Chatbots were the next big thing: what happened?
blog.growthbot.org
blog.growthbot.org
For this argument to make any sense, there would need to be data that showed growing usage of chatbots, followed by a plateau and then a drop off. I’m not sure what that data looks like, but I’m pretty sure there was never a high growth phase where users were actually interacting with the chatbots. It was all hype created by Facebook and a few idiotic VCs who wasted money on what they thought would be the “next App Store.”
I, and many others, were saying around the time of this hype that chatbots would never become a category defining product, simply due to inherent usability flaws in their design that have been discussed ad nauseum.
The only people surprised that chatbots failed to become the “next big thing” are the people who mistakenly thought they ever would be. This assumption was never grounded in any real data of user desires or real problems. Chatbots were then, and are now, a solution looking for a problem. I’m not surprised at all.
However, I do think there's some truth to this article - the rise of digital assistants in Google Home, Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, is, in a sense, the rise of the chat bot. You can text them and they'll do things. You can talk to them and they'll do things. You can even get them to schedule a haircut for you[0], as Google recently demonstrated. I think these bots are semantically identical to what we think of chat bots as doing. If you would've told me 3 or 4 years ago, that people would willingly let a "bot" into their home that listens to everything they say and talks back, I would've been skeptical, to say the least. Now, even my hippie roommate has one of these things. I still don't get it, but to claim that "bots are dead, long live humans" misses the mark about how fast speech to computer/computer to speech tech is evolving. Watch the video and be... amazed:
[0]https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/8/17332070/google-assistant-...
So yeah, the idiot VCs missed the mark - this isn't going to be a consumer revolution, led by a few scrappy start ups, one-man teams, and dreamers. It's a revolution in data collection, human-computer interaction, and AI that's already been taking place behind the scenes at Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon for years, and will continue to as long as they hold the tech world's best AI talent.
There will be room for startups to put the glue between the bots be everything else, but the core tech for the conversational interface is not going to come from startups.
The Voice Assistance is a vocal chatbot. People were thinking it was going to be text.
No one missed anything except the actual product everyone was talking about. I feel like this happens all the time. We get caught into one strict interpenetration and miss the HUGE thing staring at our face, or ears in this instance.
It's actually the people who believe that Android is Linux-based that are mistaken. If you write for Android, you write for Android and nothing more. You can't just run the application on a regular Linux (i.e. the one with libc and X11), and if Google ever rips Linux kernel out of it and replaces with, say, DOS, most of the applications won't even need to be recompiled, because they were using Android's API/ABI.
No, not quite, not without enormous effort. Look at Cygwin or WSL or Wine: tons of work poured into and still not there yet.
On the other hand, typical Android application only ever touches Android's API and doesn't even leave its JVM. Replacing whole kernel (with obvious single point of work in Java interpreter) would be practically invisible.
When we can reasonably "chat" with our voice assistants then we have actually gotten there. More specifically, when I can tell my voice chatbot I just want to say "alexa" in the morning when the alarm goes off to snooze. Or when they are adaptable and pattern observant enough that I can say "alexa the usual" in the morning and get the higher volume as I walk through the house and news and my favorite podcast as I ask for every morning. When they come close to accomplishing those things, then we will have vocal chatbots. When they can "remember" just as much as the original Eliza chatbot then we will be there. Currently they are more like vocal light switches than vocal chatbots.
Which is to say, they're not getting a whole lot of usage of features you might consider to be chatbot functionality.
This, to me, is likely why Amazon sends me emails saying "What can Alexa do now?"
Ex: "Hi (...), since you always turn off the heater when you leave, would you like me to schedule to always do it for you?"
Actually, I'm still quite bullish on this. Advocates always talk about how 'VUI' (Voice User Interfaces) will be the next big thing but from what I've observed most people - actual users, not financially invested in their success - still remain quite bullish on them, or they only use them to set timers.
I don't believe Amazon, Google, or Apple have ever actually released sales figures for their assistants. I believe its because the numbers would look so insignificant compared to everything else.
I mean that I'm, put lightly, skeptical of the whole digital voice assistant thing.
You're one of today's lucky 10,000! :D https://xkcd.com/1053/
And the other ones the other one.
Yes, it will take a few years. But consider that there are now tens of millions of Alexa pucks out there. The bot may suck today, but it’s getting better quickly, and consumers are receptive and ready to reward the tech giants when they finally succeed.
AWS was not great in its first 5 years. Its capabilities 5 years ago were pretty good but nothing compared to today.
Google is bad at long term development, especially with Ruth Porat at CFO. Microsoft is mixed - for every Xbox and Hololens there's a Courier.
One thing missed in chatbots is that X dot AI is a chat bot that works pretty well. There are others that are similarly domain limited where the current interaction model is an email thread or a text conversation. These tend to be doing well.
My perception of Microsoft is that it's a Hydra.
The upside is that it's not all bad! The head responsible for the product you care for might have been there for a long time, and is doing a really good job in keeping it up.
The downside is that the other heads might be doing something entirely different and turn the whole beast around .
And while all this is going on, some heads just get chopped off here and there.
(sniff Lumia sniff)
As an aside, I tend to think about what I'd be prepared to pay for something before I click on the pricing page. In the case of X dot AI, it was about $5-10 per month. I'm sure it is good, but docusign (similar price) is MUCH more valuable to me - time kills deals and docusign helps bring them in. An AI bot that books in meetings just doesn't deliver the same ROI.
On the other hand, if someone would have pitched Facebook to me, I would have also dismissed it. I keep that mind to stay humble.
For any trend/hype there will always be people dismissing and praising it. Thus, if it is successful or not, there will be people who say "I told you so" afterwards.
It does not matter what a comment on HN says. You personally have to decide, if you want to speculate/invest in some hype or not. You have to decide which new technology you learn and which ones you ignore. In hindsight, it would have been great to learn machine learning five years ago.
The one that I dismissed was Twitter. In fact I thought it was a joke when I first heard about it, something making fun of how long winded boring blog posts on services like Livejournal tended to be. I also thought Vine would be doomed to fail.
“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” - Mencken (paraphrased)
http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2011/09/no-one-ever-went-brok...
I still remember finding it strange to see how Ashton and Demi personally wrote short messages, since every form of communication from famous people at the time were formal statements released via the press.
Uber was not a surprise at all for me because I'd been complaining about the bloated and horrible taxicab system for many years. It was a market that was crying out for disruption. I remember in 2008 my local taxicab company had exactly two ways to hail a cab: phone or fax. They might or might not show up at the appointed time, and they'd certainly never send you any kind of updates. It cost upwards of $5 to step into the cab, and after that there were fees out the wazoo (per 1/6th mile fee, per 45 seconds fee, fee for having a bag, a fuel surcharge, a license surcharge, a regulatory recovery surcharge, and a couple others I forget). The cabs might have credit card readers but they were always broken so it was cash only. Drivers took weirdly roundabout backroads paths and always claimed it was fastest if you asked them about it, even though I knew the highway was not busy at 4am. Every single thing about the experience sucked. When they started crying later that Uber was killing their business my response was "good".
It was initially a carpooling app. The original pitch was that regular drivers would just drive to their own intended location and have an ability to see people on route who wanted to go the same way. Much harder to pick that idea out as a future billion dollar company.
(I was at that conference: everything went wrong, but it was mostly super cold. Cars were stuck in slippery snow, so someone suggesting the idea of carpooling sounds odd, but I suspect anyone there would have loved to wait out the traffic inside a heated car.)
When I moved to the US in 2003, the lack of something like Uber was a surprise.
Not in the smartphone-app sense, of course (those didn't exist yet), but in the sense of regular-Joes-making-a-buck-giving-a-ride sense.
Back in Ukraine, there was no taxicab monopoly. You could hail a ride on the street simply by raising your hand - and someone would pick you up pretty fast. Some people did it for a living, some would use the extra income on the way to/from work if you were going in the same direction (not unlikely if you are standing on a major street going to downtown, for example).
