Chatbots have struggled to live up to the hype
marketingland.com
marketingland.com
It's distressing that more and more chatbots are spawned every day to take the human element out of customer support or when engaging with a business. Chatbots work when they're a complement to human customer support, but when they're up front and center they tend to be distracting, frustrating, and their attempts to act human often amuses me. I do like Kik's and Messenger's approach to a bot and I think they are on the right path.
Online shops have usually a link where my orders are displayed and updated in real-time. Worked well.
I am only half joking. The reason nerds like CLIs is that they can just tell the computer what to do without having to first coax it into offering the appropriate menu.
The same is true for non-nerds, except they no one really wants to learn the exact commands. If for some reason, clicky-window GUIs had not been invented in the '80s -- then the hot thing in UI research might have been fuzzy, english-like text interfaces, including online help.
That is basically what is being re-discovered via chatbot technology.
So while I am skeptical, I am starting to understand the value of a chatbot and possibly a single way to do things. Maybe the "easy" path via the chatbot and if someone is a real poweruser they can use the window and type all information themselves.
For example: we had a bot that could take care of HR, expense, and IT issues. So instead of having to look in one of the systems or the documents on SharePoint, you could just ask: "how many days of PTO do I have left?" Or "when will my last expense report be paid?" or "can I get email on my corporate phone?", and the bot would be able to handle it. Especially in larger companies with lots of systems finding that can be difficult.
HN is probably not the intended audience for chatbots :)
edit: typos
I've always felt like bots for use in customer service were trying to solve a problem by adding more problems. So, now, not only is someone talking at your company because they have a problem that couldn't easily be solved by your web presence, now you're making them navigate an uncanny valley of dumb questions and answers...following the same old support script only now with even less intelligence and autonomy on the part of the company rep.
I am doing something like that myself as a side project, not exactly as "AI" more as voice interface responding to voice commands that uses humor and character voices to reply. In way, the problem of bots is actually "AI".
You can create a more flexible and lively experience if you put "AI" aside and really think of how people interact and create responses that are not based on "mean" values, but on real conversations. You don't even need the whole AI backend, you can just use javascript, audio files with or without accompanying text. Because so much of the conversation is bland, having a "voice" will make a huge difference.
AI developers should consider collaborating with writers and comedians:)
You're right that the typical chat is quite bland and feels scripted, but I think companies are picking up on this and are trying to improve on this.
Chatbots in China over WeChat act as a lightweight Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, which is highly successful due to a set of market factors which are (at least from my perspective) unique to China.
But, as I've been saying for about a year now, chatbots, in their current incarnation, don't make a lot of sense outside that niche.
Looking at it from either the American or Japanese perspective, there are a set of expected standards for customer support, which are either already met via web-based mostly-automated systems (Amazon is really good here), or by being able to directly chat with a human being (perhaps supplemented by AI) to solve a very specific and usually uncommon need.
Replacing that setup with nothing but a text-based IVR system is a non-starter for any company that wants to remain in business.
Hence, it was a natural progression to allow payments to businesses which is where chatbots came in.
Perhaps i'm a strange case, but the only times I or anyone I know have ever had to use support are for these cases.
If an issue is common, its not an issue for support, its a failure of ux or design
I think there's definitely two distinct types of people in this regard. Just like automated responses from phone lines, I much, much, much, much prefer "speaking" to a robot that:
a) is often less stressful than speaking to a human
b) is often able of hearing and understanding me better than a human
c) is often more easy to understand than a human
d) is often more straightforward to get help from
e) is often "happier" to help
f) is often much faster to interact with, especially in repeated tasks like paying bills, authorizing payments, etc
And if you do need to speak to a human after all, they typically treat you better knowing you've already gone through the "easy stuff" and are seeking something extra.
I'll regularly put off or completely avoid calling any companies (support, bills, etc) that don't have automated processes, and will just take my business elsewhere at the first opportunity.
