LLM on input to parse it in place of whatever they're currently using, instead of directly as a chatbot; something even pre-GPT-3.5 completion models were somewhat good at. I'm all for giving people time with new technologies, but here, 1) somehow they managed to take what should be an out-of-the-box improvement and use it to make things worse, and 2) myself and people like me are on the receiving end of the problem. At scale, there's lots of extra real frustration being created, and lots of additional people-years wasted, through companies jumping on such tools to potentially save a buck by automating away a few jobs. Hell, it probably shows as healthy profit on the books, as it just further disempowers customers, who learn to take a beating instead of fighting, because what's the point anymore...
    - mike_hearn 2y ago
      Yeah, I hear you. I think you see using LLMs for parsing only as intuitive and obvious, but I bet most devs don't think of doing it that way, at least not at first. After all, the thing is right there, willing to talk to you, and the most obvious way to use them is to take the words generated and send them to the customer. Using LLMS to generate tool invocations that then generate templated words is a much more indirect use, and frankly up until recently is not always practical due to the amount of context window that all the tool descriptions and possible actions can take up (which must fit not only the 'training' for the model but also the customer's conversation so far). As tool use becomes more widespread and context window sizes go up, I bet we'll start to see blog posts where devs talk about how they made your approach work well, and then others will see it makes sense and start to copy it.

empath75 2y ago

I prefer chatbots in some contexts. I should, however, always know that I'm interacting with a chatbot and not a person and also be able to opt out of working with a chatbot.

najork 2y ago
Curious, which contexts do you prefer chatbots in?
- empath75 2y ago
  When i know it's going to do what i want it to do.

paulddraper 2y ago

I've had good experiences. Sometimes they answer my question. Other times they don't, and I have to wait in the support queue for a meatbag to answer. Worth the risk of a wasted 25 seconds.

matrix87 2y ago

Funny. I sit next to someone at work on a distant team who spends all day in meetings talking about how chatbots for tech support are preferred over the real thing It's like some people have lodged themselves into this niche and want to bullshit some kind of demand for it into existence

devin 2y ago
Context always matters. I have no trouble imagining scenarios in which I would prefer a chatbot, and scenarios where I would prefer or even require a human. However, one way in which chatbots are often preferred: They cost less to the business. Whether they're good or not seems to be a secondary concern. So, if your coworker is describing what the people inside the business want, they're probably right!
- autoexecbat 2y ago
  > I have no trouble imagining scenarios in which I would prefer a chatbot I'm baffled, which scenarios?
  - geraldhh 2y ago
    there are a lot of non-native speakers employed in the callcenter business.
  - devin 2y ago
    Any shallow decision tree where the nuance doesn't matter. An example might be: There's something wrong with my order -> wrong size -> order not shipped -> update size on order to small -> small out of stock -> cancel or backorder or There's something wrong with my order -> wrong size -> sorry, the order already shipped -> start a return You can argue that these kinds of things should be supported via direct web UI, and that's fine, but I've seen them backed by chatbots, and I would rather do it on the web than make a phone call for a boring decision tree.
- matrix87 2y ago
  Let me add a little context: the use case is mostly support when people are facing infra issues And "preferrable" meant it was preferrable to developers specifically, which based off of my experience nobody wants it there, it's an annoyance at best Whether it saves cost or not: hiring people to manage the automated thing (including aforementioned bullshitter who is most likely expensive) or cheap front line support, I'm not sure

hubraumhugo 2y ago

This article could just as well be from 2016[0], when Facebook first launched chatbots for their Messenger. I played around with NLP tools like Dialogflow back then to build one of these. We've come a long way since, but some (UX and tech) challenges remain the same. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/29/why-do-chatbots-suck/?guccounter=1 https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/29/why-do-chatbots-suck/?gucc...