The fares were unregulated and negotiated on the spot, but there was an equilibrium point for every route. (Unless you were a tourist, in which case you'll be almost surely ripped off - nothing any local would care about though).
And, of course, there was no rating system, which took away the incentives for drivers to go out of their way to maintain a nice appearance. Don't like it, don't take the ride; the next car is will stop by a minute later for you, the next passenger will be around the corner for the driver.
Other than the lack of ratings and fixed pricing, this worked like Uber works now in other aspects.
What might be surprising is that central pricing and ratings really don't make ridesharing much different from what I described. It made the system more accepted in the US, but the end result is pretty much the same: I can hail a ride anywhere from people I don't know. The system stabilizes at a price point and expected level of service.
And there's a remarkable similarity in the downsides of this system. My father made some money giving rides back in Ukraine between jobs, and while the short-term revenue looked great (compared to average monthly salaries), so much of it went into gas and maintenance that the whole gig was hardly worth it - and it took more time than a job.
This is what Uber drivers are discovering themselves right now. The ones who took out loans for their shiny cars are especially screwed.
These existed nationwide in the United States in the early days of the 20th century, until about WWII. In many cities they were called "jitneys." Some were organized enough to operate as simple, private, anonymous bus companies with fixed (but flexible) routes.
They started disappearing after WWII when most people outside the urban cores got a car, and municipal governments started taking over public transit.
These still exist in some places, but are mostly in ethnic minority communities and spread by word-of-mouth. (I know first-hand because I got hit head-on by one full of schoolchildren in the late 90's.)
I was using VRBO a decade ago for vacations. AirBnB is more distinguished by a slick UI than business model innovation.
We still don’t know how price sensitive the average Uber customer is.
What surprised me was seeing a serious journalist like Wolf Blitzer regularly reading people's tweets on his prime time show.
We should also keep in mind that chatbots are clearly a thing that people want; we're just using capitalism to test whether society, technology, etc. are "there" yet, so it's not entirely irrational for investment to flow into this area. (We might debate the scale of the investments, or we can just let the market determine that for us.)
But while it does that, it also plays to something even more deeply human: to watch other people from afar, and to replace complex, anxiety-ridden face-to-face interactions with easier, gentler text-based communication.
Google Glass and all the other hyped techs never struck at anything deeply human. VR is nice and all as a tech, but it's not something we've always done.
VR, virtual reality, is a complete immersion in a virtual world. A 3D game, a 3D movie, a 3D Minecraft, you name it.
AR, augmented reality, is additional "augmented" information in the real world.
VR is nowhere NEAR ready for mass consumer market. There's 2 screens on the glasses with very low resolution. Because the glasses are very much near the eyes, pixels are very apparent. That's ugly. Furthermore, you need a big fat gaming rig with a 1000 EUR/USD graphics card for the current low resolution. And then there is the issue of the data transmission. Those huge wires (its not wireless yet, and wireless suffers from more lag). Finally, it is pricey.
AR from Google Glass flopped due to privacy concerns. It would aid users in their day to day life like a smartphone or smartwatch does. Its being used for this purpose in business settings (also due to its price) just like some other expensive tools by Microsoft such as Hololens and Surface Hub (84"). The user interface isn't quite there. For example I'd say eye tracking is useful. Some cars also get HUD in windscreen.
(YMMV but as a glass user who uses glasses which also work like sunglasses in the direct sunlight, I'd love to have a pimped glasses with AR.)
Anyway, in short, my conclusion, is:
VR is mostly fun, though some useful sims (e.g. flight trainers, but also things like 3D meetings would make Hyperloop and air travel redundant which saves time & environment) do use it as well. It is more of a niche than AR. AR is going to be part of our every day life in useful/productive ways. AR will be vastly more rampant, and it will be in use in a massive scale earlier than VR will be.
As a side thought imagine going on vacation in VR and it being just like the real thing cause you're on a robot. Your 5 senses get stimulated while you walk through Cairo. You smell the spice whilst you walk through the market on your robot which you control. Why actually still go on vacation then? I already have enough pleasure with Google Photos or the new Windows 10 login screen as it is. Going to see the Eifel Tower which you already saw hundreds of time on pictures is boring as is receiving that piece of metal on a postcard. Oh well.
The requirement of a high-end GPU, and the current price of high-end GPUs thanks to the cryptocurrency mania, meddle with the adoption.
We're far from VR being mainstream; AR costs far less resources.
From my experience, VR is a huge gamechanger (a new paradigm that will enable a lot of new innovation) whereas AR is also cool but doesn't have that new paradigm potential (like e.g. the internet, smartphones etc. did).
Oh I read your post, its against HN guidelines to assume and express someone else has not read your post or the content.
If you read the post of your GP (and that GP as well) you'll see they're casually mixing up AR and VR. You do the same, and I called you all out on the difference between the two. There's no need to feel offended about that.
You say you haven't had an opportunity to try AR, and mention Google Glass. The thing is, Google Glass is just one example of AR (a very known one) and also a very multi-functional one. The usability I had in mind is more subtle, more specific.
Examples: Layar has been out for ages (it adds AR on your smartphone screen from camera input e.g. adding complimentary digital info to a paper magazine or food you bought), if you have multiple smartphone cameras you use it, LIDAR uses it, Google Maps ecosystem as well (Street View for example). AI in general can use it. There's all kind of usages of AR such as this traffic light [1]. Not even mentioning about the experiment on how biking lanes are being lit up due to solar energy in the evening/night. Google Glass could've potentially done that all, but there's no reason that cannot exist in the future. It was just the wrong company to come first with the product. Google was also too early with it, just like Apple Newton was too early and GM was too early with the EV.
My first time using VR was on vacation in Spain as a child, using those red/green glasses we were watching a dinosaur movie. It was rather primitive, but immersive. I'm not anti; I just see it rather limited. I've read enough reviews about VR glasses and read reviews of VR games -including realistic screenshots- to know that the quality isn't there yet.
Long-term, VR will make more impact, but that's because it is so different whereas AR is rather complimentary. On the short term, AR is going to be more widespread and useful. I mean, I'd love a HUD on my windscreen telling me I am speeding. Like, of course.
[1] https://dutchreview.com/news/dutch/smart-crossing-dutch-inve...
>Its against HN guidelines to assume and express someone else has not read your post or the content
Hmmm. Uh-huh well, if you're talking about limited AR such as in HUDs or Pokemon Go or glass, that's already here and it's cool and useful, but not very exciting (at least to me). No doubt AR will be a thing in everyday life. I don't see why people (myself included) talk about both technologies (AR & VR) as if its a zero-sum game and we'll only have one but not the other. No reason they both can't exist in the brave new future.
I'd say, that when AR is "boring" that actually means it succeeds. It blends in without being annoying.
If you remember the time when desktops and mobile phones and smartphones become boring; that is when they started to gain traction among the common man; arguably, when they started to become good.
Take the traffic light example I mentioned earlier. If that's rolled out and seen as "boring", I'm happy with it. Because that means it works. Right now, it isn't yet boring, btw. It is seen as an innovation.
Same with innovations like electric vehicle and autonomous cars. Once they're "boring", their functionality is accepted. And we are talking about the "West"; it hasn't been adopted in poorer countries at all, not yet.
VR def. has the wow factor, I agree on that. Look at all the VR movies the past 30 years. AR is much less apparent, though its there as well.
Ultimately, for me games are just spielerei they might be fun (not so much for me anymore as I grow older); they have little to nothing to do with productivity. AR is going to be more useful for productivity than VR. I just don't see a lot of use for VR, especially not on the short term. You can notice this how the VR glasses are largely marketed for gaming, while AR has professional applications which -ultimately- aim to make our lives easier.
My apologies, my tone was probably a little aggressive.