I wholeheartedly wish every line I had to call were automated, and extending the real-time support capabilities of online communication only makes quality support more ubiquitous and easier to get, IMO.
--
I spent an hour on the phone with UPS support this morning (first their 1800 number, then their Reykjavik office, then one driver, then another driver, then the Reykjavik office again) that could have avoided a ton of back and forth and miscommunication if I'd just spoken to a bot in the first place that could take my request ("Hi, your online tracking says a package could not be delivered to my address because 'I moved', when in fact I did not. Please deliver it anyway.") and put it directly into a database available to the office/drivers.
People will work to support a community, because they gain self actualisation from helping others and getting status from others. Some more "karma" can be generated from early access programs and expert feedback status on new products. That's all though - there is not an endless well of good will out there to be exploited by social media and bot infrastructures. People like real gold!
For example in our case, clients often have problems logging in. With our chatbot they can easily get a one time password sent to their phone. With a regular search/faq they would have never known about that, because they are often too frustrated with the UI experience for finding that information. With a natural language conversation, it is easier :-)
Getting a regular non techinal user to search and read the documentation for this is just insane.
An obvious solution is a search box, but most sites also have terrible search functionality, so users have learned to ignore it. For the rare gem that has useful search, dressing it up as a chatbot could get people to actually try it. Too bad it looks like a lot of devs are just dressing up their shitty search as chatbots, so users are being trained to ignore them as well.
I agree, but that doesn't mean they're as bad as them.
It's _much_ faster to read a text and reply with a word/number/tap than it is to wait for the option you want to be read out to you: "for x press 1, for y press 2... for z press 9". Or worse, have to speak what you want, wait for it to parse what you said, and then ask you to confirm.
I work at a company that's helping businesses automate parts of their customer support with chatbots and you'd be surprised to learn that CSAT improves when they employ some automation. Usually this means getting a quicker first response to the customer's question (and some of the time successfully answering it!) as well as automating tedious data collection (what device are you on? what's your email? etc.).
It's early days for chatbots and I think we'll see a lot of improvement where automation through conversation should be and I think we'll also see the rest shake out.
More to your point: I agree with you, IVRs are usually really bad, but some of them are impressive. Have you used Apple's recently? It's very good at routing and making cases where it's uncertain invisible.
I certainly prefer chatbots over the menu selection when I call. But that's about it. Mose of the chatbots are similar rule based systems anyways.
Have a look at Speakeasy for a bot that is trained on reddit using deep learning, it produces very plausible responses to queries but has a few weaknesses.
Firstly it's not task directed, so if you ask it about changing the oil in a car it doesn't know any useful facts and it doesn't present them - it just fobs you off.
Secondly, type "you're" into it - it will be very rude to you... because... reddit.
So what's needed is something that can read technical documents and use them at the right time in a conversation. Deepdive (http://deepdive.stanford.edu/) gives you a bit of this capability, but when I used it (version 0.4) I struggled, maybe things have improved! Non the less; I do believe that this is state of the art for machine reading.
IBM did a tonne of work on question answering in Watson but I am now so confused about Watson that I literally don't know what to make of where their work has got to.
Hope that helps, would be interested if there are different opinions out there!
As with the brief flurry of the Semantic Web era, I think the lesson with chat bot VI/AI will again be as much in striking the balance between things like Deep Learning and things like Expert Systems, assuming Deep Learning will never be perfect and Expert Systems will never be easy/cheap (building a good one still requires a domain expert in that field to train it in whatever rules engine you are using to express the domain).
However I think that the cost of knowledge engineering is still massive and the challenge of this kind of project so sharp that it makes me quail to imagine execution! I think three or four years of full on tool development might make this more practical...
Much like the examples in this article, I haven't seen any bots that can present information in a way that is easier than a normal interface, or that even counts as "conversational."
