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Comment by olavgg | Hacker News Reader

I know that many on HN really dislike chatbots because they don't understand their super special case. As a chatbot maker, with several different chatbots that are live, I can tell you that I've seen the data. Which concludes that chat bots do work, and our clients agree. Chatbots will be everywhere the coming years.

Some of our clients have over 5000 intents, which cover quite a lot of the business, still it is important to let the chatbot be humble and connect the user to a human when it is too difficult to help.

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Could you expand a bit on the niche you see them filling? I think some of the negative perception of chatbots recently owes a lot to exactly what the OP said - gross overapplication in areas with very marginal benefit, if any, to user experience (e.g. why do I want to interact with your service though an opaque natural language interface versus less ambiguous search controls/interface?).

I wouldn't say niche, there are hundreds of use cases. I believe we have just scratched the surface of possibilities yet. I think you could say, in every situation you would ask a human a question you could also ask a chatbot.

For me searching is garbage, because I get 10+ search results returned in often a random order based on key words. A FAQ with 5000 topics is enormous, and a typical search interface is a bad user experience for finding the answer for your question.

A chatbot, which is properly implemented and that cover the exact intent you are asking will return one answer, with maybe a few follow-up questions. Fast precise and natural, this is what people want.

Chatbots are coming off the peak of inflated expectations, down into the trough of disillusionment.

I suspect many people have never even used search tools that were powerful and allowed for highly targeted searching.

Dealing with chatbots, I always feel like I'm in a badly done Infocom text adventure, trying to play guess the verb to solve an obtuse puzzle. I've done a little work with some of these NLP services, and it's staggering how similar matching utterances to intents is to adding a custom verb to the Inform 6 parser, on the implementation side.

because they don't understand their super special case

Perhaps you could you expand on the use case for mimicking a human personality, rather than presenting an interface that's obviously a piece of software that uses human-like language to the best of it's ability?

Got any pointers on getting into your line of business (e.g. as a business consultant)? What are the big problems you deal with in this space? I really see chatbots as disruptive for customer service, especially for power users, if implemented in the right way.

The big challenge is creating good data. We constantly analyze chat conversations. Sometimes our chatbot answer wrong because of a corner case that we didn't think about. It could be lack of training data, context mismatch or that follow-up intents are missing. The technology works, but the data structure needs improvement all the time. We have people that work with this and we call them "AI-Trainers".

Can you give some examples of the "data" and some concrete examples of chatbots "working"? What is this super special case you're talking about?

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