Gaming is the original VR killer app intended to gin up interest and spur development but current VR offerings go beyond that. One of the more interesting applications so far is 'live events' where your digital avatar can attend live sporting events, concerts etc with other digital avatars (you have to experience this to understand what a potential game changer this is). Even watching regular (i.e 2D) movies in an immersive environment on my headset is more fun than watching it on my tv, with the drawback that as of now you can't share the experience with other people not wearing a headset. I'm just scratching the surface of content that is already available NOW (there's even porn if that's your thing, though I personally don't find this very compelling mostly because of the low resolution). Ultimately, if things go the way I think they might, your VR headset would potentially replace not just your gaming console but also your TV set and your laptop/home office (currently I can play chess in a virtual room with only primitive controllers so I don't think working while completely immersed in a virtual environment is a long way off). If you do have the chance I encourage you to take some time to catch up with the current state of the art.
I agree with you that 'boring' is good but in the world we live in unfortunately new tech has to be 'sexy' and 'exciting' to attract venture money and developer interest it needs to get to the boring stage.
At the time the tech industry was hailing speech recognition as the next big thing. There was a lot of investment in speech: BeVocal, TellMe, Nuance, SpeechWorks, AT&T, L&H, etc. Replace your call center workers with automated systems, use voiceprints to secure sensitive transactions, etc. Amazing AI would effect cost savings and make your business efficient! Sound familiar?
Very few users actually liked these systems over the previous versions that just used the phone keypad. Poor recognition accuracy really pisses users off. And most of the time the recognition errors aren't the user's fault. Ever try to recognize speech on a cellular channel using an acoustic model trained on a landline channel? Crap! This was certainly a problem during the early 2000s because of the emerging mobile phone market.
The UIs (or VUIs as they were called) were awful since they mostly replicated the touchtone versions but added "you can say 'accounts' to...". They continue to be awful because, while speech recognition had gotten a lot of funding (DARPA, etc) in the past, the UI aspects were pretty much ignored and underfunded. People interact very differently when speech is used as the medium. The interaction automatically becomes social. Social interactions with machines are decently well studied (Cliff Nass for one), but the very nuanced aspects are difficult to bake into an IVR system, especially under pressure to deliver on a deadline. The experience feels unnatural very quickly and users either run for the door or starts mashing the keypad.
Ultimately the web killed off industry interest in IVR systems. Want to know your account balance? Log in to a web site and it's right there. No need to dial in your account number, verification and run a gauntlet through a phone menu.
Fast-forward to today and chatbots are the new IVR systems, but without the speech-to-text portion. The speech-to-text portion is the easiest part by far in those types of systems. There's still the need for a parser (shallow or otherwise), a way to pair up queries with responses/actions, the ability to track a dialogue and its context, and most importantly, a "natural" feel to the interaction.
Chatting/texting and speaking are serial in nature; very slow and inefficient. A well-indexed FAQ or an intuitive, well-designed GUI is more useful than a chatbot. The former helps in shortening search time and the later helps at streamlining transactions. Information search and transacting comprise the majority of actions that users perform when they visit a site/system/application. When you talk to a human agent for these two types of actions, guess what they're using to assist you? The same interface you'd use if you served yourself. They just know it better.
As an aside, the only noticeable/innovative use of chatbots I've seen in the past 10 years is on porn sites. I really took notice of the messages in the chat window when it started nagging me for ignore it. I wouldn't be surprised this round of chatbots were inspired by that.
The successful bots are ones that don't attempt to understand and respond to every single question perfectly, but instead act as a supplemental tool / guide and offering concrete decision points and actions for the user to take. For example, instead of asking "How can we reach you?" and letting the user enter free text and figuring out if the user entered a phone number or email or some random text that just short circuits the bot, show two buttons "Via email", "Via phone" and clicking each one would then ask for an email, or phone number.
The successful bots also know when to failover to a human being and failing over fast. I've hardly ever had a good experience dealing with sites that employ chat bots and it's not great to be frustrated by a bot when I'm already an angry customer who hasn't received my order.
I had to have an internet-connected phone on me at all times because people would send messages at any hour and response time was a factor in our discoverability on facebook.
Of course all of these questions were answered on our website (AND ON OUR FACEBOOK PAGE) but simply responding with a URL resulted in attrition. So I found myself running through the same script several times, all day, all night, every day, every night.
The best solution would have been to set up some kind of text parser which would allow people to navigate the website through facebook messenger (oversimplifying) and then alert a human if it couldn't parse the input. We could even have hooked it into the comment feed because facebook was really bad at notifying us of comments. Taking it a step further, the Mero Mero's dream of offering facebook marketing to other companies as a service would actually be reasonable, because it wouldn't just be me sending out hundreds of copypastas 24-hours a day, forever. But I was never able to put a system together because of other time-consuming duties the company needed me to perform.
This is how chatbot functionality should be implemented. Like those "chat with us" links you see on a website that drops you into a window and you get put in someone's queue. It doesn't actually wake them up until the chatbot frontend can't handle the users' request using NLP/decision trees/regex (depending on your level of sophistication of user), and then the whole log is sent to the tech support guy when they get free of the last chat and can read through it and take control.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/for-developers-faceb...
Behind firewall, so here's a key quote:
Facebook’s early efforts to turn Messenger into a service that people can use for shopping or getting news or weather sputtered quickly. But two years on, the Messenger effort is showing signs of life.
Several developers say they have been selling more bots and applications through Messenger in recent months. Trip-booking service SnapTravel, for instance, has seen its cumulative sales through Messenger grow from around $1 million as of May 2017 to around $10 million now, according to CEO Hussein Fazal. Msg.ai, which develops tools for customer service and marketing for messaging apps, has seen enough of a pickup in business to hire a new executive and marketing team, said Msg.ai CEO Puneet Mehta.
20 years ago “artificial intelligence” where taboo words for anyone hoping any funding. It would be called ‘expert system’ or ‘automated agent’ or whatever else that didn’t make people show you the door.
I think what you put as “chat bots” is having the same issue. The concept has been deployed at super large scale and people interact with bots everyday, it’s just not marketed as such.
Currently my phone company, my ISP, my health insurance company, the last airline customer support I had to deal with, they all process a crazy amount of interactions, and all the basic steps were clearly handled by a bot until I got escalated to a human. They are all real world huge scale applications, I don’t know by what other metrics they would be deemed as “failures”, and I don’t think they plateaued, I expect it’s still growing.
Usability? Sure, someone keeps paying for them, but they're not the people who get stuck interacting with them...
Human operators on big operations where already bound to a script for years now, and the “human contact” part was mostly spelling letters and numbers over the phone.
I’m more than happy it switched to chat, and both sides can deal with the exchange asynchronously, in particual with the bot handling the requirements to open the user info.
I feel it’s actually a win-win situation, as incredible as it seems regarding customer support technology.
Has it? Are these experiences people enjoy and would like to see more of?
There's no data before a breakthrough. We should be wary of hypes but at the same time we shouldn't diminish pioneers.
I was working at Radio Shack in 1995-1996 and mobile phones were definitely starting to grow in popularity. By then, you already had subsidized “free” phones and mobile plans were around $35 a month.
When we say that "Mobile is eating the world" or something, we are not talking about the mobile phone we can make a call with but the phone we can use the internet and applications with.
Your data is about the mobile device that allowed us to make a phone call.
If you say that "this is also data" then we have that kind of data for chatbot as well, e.g., the number of sales of Alexa and Google Home devices, or Messenger installations, etc.
The little chat bot widgets never took off because they didn't solve NLP anywhere near as well as Amazon or Google did.
If a next gen chat bot can make a dinner reservation over the phone (like Google's demo), it definitely will be the next big thing.
So much of our day is communicating and if we can automate our communication effectively, it opens the doors for even greater productivity.
0) https://www.vox.com/technology/2018/4/9/17214720/pew-study-b...
1) https://mashable.com/2017/11/02/facebook-phony-accounts-admi...
I at least thought that there would be some Alexa/Siri-level AI going on, but most chat bots are about as intelligent as texting commands to an SMS short-code number.
There was somewhere around 2003-2005, when a couple good ones started showing up on AIM. Since that was the IM of choice at the time, there was zero friction to actually interacting with one.