Maybe I'm being an asshole when I say this, but it just doesn't feel like these chatbot companies have put in the sheer man-hours to work out conversations. They're feeding you the information they have, through a small number of prompts that they predetermine. 100% useless.
Where are the creators of Cleverbot? Shouldn't they be using their platform to capitalize on this? That was the most conversational bot I'd seen so far and it came out forever ago.
The wrong people are doing the wrong job, too fast and without any forethought, to capitalize on the tech news hype cycle more than anything else.
Conversational UIs are good for two things really - dealing with massively selection, and providing an interface for entirely naive users.
Ultimately, I see them as much an extension of search interfaces as they are of messenger apps, insofar as given a potentially open-ended number of buttons (like restaurants in your area) it's easier to ask for them in english, despite the fact that the interface has anticipate all the issues that brings (you might not get it right, your request may be ambiguous etc)
And, sometimes it's easier to use english to make a selection - particularly if you don't know how to do something that should be relatively simple, and is consequently relatively simple to describe in english ("Hotel room, turn on the lights." "I want to order a pizza."). Unfortunately, this takes both advanced natural language parsing, and equally advanced response generation. The later is much harder, and I feel generally neglected, by most chatbots and platforms, IMHO.
This makes a lot more sense when using voice rather than text, but ultimately, hybrid voice/gui chat displays are what chatbots are going to evolve to. You will ask for something via voice and in addition to receiving audio responses, you will receive a stream of UI widgets in a chat window containing supplemental information and finer grained controls, such as sliders for the color/brightness of your hotel room light, or an options menu for your pizza order.
Amazon Alexa and Google Now are already quietly doing this, for the most part, but it's going to become a much prominent part of the interaction over time.
After a couple of months of training it it could keep up a conversation for a few minutes along most of the tracks that it had learned. To make it look more life-like I added random delays in answering and sometimes splitting an answer across two messages. Spelling errors were retained as well instead of being corrected.
Of course that's not a 'bot', merely a recorder and replay but it was at least as effective as long as the conversation was kept relatively short.
I think I should be able to ask your chatbot how their day is going, but I don't think I should be able to shitpost with it for 3 hours.
The reason I bring up Chatbot is because they seemed to at least have the conversational part figured out.
Also, Siri is really not such a part of this conversation because it is honestly the only chatbot that I can think of that accomplishes a portion of what we're talking about here.
These little things - even though programmed by some other person - can spice things up and make the bot look even more natural.
Go home Siri.
"Make sure you don't overcook that egg" or
"The suspense is killing me".
Failed cases : 1. Lookup Wikipedia during an amazing race 2. Play a specific song 3. Find an event in my calendar
- It won't work in a loud bar
- It will almost always work in a car where you're the driver and there's a backseat conversation or the radio is on.
- It's fine with street/sidewalk noise.
- Not-terribly-loud coffee shops, stores, etc. are also usually just fine.
That's not how we'll be able to achieve real AI soon.
The reason why 90% of chatbot companies aren't living up to the hype is because they're doing it wrong. Either it's an phone tree, or they're doing naive matching on regexps, or perhaps just throwing a bunch of data and trying to deep learn some intents. It's pretty amateurish. If you used more traditional NLP techniques, you'd get much further.
The other problem with chatbots is that people have become accustomed to general chatbots like Siri, and so even if you say, "my chatbot only does X", you're still going to have people trying all sorts if stuff that's not X. ("Hey, banking bot! What's the melting point of lead?" "I only do banking question." "You suck banking bot.")
We are just way, way off technologically.
Originally designed for and lessons from the game company formerly known as Jellyvision (the game company part of that is now spun off into Jackbox Games), the Jack Principles was a briefly free resource during the late part of the IRC chat bot golden age in the 90s.
The consulting firm that is left at Jellyvision still uses it as a part of their consulting, so they don't give copies away for free anymore. I'd love to see a new edition of the Jack Principles in textbook form, especially now that it is very relevant again.
