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Comment by watbe | Hacker News Reader

What is the metric actually measuring? Where did 70% come from? The article says that only 30% of requests were automated but I find it hard to believe that the API aims for 100% automated responses for all requests. Heck, if the bot API managed to reduce human resourcing by 30%, I'd say that's more success than not.

Is this an article or an opinion piece? It reads very weirdly but I can't pinpoint it.

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this article is pretty much vapor. theregister has been hitting the news pretty hard and is becoming one of the more popular non-mainstream sources. So they probably need some filler content?

30% in a year is solid, especially with the proliferation of tools for building bots making it more and more accessible to tinkerers and smaller orgs. ie, use caes where complete automation may not be the primary goal.

30% in a year is "solid"? If Apple released something that failed 70% of the time on launch day they would never hear the end of it. The original Newton's handwriting recognition was way better than that.

wow, both of those points are entirely out of context.

First, their BOT api which is the product in question, works 100% of the time. the failure rate mentioned has to so with conversation that require humans as opposed to entirely AI driven. A better Apple analogy would be Siri. if Siri failed to even acknowledge a request 70% of the time, it would indeed be catastrophic. But siri does often fail at providing relevant results and while frustrating, is entirely expected.

We could argue more, but as you and I have both noted, the main substance of the interview is not provided.

Still not quite there.

FB's third party access to the messenger platform (aka you and the article calling it the bot api) is supposedly failing 30%.

That number, if I were to guess where it came from, likely came from the fact that a chat bot app has to be submitted to Facebook for approval. That means FB has a running tally of how many chat bot accounts exists within their ecosystem.

Maybe that number is 100k.

Likewise, because messages are passed to FB to then be passed to the user, FB has a runny tally of the sentimental analysis or even the blocking analysis (users have the option to block bot accounts).

From there they can ascertain that 70,000 bot accounts result in negative interactions, discontinued use, or results in the user banning the bot.

This is the equivalent of Apple opening up third party access to the Siri platform and seeing that developers and users don't like the 70% of the ways to interact with Siri. Or Amazon saying that users don't like 70% of the Alexa Skills available.

I don't think I'm being unfair.

Newton's handwriting recognition worked "100%" of the time by that measure. I assume we are comparing quality of outcomes not whether the API accepts the arguments it says it does and produces data in the format it promises.

> this article is pretty much vapor.

In what way?

It references another article and doesn't really provide much substance.

The main article it references is from The Information which is subscription-only, so there's that.

If a tool only works 30% of the time people will quickly stop using it.

I may be missing some context, but I think OP's point was if you have a task that requires 100% human intervention, and you automate 30% of that, its potentially a very big positive. What % is a good number depends completely on the context -- 10% may be best-in-class and drive you to profitability, or it may be 100% or bust. Personally, I was unable to discern the context from the article.

I don't know. My microwave is only good for about 20% of the cooking I do, but I still use it.

If you only eat Hot Pockets, your microwave will handle 100% of the cooking.

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