Predictions from early stage bot investors | Hacker News Reader

Predictions from early stage bot investors

venturebeat.com

57 pointsshaunroncken12 comments

"bots" lack any standardized discovery interface, which eventually causes frustration for users. Two popular bots - Siri and Google Now, won't tell you everything they can do, and give such useless answers to most requests that people use them as a gimmick once or twice, maybe memorize a handful of key phrases, but otherwise won't use them.

They're also typically not extensible - I haven't come across bots that allow you to string multiple bots together to accomplish complex tasks. It's all the bad parts of a CLI with none of the good parts. No one wants to memorize a bot specific query language along with it's capabilities for something they interact with very infrequently.

Instead of sinking money and effort into natural language processing, services should be building responsive, discoverable websites with all the capabilities of a customer service agent. Work on better on-site search, and expose available actions to Google.

I am on the other side than you - I am betting on the NLP in my current interface.

The biggest reason for me is logging. I can see what are yet-unfulfilled needs of my customers and prioritise building new features. In responsive website you hardcore your assumptions about needs of your customers. What's more, you can fall-back to real customer support.

One of reasons why bots exploded recently are advances in NLP including deep learning, other new methods, cheaper hardware, etc.

NLP and logging failed queries doesn't excuse the current lack of any customization and interop. This is the same thing as with IoT all over again - everyone wants to take over the entire market for themselves, and thus everyone forgoes the only feature that can make it actually useful - free interoperability.

Some interop-ability exists at this point:

  - Bot A: Visit this URL to fulfil an order.
  - Ar the URL you are faced with a GUI with a separate bot B.

E.g. if you are fulfilling a payment, nothing prohibits Strip from creating their own bot.

I hope the answer to discoverability is that bots (within a single app) will be able to fulfil 95℅ of your needs, such that you're more willing to just try it since your expectation is that it will succeed.

I also only really see it taking off on mobile if voice input becomes near ubiquitous, since typing on mobile sucks.

I agree with your conclusion (services should be focused on getting better and getting things done), but the rest of your arguments are needlessly negative.

If it lacks standardized discovery interface, the next rational thing should be to think about how to come up with one, instead of saying bots suck because of that.

That's like trying out a raw coffee bean and saying "coffee sucks, I tried chewing on these coffee beans but they all taste like shit". Someone else out there is figuring out how to add hot water to coffee beans to make it much better while you're complaining about how coffee itself sucks and moving on.

Same thing with extensibility, if you haven't seen any bot platform that lets you string multiple bots together, then great! It means there's an opportunity there. That doesn't mean bots suck.

This quote from Joshua Kauffman is a little odd:

“Any time a human needs a relationship and a person isn’t there is an opportunity for a chatbot to fill itself in. I think that when humans are on this planet in some years time, with a lot more technology, we’re going to find that our ultimate purpose is to be having conversations with each other, in addition to creativity and other things. So there’s a lot of conversation that can happen with chatbots and intelligent assistants.”

So humans figure out their ultimate purpose is to talk a lot more with each other? But there isn't going to be enough supply of man hours of conversation - so they just opt for the next best choice - which is talking with chatbots?

Can someone locate the actual video of this event, if it is online? Many of the quotes from this article are all really far-out.

Bots are phone menus updated for 2016. It will reduce support costs. Exciting... I guess...

From the article: "Any time a human needs a relationship and a person isn’t there is an opportunity for a chatbot to fill itself in." Hm. Need to think about that one.

Chatbots currently assume a master-slave relationship, where the chatbot controls the dialogue. The human has to adapt to the chatbot, although there's some illusion that the chatbot understands the human.

Right now, a pharmacy is sending me a text telling me I can refill a prescription by replying "REFILL". But I can't reply "Which prescription?" The autoresponder is too dumb to handle that.

I think there's a huge potential for developers on chat platforms due to the fact that the app is already installed, and the user is already "logged in", and the UI paradigm is more or less standardized across OSes.

I worry though that this opportunity will be squandered by the big social platforms by botching the bot discovery mechanisms, much like the app stores did.

A problem is that there are so many chat apps and it's hard to support all of them. There are some cross platform development tools (and online services) but some chats have different ways of interaction. It reminds me of the cross platform GUI toolkits of the 90s. They worked pretty well but they were never the same of the native UI so nobody was happy.

Did anyone else think the article was going to be about using bots to direct investment decisions?

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