Funny, I see the interface of bots on a messaging platform as their only value. As for the AI/NLP, Meh. To me the possibility of replacing the umpteen apps and Web pages with a single consistent UI is the appealing part.
In many ways this new generation of chatbot is worse than what we had 20 years ago in IRC -- at least then the functionality was clearly presented.
Well put, sir. I hadn't managed to put that into words quite as succinctly but you've pinpointed exactly my feelings and my reasons for skepticism.
Unless you bother to read up on the commands that it accepts you find yourself greeted 50% of the time with "I don't know how to do that". Now we're on the same turf as any good UX problem - power-users (who have the incentive to learn an interface) vs casual users (who don't and shouldn't have to). Chat bots seem to be targeting the latter but they require the time investment of the former.
I've grown very tired of all the differing UIS I must navigate on a daily basis.
I've never met a command line that wasn't obfuscated. Try learning Unix using only man pages as reference. With bots, you can at least expect reasonable responses to some natural-language requests.
Last year, I said:
"Chatbots are a fancy name for when your API is accessible through some well-known IM service. They come with all of the monetization issues of APIs, but they're surfaced in an environment where you have no pre-existing relationship with the client, and you can't even charge them for access. This essentially limits the business model to where you give away the chatbot and make money some other way; or you recognize you have no business model and do it anyway." [1]
The discoverability factor is amusing: apparently everyone complains about discoverability, just like they did with Apps and websites. First-comer Kik isn't big enough for advertisers, meanwhile, Facebook added bots just to have them and isn't doing anything to promote them because it realized it has all the users, and botmakers will give them business regardless.
The discoverability question always boils down to "how will people find my stuff, in favor of my competitor's stuff?", which just proves that the chatboot "boom" is just like the app boom and the website boom before it [2]: a gold rush to make it big early, then as the dust settles, the roster of victors will have emerged and they'll maintain those rankings for years. Others can still establish niches for themselves, but they are deluded if they think runaway success is a realistic goal.
All this means, as the article points out, that most of today's chatbots are just phone trees in text form -- which still has value, but is a lot less enticing as a get-quick-quick scheme.
Actually, for this very reason we don't even have the word "chatbot" on our homepage.
When people say things like "stay in contact with everyone who clicked on the ad to open a conversation with the bot", "Discovery is the biggest challenge", it shows that they just don't get it.
No customer, ever, will open their Messenger just to hold a conversation with your chatbot. Customers don't actually want to "discover" your bot so that they can chat with it. Why would they want that? They have more important things to do with their lives. :)
What customers want when they write to you on Messenger is finding information or performing a transaction. When you understand that, you can quickly see the benefit.
E.g. add a bot that will instantly reply to frequently asked questions to decrease the load of your customer support team. And when the bot doesn't understand requests, don't make it say "sorry I don't understand", just leave the question and a human will reply later (and maybe send a message with expected timeframe for human response).
When you have a chatbot which can replies to more than 30% of customer queries (for some of our users, we've seen bots reply to more than 90% of questions), it'll save plenty of money and time for your business.
About discoverability, well, how did your customers find your Facebook page in the past? Why do we need a special way to "discover" now? Maybe for "game and entertainment chatbots" a bot store would work, but I just don't see how it would work for serious businesses.
How can a business leverage bots right now?
- quick data collection
- instant answers to frequently asked questions
- surveys and polls over chat
- lead nurturing via Messenger (engagement rates > 70% compared to low read rate of email)Why not just present your users with your FAQ and a search box prior to them chatting with an agent? If most customers write in to support on questions that they would've found answers to via an FAQ, wouldn't that work? You don't need a bot for that, and it's just more load on a customer to try and understand the interface to the bot.
I think bots are going to be big in customer support or in conversations between a customer and a business, but I feel like a lot of bots are being built to try and replace the human connection between customer and the business, which I think is the wrong approach.