Anyone predicting it as a "next big thing" after around 2007 totally missed the actual hype and was trying to build on something users had already dismissed as not actually the future.
I think its more about chat then chatbots. Chat has already become the next big thing between customer to customer interaction. What chatbots are trying to do is enabling brands to start interacting with their customer on chat. Human-based support was always there but to able to interact with customers using chat during his/her complete lifecycle was not possible using human agents. But chatbot can solve that. We are moving back to chat because it is one of the two natural media of communication (voice/chat & gesture) to humans. The hype about chatbots was bad, resulting in everyone trying their own version of chatbots and fail. But for those who used it in its actual capabilities, it has done wonders. For some top financial brands of India, it has increased no. of people interacting with a brand to about 400% resulting in ~200% increase in marketing leads and lead quality by ~150%. This is actually the NEXT BIG THING for the marketing department. Also, chat apps are more evolved then SMS/phone apps which give user/customer more control over communication, resulting in happy customers.
Chatbots are not solving any problem as they are not a solution. Instead, they should be used as a tool to solve any other problem, just like AI/Crypto.
These interfaces are almost like a dark pattern because of how bad they are.
With Siri or Google Assistant, you soon figure out few things that this very low intelligence person can do(like telling the weather or setting an alarm) and stick with it.
This is also why I'm excited about iOS12 with all these Siri shortcuts, instead of pretending that we are talking to a smart being let's have a concrete list of things that can do.
On the other hand I do believe that these voice interfaces have some potential, just the technology is not there yet.
When Siri first hit the Iphone and I was trying to figure out if it was useful for me (no), I named my phone Searle[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Chinese_room_thou...
"Hi, in a few words, what can I help you with today?"
> "billing"
"It sounds like you have a question about your bill. I can help you with that! If you can give a few words to describe the reason you are calling, I can help you with your bill."
> "billing"
"OK, let me get you to a representative who can help!"
... instead of spending 10 minutes wrangling with the vapid AI, I can actually move on with my day after speaking to a human. Was this the future we envisioned in the 90s? I think not. Some systems let you spam 0 (zero) and it transfers to a human, but more and more are requiring you to interface with the system in some way, even if disabled or impaired.
But I hear you. I recently wanted to change the ownership of my cellphone account. "Change ownership", "It sounds like you want to change cellphone plans, is that correct?", "Agent", "Okay, let me get you to a representative".
The only tasks these things are equipped to do, are the tasks that I can do via the company's online portal, and in a much less frustrating manner. I wonder who is actually using these things.
It's annoying when my issue isn't on the list, since I'll have to hear it 50 times. And it's incredibly aggravating when my issue is on the list, but the website doesn't actually work right. But it's not hard to understand why it happens.
Yeah, that's unhelpful if "the website" is a sprawling, vast wasteland. Finding a specific thing on an obese, convoluted site is like trying to find the bucket of ice cream in Siberia. I always check the site first, so if I am calling... it's because your website is pretty bad.
So if I do find the thing I need and it is broken, then I call and dodge the idiot AI, and the beleaguered agent or offers the pathetic advice of: "It's on the website". I tell them it doesn't work, and this has led to two outcomes, either the agent tries to do it and it is so broken and fucked up that they tell me that's it's down and I have to call back or try the website days or weeks later, or I am lucky and the agent has to do a tedious task that I would have preferred to do myself online.
I get an email "Hey, I need to contact you so we can proceed, what method would you prefer?" I reply "Email, please" provide the information I assume the rep needs and which the online form should have been able to ask me and offer "What else do you need".
"Is there a time I can call you and [go over the script and fill out a form on my computer, as if you'd just stayed on hold hours ago]?"
10/10
Failing that I also resort to answering in one word answers. Bots can't handle any sort of ambiguity. Even when they manage to solve the language-parsing problem, people will still just bark one word answers at anything that looks or sounds remotely non-human[1] because that's how the early AI's trained us. The future-concept of people chatting away to robots is incredibly unlikely because to do that you need a level of empathy for the person/object you are talking to. We've clearly shown so far that we just don't have it for bots.
--
[1] Like the 19th century British Explorer shouting English at the natives.
Usually you'll get it try to say stuff, give up and then say "Thanks, I'll put you through to one of our team"
The people using the automated phone services are the people without internet or even computers.
Believe me, they exist ;)
"Okay, let me get you to a representative."
"I'm sorry, it looks like you want to talk to a representative. You need to answer a few questions first."
Very HAL-like.
Old people. I'm not kidding. I used to do PCI compliance work with call centers. I've listened in on many a call to verify procedures. Call centers deal with an unending stream of older people who cannot or will not use "computers". They want to talk to a person on a phone. The people who are comfortable with the online interface only call when the online interface fails them. Old people go to the telephone first.
And there is a growing subset of old people who are functionally illiterate. I don't mean they don't know how to read, I mean their eyesight is diminished to the point that using the computer/phone/tablet is uncomfortable. Or their fingers don't move well enough for a keyboard/touchscreen. The phone is simple and reliable, not requiring either visual or physical dexterity.
Even non tech items like opening a bag of chips or box of crackers. I estimate that some packaging must require 40+ lbs to open. And I think of the "how it's made" show and how advanced manufacturing plants are. So they use all this tech to make a box of crackers as cheaply as possible, they have cameras fast enough to find and remove a single dark grain of rice in a torrential stream, but put zero thought into the UX experience and how the user can open the box.
It sounds like the simplest "tech fix" for this phone menu is once their account is found,
if (age > 60 ) sendToPerson ();
Furthermore, you could do "soft" account verification with their number. So if they call from a number that matches an elderly customer, just route it straight to a human, even though numbers can be spoofed it's not going to harm the customer to just assume it's them for that step only and fully verify their acct later.
If they don't, is that because they don't know any better, or because they actually want to use the IVR?
My guess is either they go straight to a person, or they don't know that's an option. So if I'm correct (and I think the onus would be to prove that old people think differently than everyone else in this regard), these things exist to take advantage of the ignorance of old people to save a company some money. Greaaaat.
"We are sorry our website didn't work, let me get you a human..."
Unpacking it...
Haiku: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_%28operating_system%29
Penguin doll: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tux
Bearded dude with swords: http://blog.xkcd.com/2007/04/19/life-imitates-xkcd-part-ii-r...
which is a recursive reference to XKCD: http://xkcd.com/225/
Shibboleet: Shibboleth from Judges 12
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
combined with "leet"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet from hacker culture
- Me" "REPRESENTATIIIVE"
- Phone: Sorry, I didn't get that. Say "representative" to talk to an agent
- Me" "REPRESENTATIIIVE"
- Phone: Sorry, I didn't get that. let me transfer you to a representative
(This specific one happens on United calls, every single time.)
Always having to ask for permission is tiring.
I need a machine to take all of the measurements and make decisions entirely without any kind of subjective judgement on my part.
Please, validate my health the same way automated testing and other such diagnostics checks work.
> one two three etc
"Please hold"
"Hello this is agent a, Can I verify your X"
> It's XXXX
"Looks like you have <totally unrelated subject to what you called"
> Yeah but, I called for Y
"Oh ok"
> Y this, Y that, I need Y to do Z
"Let me forward you to an agent that can help you"
"Hello this is Agent Q"
> I need to do Y! damn it I've been on hold and transfering for 20 minutes
"I can help you with Y, but first, I need your account info
> FREAKING A 1234
"Can you verify XYZW?"
> YES GOD DAMN IT YYYY
"Ok sir, I'll need you to FAX it in"
> What, that's technologies from the 1920s
"I'm sorry sir, is there ANYTHING ELSE I can help you out with <condescending voice>"
> PLEASE KILL ME NOW
"Would you like to take a survey?"
a week later, 7pm you get a robo call
"You had a call with Agent X how did that call go"
If its a charge on my credit card or checking, that's what I do, I give them this counter party risk. I call and do a charge back. Basically after 20 minutes with a vendor on hold, I declare that they are being unreasonable and they are unable or unwilling to refund me, I call the bank to do this charge back.