pyrale 2y ago

The issue I have with most chatbots, or voice assistants on helplines, is that they're designed to be a time waster before I receive actual help. Either A) I know what I want, and that I can't get it without human intervention, or B) I can't formulate my question, and chatbots do a terrible job to point the relevant doc to me. They seem optimized for situation C) where I need something that is easily understood/available, but am actually lazy to look it up, which doesn't really happen. And so, my typical chatbot interaction is me trying to speedrun through the bullshit in order to get to actual help. There was one notable exception, where the chatbot was actually there to ask 2-3 questions/give informations to prepare for the following human interaction, and made it in such a way that user saw the goal. I wish all chatbots were like that.

ahzhou 2y ago
While it may not happen for you, “too lazy to look it up” is the vast majority of CS requests. My understanding from talking to a couple of CS execs is that these have been a slam dunk in terms of ROI because CS agents don’t need to handle type C requests. I expect we’ll only see more as time goes on.
- malfist 2y ago
  They're especially slam dunks when they don't provide you with a way to get out of the automated useless system. Looking at you Amazon
  - codeduck 2y ago
    shouting "speak to a fucking human" repeatedly seems to work, though i may be suffering from confirmation bias
    - freedomben 2y ago
      Actually this does sometimes work because some of the systems now have sentiment analysis baked in and can tell if the user is getting pissed off. I've used this a few times to get through as well.

noodlesUK 2y ago

I've worked on chatbots for a couple of years. I too have come to the conclusion that they're generally garbage from a customer perspective. Sometimes they can serve as a useful intake system for collecting information before passing someone off to an agent, but even then they tend to be less useful than just filling in a form. I think in most cases, a step by step form followed by a live chat would be better. Unfortunately there is a segment of the population that is completely incapable of filling in a form. These people should probably be passed off to human beings, but then those human beings are wasting their time dealing with similar issues constantly. LLM chatbots are even worse. They have great latitude to say convincing and incorrect information, but can rarely actually do anything. It would be much better to just publish a good knowledge base. I would say a pet peeve of mine is when you do end up having support staff that are human beings, but are not empowered/trained to actually solve customer problems sufficiently. From a business perspective a chatbot is a great replacement for that, because it also regurgitates a script without actually having to action any business processes.

Swizec 2y ago
> LLM chatbots are even worse. They have great latitude to say convincing and incorrect information, but can rarely actually do anything. It would be much better to just publish a good knowledge base. The problem of course is that users have all been trained that knowledge bases are terrible and will go straight to support without even bothering to look. Many users also don’t really want to become an expert in your thing. They just want someone to solve their problem and don’t care how For example: I could learn the ins and outs of quickbooks, but I don’t really wanna. The once or twice per year that the UI won’t let me easily do what I want – straight to support.
burningChrome 2y ago
>> Unfortunately there is a segment of the population that is completely incapable of filling in a form. I work in accessibility. Most of the forms I've worked with are horrendously bad for accessibility. Chat bots are even worse. People with vision or cognitive issues are an afterthought these days. As we've forced more and more people to use these poorly coded or poorly designed applications and moved away from allowing people to talk to an actual person, we are creating an internet that is increasingly less accessible to people who really need it. The sad thing is way too many devs I work with have no idea how to write semantic HTML any more. Just simple things like putting things in an unordered list seems beyond some of the frameworks and CMS they use.

dmitrygr 2y ago

The main problem is that everybody understands that the chat bots are there to add more obstacles between you and an actual human who might be able to help. The reasons are also also easy to understand and everyone knows them. Humans cost money. Predictably, people are infuriated when obstacles are between them and what they need done. In an ideal world, any company that sells anything would be required to have a phone number that is answered by a human. The maximum hold time would be limited by law and be required to be lower, the higher the cost of the items they sell. The punishment for violation would be jail time for the CEO, at a month per violation or so.