Because e.g. the user asked the question on Facebook Messenger. And you don't want to send them to your website when you can reply instantly, right there.
> You don't need a bot for that, and it's just more load on a customer to try and understand the interface to the bot.
I'm actually advocating for bots with no interface, no IRC-like commands. The customer sends the question via chat. If the bot understands it replies instantly, if not a support person replies. Simple. No "type X for whatever" or "sorry I didn't understand your request".
> I feel like a lot of bots are being built to try and replace the human connection between customer and the business, which I think is the wrong approach.
We're definitely on the same page. :)
You're defending the use of a bot for a scenario that only occurs because the bot exists.
There are currently hundreds of thousands of Facebook pages which receive dozens of customer support questions every day via Messenger.
My point is that a bot can be used reply instantly to frequently asked questions and leave more sophisticated questions to humans. I'm not defending any fancy use of bots. Just simple use cases like this.
Also I just spent 50 minutes in chat with either a bot (or possibly human named Anil) with Comcast trying to sort out a billing issue. Spent 20 minutes trying to point out the lines in the bill I was disputing though I got the credit but I'm not sure if they actually knew why they were giving it. I'm not sure if it would have been faster to call by phone (usually not) but I thought I'd try the chat interface. I wonder if a good bot might be able to figure out context and get a human involved and give them relevant context faster and sped that interaction up.
I don't understand the bot part of this. First looks like a search box over faqs and second sounds like a web wizard survey .
I think "instant answers to frequently asked questions and surveys and polls over chat" (with some NLP to make it better) surely match that definition, no?
I don't understand why everyone is so fixated on the AI/conversation aspect. :)
With the current state of the technology, companies can benefit by using bots to enhance human-to-human conversations, not trying to replace them altogether.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. Bots should be a complement to human conversations, not a replacement. Having a bot doesn't mean you hire less customer support agents, it just makes them more productive.
But as you mentioned, when using a bot, the goal should be customer happiness, not cutting costs.
And a fantastic way of building your bot on top of the platform of a 3rd party, which, at any time and for no reasons, can cut you off.
And I agree with you. If you weren't using Facebook to reach customers in the past, there's no point building a Messenger bot.
I would love to present our virtual assistant "James" to the rest of the world, but we have only recently started to build english training data. Currently it only understands english with the use of synonyms, so it isn't working as well as it should.
If you're interested in trying it out you can play with it on the webpage of one of the largest banks in Norway http://srbank.no, the chat icon is at the bottom right. You can ask questions in English, but it will unfortunately only answer in Norwegian at this time, so you have to use google translate too see if it answered correctly. "James" do support language detection though, but we have just recently starting to add the english answers. In a few weeks and James will answer in English :-)
Currently James can predict over 1500 intents related to banking and insurance. Here are some of the more complex questions James can handle:
Want to open a savings account for my daughter
Can I adjust the limit on my sons bank card
What can you tell me about my pension
Do you have a pension calculator?
I was out drinking last night and lost my credit card
If anyone says that chatbots aren't working and will never work, I can say this with real data to back me up, it works very well! The feedback we have gotten the last few months has been amazing! And I'm 100% sure that chatbots will become a big industry the next years. Complex UI's will finally be good riddance.
Feel free to ask me anything if you have any questions.
When you write 'built i from scratch' what do you mean? That you handcrafted all the data?
How long did it take to develop this bot, and what technologies did you use?
It is still under development, we started at the end of last summer. We use Torch and Python-NLTK.
What kind of model is possible in LUA-torch that could not be done in python with caffe/tensorflow?
We may switch to pyTorch though, but Lua works rather well for now.
Chatbots were probably overhyped and oversold to people. Not every platform needs to explode overnight and produce SV unicorns. I think there is immense value in chatbots as a platform, but expectations should be tempered. I've seen little to no overt marketing to regular users that they can ask a bot rather than looking for an app or website. Most users don't really want to download and learn another app and create another account for every little thing. Additionally, many budget phones in emerging markets have limited data, limited storage space, and minimal specs for downloading and running apps for every little thing.