Now, what you tell the bank is critical. For whatever reason, vendors have been able to un-do my chargeback. So instead, I tell the bank that I dispute the charge -- but that I am also disputing the method of payment. So if they argue that the charge is valid in the investigation, I say that is fine -- however, the bank is not authorize on my behalf to pay them, and if they think the charge is authorized they must contact me to arrange a different method of payment. And under no circumstances can they use the bank to make payment. So yeah if they argue the charge is legit, that's fine, contact me (I wish I could put them on hold haha), and I'll pay them -- but the bank can't. The bank likes this because they are off the hook and I like it because they don't get to screw me. Worked every time.
If everyone did this, and made this a huge country party risk, these vendors would stop putting people on hold and ignoring or purposely inadequately addressing their greivences with their product/services.
It’s funny how they never keep their promises of calling you back until you actually stop giving them money. They also magically start paying more attention to what you say, and complaint letters that went unanswered for months and presumed “lost” suddenly become found and answered.
It is probably not the most complex integration technically, but it made the experience so smooth.
So if you know where the thing you're looking for is on the website, you can just launch the website and use that.
Super simple feature but it seems like for so many companies, if you go online, it redirects you to their mobile site which has been "phased out" and tells you to the get their app, which you have and would have used if it had the feature you needed.
For such a "post computer" world it seems ridiculous how often I throw my hands up and find my laptop when trying to complete an online chore from my mobile.
Can't they see what I just typed before? Seriously, how bad can this be.
> when one tries to be as clear, as brief, and as orderly as one can in what one says, and where one avoids obscurity and ambiguity
In a sense, this is not unlike an unskilled and nervous attendant who, faced with a request that they don't understand, starts to chatter more and more in hopes of eliciting the information they really need.
[1]: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/grice.html
In a sort of sick and very selfish way, I find myself somehow glad that blind and deaf people exist and are protected by accessibility legislation. I've often found accessibility features, particularly those in software, to be exceptionally useful even though my vision and hearing are fine.
The guy you were talking to eventually just routed you to someone with the same job but who has a mic, because you weren't giving him anything to go on and all he'd have been able to do is push the button again to ask you the exact same question (and having a person do it who can at least vary the inflection of the question is less infuriating than seemingly being stuck in a chatbot's infinite loop).
--
Source: have a friend who used to have this job. He has thankfully moved on to something less soul sucking than being a human literally pretending to be a robot.
I'd love to know more about these operations, thanks for mentioning this.
I'm just speculating here, but I suspect it means that the employee needs less training. All he needs is a quick flow-chart to route the calls. No training for how to talk to customers, no liability regarding things he might say, etc.
He was glad when he found another job.
Is this practice widespread at all? I've worked at several contact center software companies with many customers and never once heard of this. It's always been automated IVR software controlling this. This sounds to my ears like maybe an outlier of a particularly awful contact center? I'd certainly pause before claiming this is how it works for "many of these systems".
Edit: ahh I can no longer edit it :|
It seems very strange to have a human who can listen but can't speak. I guess these companies think that by removing speech as a possibility, they're able to pay the employee less or something?
Not perfect but good enough that it provides value.
I now use voice a lot because of the quality with Google tech.
80% success and 20% no action might be usable for an assistant, but adding in 5% random behavior makes it drastically worse than useless.
Except that with text adventures I was willing to overlook an obtuse parser if I was enjoying the game. I never call my bank just for the fun of it.
It's just not true, either. So I end up trying to figure out how to structure my query so the robot on the other end will understand what I want, instead of just saying what I want.
In the end, I just repeat "human" and mash the 0 button over and over until I get a real person to talk to.
How many times have you called and the prompts go:
Press 1 to talk with sales Press 2 to talk with marketing .... Press 9 to talk to tech support, the only reason anybody dialed this number
Then: Speak your 18 digit account number, being sure to pause between each digit to make sure the computer records it correctly.
Then: Speak your phone number
Then: Speak your 24 digit hexadecimal product code
Finally you get through to a person and 100% of the time they ask you for all of that information again so they can type it in (and get it wrong).
And even when you get a person on the line they make you go back and do all of the stuff you already tried before finally transferring you to someone with half a clue.
a) The backoffice is really shit, broken, and doesn't even display any info (down, badly designed, etc)
b) Backoffice and/or VPN connection from outsourced call center to ISP is really slow, so they work faster by asking info.
c) CRM/Customer database has no consisten quality information, so agents do not trust it.
I may forget something, but those are the most common ones.
Spanish law also require a second ID verification to disclose some information (let's say your wifi password), in our case it's the las 4 digits of the bank account number.
Also to pipeline you into different call centers, because it won't be reasonable to demand agents to know all the tech and commercial info about the company, it's just too much.
They hide key functions behind a 3D Touch, but there's absolutely no discover-ability. So you're either left trying to 3D Touch everything to see what works, or actively researching 3D Touch tricks.
As phone gestures become more popular, they'll have the same issue.
Seriously, watch someone on a new iPhone and it's just painful.
Oh, I created this contact for fun, now how do I delete it. Tap it? Nope. Tap and hold? Nope. Double tap? Nope. Is there a menu somewhere? Nope. Maybe I slide it over? Nope, that brings me back to the previous page. Maybe I pinch? Nope. Guess I'll pull up the help, oh there isn't any. Off to Google then. Oh, I have to slide it over from the middle, not from the edge.
The Web was legitimately the next big thing. And after that, mobile. Both of them have changed our lives in deep and lasting ways. But we as an industry are absurdly hungry for the next, next big thing.
How many dumb-ass voice and bot and AI and blockchain projects are there out there now? That basically don't work, but have been shipped anyhow? How many millions of dollars have been wasted? And really I should say billions. Theranos alone burned through $1.2 billion of hype. And there was the wave of "Uber for X" companies, busily failing to replicate the business model of a company whose success still isn't a given.
I should be clear that I'm not opposed to trying new stuff. I'm all for it! But I think if we explore technological possibilities with less flagrant waste, we'll learn more. And be able to explore more.
And as an aside, we haven't really had voice-only interfaces for 100k years. Really, they've only existed since the telephone. What existed previous to that was humans, whose in-person interactions are almost always far more than voice. People have different estimates of the amount of information conveyed in a conversation through expression, gesture, posture, glance, and the like, but it's never a small amount.
My point is that voice is a powerful and ancient channel, and it's about time that computers leverage that channel.
As I said, I'm all for trying new stuff. We should look at the extent to which computers can usefully leverage that channel. But I don't think we should presume that it will be particularly useful.
When I look how my kids interact with Google home it's becomes fairly obvious to me that to them this is completely natural. Google Home is almost like a pet to them not just a tool.
We are finally at a stage where voice recognition starts to become powerful enough to understand nuances now the next question is what to connect them to. One thing that I really like is that it allow us to retrieve information without having to look at a screen. It feels like having a 5th person at the table.
At First Principle, we built a little a voice app that allows you to ask Google Analytics or Salesforce for data (and potentially whatever you want to connect with) for meetings so we can ask instead of having to look up. It becomes a natural part of the conversation and everyone have access to the data.
That's where I think it will first make an impact. In meetings with relevant data.
The irony, of course, is that research is making strides in NLU, it's just too late for the last wave of chatbots. Here are two recent papers from DeepMind:
Learning to Follow Language Instructions with Adversarial Reward Induction https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01946
Relational inductive biases, deep learning, and graph networks https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01261
The tipping point for me was when the AT&T small business line I used to use changed to a voice interface and included fake keyboard taping sounds after each interaction. That just felt so damn insulting.
Lately I just say ridiculous shit with these interfaces to see what happens.
A few days ago I was using one for Delta that couldn't tell the difference between "Yeah" and "Yes". Sigh.
In an alternate pinch, licence some item get sounds from vidoegames and do A B testing on customer satisfaction.
