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Comment by benbread | Hacker News Reader

It'll be interesting to see how a human knowing they're talking to a bot changes their behaviour - in the demos people thought they were talking to another person, and are polite and professional - I wonder if knowing they're talking to a machine people may change their tone, become more abrupt, speak more slowly or become agressive - maybe it would lead to unconscious (or likely conscious) discrimination against bot calls, in a similar way to stories seen of people with 'ethnic' accents calling restaurants and being told there are no reservations, when in fact there are.

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Can't wait for a day we'll be talking about human privilege and quotas for chatbots in call centers. /s

Your observation is most likely true, though. Humans do talk to machines differently, and I'm not talking about those who swear at bots "just for fun".

Personally, as soon as I'm positive I'm talking with a bot (because it doesn't respond naturally) I remove any unnecessary verbal clutter, as it is confusing for the machine and my respect for the bot (haha) is by exactly omitting what's irrelevant. Also I try to guess what keywords bot would recognize best, so I would get what exactly I'm asking for.

So, "Hey, can you please help me? I'm looking for a way to configure Foo to do Bar, but stuck with error code 123. I wonder if there's any blah blah blah. Thank you very much!" becomes something like "How to configure Foo for Bar? It fails with error 123." And that if I still try to use natural language and don't go with `Foo Bar configuration error 123`. Surely, such conversation with a human would be considered impolite to say the least.

The above's tech-biased, of course.

You're not alone in doing that, though it'll be interesting to see how these boys perform when given these sort of succinct prompts and instructions, given the Google example was trained on real conversations - you may find they perform worse compared to 'natural' speech

I wonder how it does with non-native English speaker on A2-B1 level (e.g. Chinese restaurant ran by immigrants).

> The above's tech-biased, of course.

I'm also very curious how 'normal' people would handle this. Judging by the google search queries I've seen people type, and by their interactions with chat bots, it's quite possible they won't adjust the way they talk all that much.

On the other hand, tools like Siri and Alexa do seem to be teaching these same people to adjust how they talk, so maybe this won't be as much the case anymore.

Do you actually get a useful answer from the bot?

I don't think I have ever got a useful technical answer from any bot that was superior to just using google.

What if it's self correcting?

1. Comp has crap / no website

1. robot can't automatically make booking

1. Comp gets annoyed with robot callers

1. Comp sorts out a decent booking system

1. robots don't need to call anymore.

I would prefer talking to an AI for business calls, because then I know I can get straight to the point without wasting time on being courteous, without having to worry about hurting someones feelings.

> discrimination against bot calls, in a similar way to stories seen of people with 'ethnic' accents

Are you seriously comparing racial discrimination and people wanting to talk to a human instead of a bot? Racism causes huge problem. What‘s the problem in not wanting to talk to a bot?

It's less profitable, and that's a way more important problem. (/s (but also !/s))

> (/s (but also !/s))

The term for that is HHOS.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.ht...

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