That said, this article is pretty terrible. It almost seems like they chose the worst possible examples to fit a given narrative.
Those symptom checkers have them most of the time - I just can't see it fit within a bot as well.
So far I've heard only three compelling reasons: to support users without smart phones, to support voice interfaces or to be accessible through Slack etc.
Bots allow us to reach people all over the world no matter whether they are on their desktop, tablet, smartphone, or budget phone on every platform (iOS, Android, etc.). When I look at my girlfriend's phone, she has 95+ updates waiting and she's not looking to download more apps when a Google search would suffice.
We've discussed building an app in the future to enable even more features, but it's not a high priority right now. We're competing against Googling what's wrong with you, and we have to be just as easy to get started with. The priority for us is answering people's health questions.
Hand-building the tree to be efficient is actually the hardest part.
Edit: yes, this is probably "AI" to some people, but AI only exists as long as we don't understand it. This kind of tech has been well-understood since the 70s.
Now chatbots can be used as a content distribution channel (see publishers’ bots), app replacement (Swell is a great example, and they are in the next YC batch, congrats to them), but I’d like to point out how makers miss the point on arguably the largest use case for messaging in the business world today, customer service. Yes, most bots that address this domain can’t live up to the expectation either. And really, just think Job to be Done, the customer wants a quick, accurate and preferably personal reply to their question or issue, it is that simple.
So what we (Bicycle AI) did to make our clients better at this Job is we are fusing human and AI for a faster, affordable and scalable solution for SMEs. I hear you say, wait, isn’t this like Digital Genius, well, nope, we integrate with Intercom for example and we have a team of AI supervisors who approve the answers suggested by our AI.
This means our clients can provide blazing fast customer service for their customers 24/7 and according to their volumes. Simple as that. We use past conversation history and product docs to generate our suggested answers. We can go live pretty fast and can take care of around 60-70% of incoming conversations, escalating the complex cases after engagement.
Aaand, we are in alfa stage with emails.
So when it comes to harnessing automation in customer service, we believe that customers should not be the ones dealing with the rough edges.
I can just imagine how much more annoying a "cute" pseudo-AI will be when I just want to get through to a human being.
Advertise that they can get connected to a human by typing 'human' and see how popular it is. I would be impressed if a bot could get to 10%.
I don't think you need a confidence metric, the humans using the bot will be happy to signal to you that they're not receiving value.
When a client sends an email it's parsed by an AI to find things that could be answered automatically (because the user can't be bothered to read the faq) it replies to the user.
It tells the user that it was answered automatically and ask him if it answers his question, if he says something negative it's forwarded to a human support
In some ways they are great because they make command line more popular in some ways the are completely useless as they turn something which should most likely be automated into a manual process.
These "bot" cult members say this time it's different because now we have deep learning and it's different from the shitty comcast/verizon call center lines where you have to walk down the decision tree.
But the problem is 99% of these people have no idea what they are talking about. They probably saw the Lee Sedol match and thought AI has made some huge breakthrough almost like quantum computing. It hasn't. The accuracy has gotten better and that surely enables a lot of things, but this has nothing to do with what these idiots are trying to build.
If you look at the type of people considered "experts" in the chatbot scene, you'll immediately understand how ridiculous this is. Most of them are non technical people who don't even know how to write a simple program.
It's hilarious watching these "chatbot experts" talking about how the "old approach" to AI was all about stupid decision tree whereas "NOW with deep learning you can actually let the machine learn!" haha welcome to "machine learning".