Of the bots that are marketed to be more human with lots of machine learning. From my experience, they feel no more better than the original ELIZA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA) despite the leap in tech.
Oh and this comes along with a modern website that can execute all those use cases too.
But then you throw in the natural language, enabling users to write complex queries in English. That and great funded teams focussing on niches.
My experiences with bots are becoming outstandingly good.
To go back to interfacing with a program using written language seemed like an odd step. It's never been the most efficient way of doing something, and it requires very advanced technology to accurately understand what people are trying to say, in whatever slang, shorthand, or bad spelling/grammar they use.
Besides, it's not really dead, the tech just moved to "voice assistants" rather than "chatbots" - really just spoken word rather than written word. And I'm not convinced that's the "revolution" most people are expecting either. I'll stick to clicking buttons and typing things into my terminal.
>get sword
I don't know what "sword" is.
Some of the current interactive fiction (as the genre is now called) would surprise you.
Anything by Andrew Plotkin [1] (aka Zarf) is guaranteed to be interesting. Other indie authors of renown to look for are Emily Short and Adam Cadre. But also look for new authors! Mind you, modern IF focuses less in puzzles and more in narrative or exploring the boundaries of the medium.
One of my personal favorites is "Spider and Web" by Zarf, because I love its Cold War-esque setting. Mind you, it can be difficult! The best IF games also explore the console interface itself, such as in "Fail Safe".
An example of a particularly innovative game is "Rematch" [2]: it's a single move game (i.e. you win or fail in a single input, which can be quite complicated and shows off what modern parsers can do). It's sort of a "Groundhog Day" where you must prevent a disaster in a single move, and if you lose you replay it again, and again, and again, till you get it right.
Many of these games can be played in a browser, without installing anything.
----
sudo apt-get install gargoyle-free;
wget http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/Rematch.gam;
gargoyle Rematch.gamYou can play it at https://classicreload.com/zork-i.html or http://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/5zyoqrsugeopel3ffhz_v...
By the way, what OP says may be true of a game like Dunnet. I don't know if it is no more maintained or if it is kept that way because nostalgia, but more recent text-based games (that is, one that could have been programmed by your father instead of your grandfather) do way better than this. Just try some popular MUD (the MMO version of text adventures), I'm sure you'll be surprised.
It seems like a lot of times when people talk about chatbots, they really mean these phone trees in text form, in which case I would agree with your sentiment.
However, be cautious in conflating chatbots with CLIs. I would say a CLI is not (always) an intuitive interface, but for a lot of problems, they are quite efficient.
The CLI style chatbots tend to be much better since they are basically CLIs in an easily accessible location (e.g. in an app on your phone).
There is only so much input you can give and subsequently evaluate if you show a GUI with 3 buttons.
Now if you restrict the chat or voice input to 3 options than the interface feels unnatural, annoying even.
Understanding natural language is much more than just a design problem. It's a grand challenge and core subfield of Computer Science. It's the original Turing Test.
The biggest manifestation of this is the self-driving car hype for when grandpa can't legally/safely drive himself, however voice-assistants also fit that mold: Something to sell to grandpa when they don't want to learn/buy a new thing and his eyesight is bad and arthritis makes typing hurt.
At that point I just push 0 and repeat "speak to a human."
Why, oh why, would any rational person think that this kind of technology was about to suddenly take over everything?
This is a typical example of groupthink delusions.
It's not as though the tones are harder to recognise!
But seriously, it's the same reason so many sites won't accept a credit card number with spaces in it. Someone writing from scratch the same thing that's been written a thousand times, but only thinking about the way they would use it (or the way they were told others would use it).
They already have those online, in the form of FAQs and knowledge bases that don't tell you anything new.
Voice-based systems currently combine all of the limitations of human conversation (e.g., low bandwidth, strongly linear, possibilities hidden) with all the limitations of computers (e.g., not very bright, highly literal, inflexible).
I think the main reason they're so popular for support is that people are bad at accounting. If I install an IVR system, I see that calls to human agents go down, saving me easily measured cash money. But I probably haven't measured the time and cognitive load burden shifted to customers, or the value lost by suboptimal use of whatever they're supporting.
I think customer service departments find them boring and want to automate them away.
In a sense, the Google search bar is a type of chatbot, but we don't converse with it in grammatical English. It doesn't present as a human, so there's no uncanny valley effect. What gets typed into Google is a sort of lingua franca that we've all collectively learned through 20+ years of increasingly capable search engines. What we need is that level of lingua franca, but for a full, state-change-driving conversation, instead of just a one-step search.
It's not the machines that need to learn, it's us.
Particularly, of course, they no longer care whether results include your required words.
One has to learn and re-learn how to get the best from these systems.
Aside, I'm impressed with Alexa on FireTV, but until it enters data in to the apps, and searches within media libraries, it remains a novelty.
The uncanny valley effect, in my opinion, is due to the fact that 99% of our speech and writing is not dictated by content or necessity, but instead driven by social tendencies.
If I ask my friend to lunch, I'll text him "lunch?". But if I ask my boss out to lunch, it's going to be something like a paragraph, explaining what I'd like to cover during the lunch.
Most of what we say is a kind of dance to ensure other people that we aren't stupid. We don't need this formality when dealing with non-human entities, so speaking in grammatical language when chatting with a bot feels incredibly stupid.
Of course one can say that this is not an exclusively AI issue. Call centers, especially offshore ones, have the same problem.
Those strings are piped through a Switch statement of static responses, or fall out into the Default response. This was the situation in 2013 when I created a speech bot in Powershell, and it sounds like the state of the art here hasn't progressed far.
What's needed is logic to dynamically build the Switch statements, or otherwise better parse human entry and build responses. There has been much work on a few different fronts, but I'm not aware of any which were wildly successful.
Cloud services backed by big data sets tend to be better although I admit I haven't tried a local copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking for a long time.
In any case, at least assuming fairly mainstream American/English accents, the voice recognition isn't really the problem any longer. Sophisticated NLP and responses are. We're a long way from virtual assistants that can do anything sophisticated.
This is also true for CLI interfaces. It illustrates the popularity of GUIs - much to the dismay of CLI enthusiasts everywhere.
Edit: Yes, a -help or "help" command can be used to list the menu. But then this command has to be known beforehand. What if a clever designer decides to use -assist or "assistance" instead?
Linux Newbie:
"I need to find out how much space I have left on this machine."
> freespace
bash: freespace: command not found
> diskspace
bash: diskspace: command not found
> disk info
bash: disk: command not found
> diskinfo
bash: diskinfo: command not found
> man disk space
No manual entry for disk
No manual entry for space
> help disk space
bash: help: no help topics match `space'. Try `help help' or `man -k space' or `info space'.
> df /dev/sda1
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 19478160 1370768 17094912 8% /
EDIT: Maybe I should have said 'CLI Newbie' - I am in no-way singling out Linux here.
“I need to find out how much space I have left on this machine.”
Now what?
"Oh there's an entry called My PC" (click)
"Aha, there's my disk and little bar showing the free space"
It's two clicks if you have your wits about you, maybe a few more if its not that obvious.
I don't know why you singled out Windows. It's just as easy in Gnome or KDE etc - the point here is that CLIs can never be as intuitive as GUIs. As the original article said - Humans are very visual people. Seeing things in a visual space is much easier for us.
Personally I think the experience is very similar for noobs.
But then again, why wouldn't the Linux guy search google in the first place?
Or if it is a total newbie, look for the disk icons, the information is there as well.
$ apropos space
CORE (3perl) - Namespace for Perl's core routines
arpd (8) - userspace arp daemon.
CMSG_SPACE (3) - access ancillary data
CUDA_ERROR_INVALID_ADDRESS_SPACE (3) - (unknown subject)
cudaErrorInvalidAddressSpace (3) - (unknown subject)
df (1) - report file system disk space usageGoogle "linux how much space on drive" and the first hit tells you exactly what you need.