CoastalCoder 2y ago
> Humans cost money. Predictably, people are infuriated when obstacles are between them and what they need done. Another way to frame this: it's a fight over whose time might be wasted.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Well, one of the group is paid for that time. The other one is paying with their time, on top of what they already paid in money. With time being the one finite resource for everyone, stalling someone to make them go away feels unethical, when the alternative would be to just tell them to GTFO.
deleted 2y ago
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floundy 2y ago
>The main problem is that everybody understands that the chat bots are there to add more obstacles between you and an actual human who might be able to help. Technically competent customers who have exhausted all means of self-solving the problem understand this. People that call or open a customer support chat for say, a routine return to Amazon instead of clicking a button might get upset at it but certainly don't realize they're why the bots exist. >The punishment for violation would be jail time for the CEO. Comments on this site read more like Reddit every day. :(

tracker1 2y ago

I'm absolutely hating the chatbot item search thing on Amazon... the answers are pretty useless to say the least. I swear google and Amazon are both getting significantly worse with time/age.

maxehmookau 2y ago

My biggest issue is that so many chatbots are utter trash, that when I come across one that is actually good and can solve my problem quicker than a human that I've already lost patience and don't want to engage with it. If chatbots really were good, and could solve my CS problems 90%+ of the time then I'd love them. But that doesn't happen, so I want to speak to a human please.

meiraleal 2y ago

I love chatbots, especially the ones I create and integrate with whatsapp. They provide a great user interface, probably the best for creating and maintaining workflows. I still believe the prime time for chatbots is yet to come.

afro88 2y ago
Can you give some examples?
- meiraleal 2y ago
  Sure. I created a few CLI tasks that I use frequently. One of them creates and sub videos for me to post on instagram with optimized content from LLMs like captions, hashtag, description. Those videos are created using videos and images I get from whatsapp. So to create a new video I forward those media files to my bot which is running in my computer at home and it generates the video, description, hastags, caption and send to myself (I use 2 different numbers, one for me and one for the bot). This saves me many hours of work. This same chatbot also helps me manage my whatsapp groups.
  - afro88 2y ago
    Ahh I see. The time saving part of having it as a chatbot is the way you can easily forward things to it for it to execute a workflow. I thought you meant more like a way of constructing or managing workflows.

Arthur_ODC 2y ago

I'm honestly at the point where I wish there were a built-in one-click filter for Hacker News to prevent anything related to Machine Learning, AI, Chatbots, etc, from showing up in the feeds here when I'm signed in.

burningChrome 2y ago

We went from having pre-answering services that you had to wade through huge decision trees to get to a real person. Now people seem to think chat bots are SO MUCH better? All we did was replace one horrible technology for another technology that does the same thing. Its not better, its not getting better and layering LLM's and AI on top of an already bad technology isn't the answer.

iainctduncan 2y ago

The AI hype means we have record number of companies confusing optimizing for their needs with optimizing for the customer. I have worked at one place that did this, and slowly but surely, everything they did to improve "scalability" chased the customers away. If you make me interact unnecessarily with a chat bot, I dislike your company more, instantly. If a competitor doesn't and you are largely interchangeable, I'm leaving. The fact that Gen AI cuts down your support costs by making support worse is a net negative to me, the customer.

klabb3 2y ago

How can people possibly be surprised by this? It’s just another layer of obstacles between you and someone might be able to help and take action. At the absolute best, it could be an alternative to sifting through poorly written help docs.

mbesto 2y ago

Honestly, this has massively changed with the introduction of ChatGPT. I've used an intercom (Fin) based support function on two separate occasions and they both got me the answer (and it was not in the knowledge base, it was clearly based on a previous support chat someone else had).