If you chat with a bot you have near-human expectations. Yes it should be flexible and not just one-purpose. That's the reason for chatbots instead of a button. And if you can't provide that you need to use bots to make human labour cheaper, e.g. telephone bots who make support hotlines cheaper by getting some of the details out of the way before sending you to a human. Success will come to companies who can work in this gray area where bots and humans interact to provide a service together. I think Amazon did the same, when they started their suggestion engine, where actually humans would do the sorting at first, then supported by machine learning and finally they got replaced by pure software.
everyone jumped on bandwagon for FOMO (fear-of-missing-out)
The small games are pretty fun too, perfect for killing time when bored.
There are also things which would otherwise have to have been a separate app. I don't want to download another app.
Chatbots with AI where they try to have a "conversation" is often just a lot of hurdles to do something that should be trivial.
I feel your pain. I'm tired of all these attempts to monitize data with apps, Web pages and adds. I'd rather have a single platform I could just type in weather @ 99999 to see the forecast. Kind of like SMS 10 years ago but with graphical and audio response capability.
And yes, I'd pay money for the service.
There have been small improvements but the real breakthrough was a couple of years back when Google got good enough that i started typing search queries in plain English for most things.
Customer Service -- Login issues -- Information about products -- Walk them through problems
Health -- Information retrival, pills, medicine -- Diagnosis, based on symptoms -- Getting an appointment with a doctor
Finance -- Payment, (entity wants to pay entity sum) -- Counseling (legal, tax, pension, savings, investment)
And there are a dozen more. Chatbots will work because they use an interface we humans already know well, natural language.
"Does this product reduce the number of social interactions I have to have? Does it let me do something without interacting with another individual?"
Chatbots, because developers keep trying to make them more "human", fail the second part of the question. They "feel" like talking to a person at times, which is something I don't want. I'll just tap a few buttons instead.
Talking at a CLI interface is no more a "conversation" than typing at one. Despite the fact that interactive computer systems were called "conversational". (Don't believe me? There are books on the subject, from 1968: https://www.worldcat.org/title/conversational-computers/oclc... https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=kw%3Aconversational+comput...)
I've been thinking about world models and communication a great deal. In this context, talking (or typing) with a chatbot is a great deal like arguing with an idiot. If the chatbot's world model doesn't include the actions or questions you're trying to address, there's simply no way to get it to understand. Quite literally, its world doesn't include such things. Though unlike the proverbial wrestling with a pig, in this case, you're the one far more likely to be annoyed.
Which gets to another major problem: such systems are constructed, and serve, the interests of their creators and clients: the companies which create them, frequently not the same as those who deploy them, the clients.
Users' interests are at the bottom of the priority stack.
Some weeks ago I had the pleasure of calling the local (and pathetic) newspaper company after our Sunday paper failed to arrive. I was greated, on three successive phone calls, to a several-minutes-long pitch for services I had absolutely no interest in, when trying to address a problem created by the company in the first place. To put it mildly, I was not pleased.
And my standing recommendation to cancel the subscription (substituting it with a much superior national paper) seems to be bearing out.
Chatbots which treat interactions as captive sales opportunities will, I suspect, not greatly enhance customer affinity to brands deploying such strategies.
Walked away very disappointed. The chatbot would give incoherent unfitting answers every three sentences or so. It was also unable to keep in mind what had already been written.
At that point we get into some very interesting social questions, though.
Rumour has it there was this one guy who wanted to marry her ;)
Futurism is an extremely useful exercise as long as it's treated as a thought experiment based on current trends rather than actual prognostication.
The median HN post is probably wiser or better informed than the median post to Slashdot or /r/programming or whatever, but at the end of the day it's still an Internet forum for anonymous tech enthusiasts, with all of the potential for bias and tunnel vision that that implies. You still have to wade through mountains of garbage to find gems of insight, there's just sometimes a little less garbage and a little more insight here than elsewhere. I don't say that to cast shade on HN, rather I think accomplishing something like "a little less garbage than proggit" is a freaking miracle and that's why I read HN every day.
Most of us tend to anthropomorphize (or hivemind-ize?) the community, but it's divided on just about every controversial question.