Another question someone might ask is "how do I change my password". Google for "linux change password" and there is a special help box right at the top of the search results.
apropos password and you get this enormous list:
apg (1) - generates several random passwords
chage (1) - change user password expiry information
chgpasswd (8) - update group passwords in batch mode
chpasswd (8) - update passwords in batch mode
cpgr (8) - copy with locking the given file to the password or gr...
cppw (8) - copy with locking the given file to the password or gr...
cracklib-check (8) - Check passwords using libcrack2
create-cracklib-dict (8) - Check passwords using libcrack2
crypt (3) - password and data encryption
crypt_r (3) - password and data encryption
des_read_2passwords (3ssl) - Compatibility user interface functions
des_read_password (3ssl) - Compatibility user interface functions
doveadm-pw (1) - Dovecot's password hash generator
endpwent (3) - get password file entry
endspent (3) - get shadow password file entry
EVP_BytesToKey (3ssl) - password based encryption routine
expiry (1) - check and enforce password expiration policy
fgetpwent (3) - get password file entry
fgetspent (3) - get shadow password file entry
fgetspent_r (3) - get shadow password file entry
getpass (3) - get a password
getpw (3) - reconstruct password line entry
getpwent (3) - get password file entry
getpwnam (3) - get password file entry
getpwnam_r (3) - get password file entry
getpwuid (3) - get password file entry
getpwuid_r (3) - get password file entry
getspent (3) - get shadow password file entry
getspent_r (3) - get shadow password file entry
getspnam (3) - get shadow password file entry
getspnam_r (3) - get shadow password file entry
git-credential-cache (1) - Helper to temporarily store passwords in memory
gitcredentials (7) - providing usernames and passwords to Git
grpconv (8) - convert to and from shadow passwords and groups
grpunconv (8) - convert to and from shadow passwords and groups
grub-mkpasswd-pbkdf2 (1) - generate hashed password for GRUB
lckpwdf (3) - get shadow password file entry
login.defs (5) - shadow password suite configuration
lppasswd (1) - add, change, or delete digest passwords.
Net::LDAP::Control::PasswordPolicy (3pm) - LDAPv3 Password Policy control object
Net::LDAP::Extension::SetPassword (3pm) - LDAPv3 Modify Password extension ob...
pam_pwhistory (8) - PAM module to remember last passwords
pam_unix (8) - Module for traditional password authentication
passwd (1) - change user password
passwd (1ssl) - compute password hashes
passwd (5) - the password file
passwd2des (3) - RFS password encryption
putpwent (3) - write a password file entry
putspent (3) - get shadow password file entry
pwck (8) - verify integrity of password files
pwconv (8) - convert to and from shadow passwords and groups
pwunconv (8) - convert to and from shadow passwords and groups
seahorse (1) - Passwords and Keys
setpwent (3) - get password file entry
setspent (3) - get shadow password file entry
sgetspent (3) - get shadow password file entry
sgetspent_r (3) - get shadow password file entry
shadow (5) - shadowed password file
shadowconfig (8) - toggle shadow passwords on and off
smbpasswd (5) - The Samba encrypted password file
smbpasswd (8) - change a user's SMB password
ulckpwdf (3) - get shadow password file entry
unix_chkpwd (8) - Helper binary that verifies the password of the curren...
unix_update (8) - Helper binary that updates the password of a given user
vigr (8) - edit the password, group, shadow-password or shadow-gr...
vipw (8) - edit the password, group, shadow-password or shadow-gr...
xcrypt (3) - RFS password encryption
xdecrypt (3) - RFS password encryption
xencrypt (3) - RFS password encryption
$ apropos -a change password
chage (1) - change user password expiry information
kpasswd (1) - change a user's Kerberos password
passwd (1) - change user password
PKCS12_newpass (3ssl) - change the password of a PKCS12 structure
$ apropos -a space disk
df (1) - report file system disk space usage
df (1p) - report free disk spaceman -k -S1 password
I use man and apropos all of the time, but I have no illusion that they're new user friendly. They're amazing when you just need to look up some options or get the syntax for a system call, but if you've not assimilated the Unix way of thinking they're quite obtuse.
(Seriously though, reading the manpage for man is where I first learned about apropos.)
Apropos would be a powerful part of a "help" command, but in 50 years nobody has ever written a help command that gained enough traction to be included in the standard toolchain.
Apropos doesn’t do it’s job because it isn’t named — or integrated with — help.
The tools themselves leave a lot to be desired from a UX experience too. Things like nonsense names, bad defaults and/or no inherent intelligence in the program, means you have to specify numerous options manually for things that should be easy to automate.
The whole experience would benefit greatly by telling people about things like man/apropros on first startup and other one time tutorials.
There are some days where I feel tempted to write small helper scripts whose sole purpose would be to rename/reorient the default experience/flags of various CLI apps, so that it is not a jumbled mess full of historical accidents that can no longer be changed.
then it's a really bad one.
You really don't have this option with voice. On the other hand, when I visited my mother I was surprised that she figured out that Google Assistant can provide her with nutrition information. She would have never figured out by herself on a CLI or menu because it's very intimidating.
This somewhat contradicts my previous comment about how much I dislike voice interfaces but they probably have some strengths.
On voice interface, your best chanse is to connect to an actual intelligent being as soon as possible because getting the options is a frustration by it's own.
If I'm saying 'help' it means I've tried that and failed, so it's not clear what the benefit is.
And you get to enjoy fumbling around trying to guess whether this particular program's magic incantation to summon help is "help", "-h", "--help", "?", "/?"...
swipes to the right
> Message archived.
No wtf.
undo
Guess it doesn't.
IVR, is supposed to be 'intuitive' or 'natural' or however one's preferred marketing dialect describes it. The assumption is usually flipped - that tools are supposed to assist those ignorant of their use[1].
It has been a long time since normal users have been expected to use a CLI. If you're looking at one, you choose to. This is not at all true of IVR/Sirlextana.
[1] Of course, they don't serve the caller, they serve the robot's owner, so interests are only aligned to the extent the robot efficiently helps the caller with their goal, which adds an additional layer of opportunity for frustration.
Think back to the earliest programming courses people take:
What's your first name: Jack
What's your last name: Ch
Hello Jack Ch!Spamming the # key repeatedly seems to work pretty well for this too.
The most annoying part of the experience to me is the menu items are always ~25 things I can trivially do on the website. No, I'm not calling to check my balance, pay a balance, update payment information, etc. I'm calling because your website specifically said that function isn't available online and I need to speak to a representative.
I think if you're from a certain era, you just pick up the phone first and want to talk to somebody, even if it might be pretty easy to find what you're looking for online.
Because the boardroom got a huge boner when realizing they can do major cost cutting in the human department.
Amazing what they are spending to keep up illusions.
2. "Chatbot" makes me think the user is leading the conversation. The bot is interpreting what the human says, and then the bot tries to respond appropriately. This leads to customer service or operations (like calling a car) use cases. These specific use cases are hard to pilot, hard to get right and really tricky to show value to the user or the company. I've never seen a compelling problem/solution/use case for customer service chatbots. The math doesn't work.
3. Messaging is a real channel. It has advantages over phone calls, email, direct mail and even face to face conversations. Chatbots just aren't the right concept for the messaging channel. Dentist reminders work great for instance.
4. If you like thinking about this stuff, I do a podcast all about messaging. It's called The Chat Bubble, and this episode is a good place to start if you want to go deep on FB Messenger. http://thechatbubble.com/2017/11/edit-content-the-playbook-o...
Like anything, it depends on how the person on the other end acts, but in my experience, they're set up to make the interaction repulsive.
Chatbots work well as an input when your hands are otherwise occupied:
- driving/directions (Google Maps telling you where to go)
- cooking (reciting a recipe)
They work well when you're requesting a specific thing:
- "Play Everlasting Light by the Black Keys"
- "Add Eggs to my shopping list"
- Responding to Answers in Jeopardy: "What is Syracuse?"