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gregw134 2y ago

Technical support with Comcast yesterday: https://imgur.com/a/NJMEIkm https://imgur.com/a/NJMEIkm Their actual human support couldn't figure out my problem, but instead of admitting it they just turn on AI-chatbot mode, effectively hanging up on the customer. There's no UI indication you're not talking to a human anymore. Meanwhile the AI tries to engage in small talk and tells you to patiently wait while they're fixing your problem. Eventually an actual human came back and admitted they couldn't fix the problem and was escalating me to "tier-2 support", which turned out to be another chatbot. Incredibly dystopian experience. Meanwhile their engineers probably got a promotion for this and wrote an arxiv post bragging about their work: https://arxiv.org/html/2405.00801v2 https://arxiv.org/html/2405.00801v2

krackers 2y ago
Heavenbanning in practice.

threatofrain 2y ago

Has anyone seen some top-notch chat bots recent to the restaurant space for helping people do phone orders? Some people here describe uses of chatbot that are meant to basically thwart customers and waste time, but IMO chatbots are getting good enough to eliminate some customer service roles.

maxdo 2y ago

Weird argumentation. The ultimate differentiator is that LLM, with proper management, can give you a definite, exact answer to your very specific question. This is also a usability boost; it's like moving from a landline phone to a mobile phone from a usability standpoint. The entire chatbot history is a path towards making support better and more accessible because human agents cost a lot. In fact, the entire chatbot business has to compete with the cheapest human agents on the planet. You can clearly see NLP-gen bots evolution. From a basic how to reduce the load on human agents to cover the top 100+ questions by bot. The current LLM generation of bots will evolve into pre-AGI bots, which will be very informative and capable of answering 1000+ questions. The improvement is 100x, at least. This is HUGE. The numbers are just average, but the limiting factor were levels of efforts to manage these bots. People who wrote and read the article have a professional deformation/bias. We are all advanced Google search users or even represent businesses that depend on Google. The majority of the population on earth is still not very good at doing online research to just solve their basic problems. They trust phone calls, tiktok recommendations and sometimes chatbots, sure. They will prefer anything but not complex googling and digesting large amounts of information. LLM-powered bots are also much easier to manage, including capabilities of bots actually doing something, e.g., making requests to DB, etc. Even pre-AGI chatbots, with their 100x+ improvement, will cut a huge amount of what we use to call web2.0/3.0. LLM is just a vehicle that eventually standardizes content mechanisms. It will cover every aspect of content creation,update, moderation, analytics, and delivery, including, but not only delivery through a chatbot. Such a change will be as different as the pre-internet media vs the social media era. We used to think that the Western world is a cutting edge of every single trend globally. In fact only western world is still living in pre-chat world where websites are the main engine of information exchange. Look at Wechat, Telegram, and Line with their billions of auditory. LLM-powered chatbots will bring the lagging Western world, which used to be golden billion, into modern world reality. This article is just a mental resistance to what's imminent.

gregw134 2y ago
Nice sentiment, but are you using chatbots now and having a positive experience with them?

maxdo 2y ago

So people Love chatGPT , but they hate ... bots? The only difference between chatGPT and your support bot, is lack of maturity/investments to bring their unique knowledge to have similar quality of answers as chatGPT can answer you about your queries. The quality of the bot = money you spend * how god is the tech. prev gen bots are still essentially a programs written by human. Build a good bot is hard , sometimes require entire team of 10+ people working every day. Think of it on a scale : cheap no name brand - no support average brand - some support, almost 100% bots and documentation, super hard to get to human agent. apple brand - ok support with bots luxury brands - super knowledgable human been always ready to help It's clear that we don't have resources to deliver everyone support of a luxury brand. Luckily, we have LLM's will 100x improvements to deliver bots that are way way better. That will allow even small brands to have a very decent support. Chat interfaces will eventually eat western world Web 2.0, and the rest of the world is already in chat interfaces around the globe anyways.

M95D 2y ago
What we all had 30y ago is now a luxury. Good. Keep going...

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clgong 2y ago

Big question, what problem are we really trying to solve with customer support chatbots? Goes back to management and not the technology. I'm working on chatbots. Curious what would you like the bot to do when you contact customer support?