They can work as an alternative CTA in certain narrow areas where they function like a traditional "wizard". I've seen some ecommerce stats for things like "Are you shopping for a Fathers Day Gift? Does your dad like sports? Does your dad like gadgets? Want to see some popular gift ideas?"
Where they don't work:
- complex NLP dependencies
- data entry
- when there is an expectation set that you're talking to a human.
As in, not just reciting but allowing me to ask how much of X is needed or what the next step is? That would be great
That was never going to be the case for sufficiently complicated tasks with enough decisions to make. Same reason Google Home/Echo are awkward interfaces for almost anything other than getting music to start playing.
GUIs on phones/desktop are tremendously productive because they're information rich and trivial to use. I can search, choose, customize, and purchase an item on Amazon in like 15-30 seconds flat. A bot isn't going to beat that for the general case.
Yeah, right now the home/echo/siri/etc seem completely worthless to me for all but the simplest tasks, but the idea is for the use cases to keep increasing.
Tools do get better and better. Automation and AI will continue to improve. It's more a question of why chatbots haven't gotten there yet and what needs to be done differently.
Egg timers too.
But stupidly, Siri only lets me have one simultaneous timer.
They used to say that GUIs were toy interfaces and only CLIs could offer real productivity. I don't know where chatbots are going but I wouldn't expect the current state of the art to be anything like where they end up.
It was possible and commonplace to invoke parameter-oriented CLIs from another process, and use the CLI as a perfectly adequate API, while other interface paradigms like TUIs and GUIs never quite achieved such ease of programmatic manipulation.
Chatbots and NL interfaces in general are thus far a failure because they neither improve on these purposes nor provide a third, unique benefit. I could see them being useful for consolidation of services (instead of comparing eight puzza places' sites, go to one third-party pizza chatbot), but there's a very, very long way to go.
Another case study - I worked with a large pizza chain to implement chatbots onto their site. In the end, I (although I knew I'd lose money) told them that their basic add to cart, checkout experience on their e-commerce site was far better than a chatbot asking you 101 questions to make a fg pizza. I didn't advice them based on just intuition, we actually setup Google analytics and saw that the conversion rates were far better on the E-Commerce site and that it was impossible for the IT team to keep up with the marketing team that kept running promotions which led to tons of edge cases for their ordering flow.
So, another example of great technology, great potential, but destroyed by greedy marketers, poor implementations and businesses that simply want to ruin an otherwise perfectly customer work flow.
With SMS, in the US, it is illegal if a company is sending unwanted texts. Covered in the TCPA - Telephone Consumer Protection Act ~2015. Any legitimate provider will automatically opt you out of the campaign if you reply STOP. You can also copy the text and forward it to the number that spells SPAM (7726). They will send a bounceback and ask you what number sent the message.
It's super cludgy, but the carriers do seem to act on complaints, although it can happen slowly.
"The electric pole outside my apartment looks like it's going to fall over"
It ended up using that sentence to determine that I should go to emergency on-call, which is all it needed to do; further parsing was irrelevant. But then I called Fedex this morning and told their chatbot:
"My package has a delivery exception."
And it simply couldn't wrap its head around the problem at all — apparently Fedex doesn't train it to recognize terms displayed to shippers! — and so I had to battle through the usual "operator, domestic, 1234" route.
If you have a chatbot, be absolutely sure to train it on every word your company uses for official purposes. The electric company clearly recognizes "pole" + "falling" as an emergency, but Fedex doesn't recognize "exception" because their mindset is "which division of Fedex Multinational Conglomerocorp do you need", even though they directly asked "why are you calling".
I bet if you said something like "This electric pole isn't good for the aesthetic of my neighborhood, please bury your wires." it would assume that to be an emergency too (or maybe mentioning buried wires would take you to the "call before you dig" department...)
I don’t know if they still do this but it was ridiculous.
All of this obsession over "natural language processing" is annoying to me.
I have a Google home, and it can't do even the most basic things and struggles to understand whenever I tell it to do something.
It would be nice if I could just talk to my Google home as if it was a command line, with very explicit and specific commands that do powerful things. "Google take a note. Do the laundry." "Google play spotify on the living room speaker" etc. Instead the interface is an unhelpful mess that doesn't know how to help me get it to do what I want.
I feel that it is the same with chatbots. Stop trying to process natural language, and give me a command prompt with good documentation and user on-boarding.
cat cancel_service.script | /use/bin/comcast_dialer
What happened with Chatbots was the result of some very very poor 'ui translation' from Asian apps. The product designers and managers of the western world looked at 'mega chat apps' like WeChat and Line that have all these built in apps and interfaces and tried to replicate that. Instead somehow they thought they were textual chat interfaces (buy plane tickets in natural language) when in reality they all had their own GUI with buttons and things to press.
Then all the businesses and agencies and consultants that thought they could cash in on this opportunity saw it and started pushing it even harder.
There was never any real user problem that this was solving - just businesses trying to cash in.
Counterpoints: web, mobile, cloud
cloning, the semantic web, and fog computing
They were never the next big thing - one night we woke up and they were already the current big thing. Definitely the smart people could sense that it was happening, but there weren't medium articles about it :)
Chatbots are not a fad, its a real thing, and you will only see more of them in the coming years.
And there was no AI, ML or anything, just basic database fulltext searches and tree-based questions and answers.
Finding information quickly: no menus, no clicking around, no more searching.
Customer facing chatbots are one alternative, but many of our clients also have internal chatbots for either HR stuff, or for finding internal information. One good example we see is onboarding new employees who benefit from a chatbot as they ask a lot of questions. Also they are not afraid of asking too many questions as they no longer fear that they are nagging nor asking "dumb questions".
Automating processes: for example filling out the insurance form. Or filling out tax returns. Placing an order, getting status of an order. There are also a lot of HR tasks that gets automated. How many days of vacation there is left, business travel, arranging meetings, company benefits and so on.
Think about it this way, a chatbot is a very advanced full text search engine that excels at filtering out most of the noise. That is also why they have another name, virtual assistants.
I hoped you might prove me wrong, so I checked out boost.ai - is there any way to get a demo of your chatbots without booking a sales call?
That's some mad growth you've had, so you must be doing something right! Also interested to know how you went about finding your first customers? Are they mainly in Norway?
All we did in beginning was asking our first client what they want, they replied chatbot and something better than ----> that. We promised, read a lot about NLP and delivered. After that we partnered with several consulting companies, which made the selling and project integration process a lot easier. Most of our clients are in Norway, but we have clients in several other countries too. Even Finland which is not an indo european language but uralic.
Bullshit.
The point is not to have chat-bots handle all cases, but if they can handle 80% of cases, which are generally trivial, then it'll good enough.
Of course I hate talking to a bot just like anyone else, and being cornered into a dead-end discussion with one, or to be in an infinite loop, or in a situation where the bot has no answer and does not offer another path to resolution. But, from a business perspective, it's a rather sound approach to have people go through a bot first rather than have every single complaint clog an inbox. It doesn't scale so well.
Though this issue might equally be resolved by intranet search engines no longer being painfully bad (e.g. ones powered by Microsoft Graph).
That seems like it should be something that could be a trivial CRUD website, with far less complexity.
He used the chatbot to ask what his 2016 salary was going to be after taxes :/
It is extremely frustrating to use them because I usually only reach out when I require help with something complex, but I could see it being useful if your metrics indicate that question X is 50% of your phone time.
The basic tech dates back to SHRDLU and ELIZA. In some ways this is similar to the partially-self-driving-car problem: if it's a mechanical interface where the human is in control it's fine, and if it's a hypothetical human-equivalent AI it's fine, but in the middle people forget to adapt to the limitations of the system. And the limitations are very severe as soon as you go outside the lines.
1) There’s a huge consolidation around Siri, Alexa, and Google. No one wants to download an app, and you’re never going to win against wake words.
2) Doing the NLU and intent modeling is really hard to get right. All too often, someone comes along, thinks all they have to do skis throw together some regexps or toss the neural net du jour over some text and it will all just work. It won’t. It doesn’t. It’s just really really embarrassing.
Intelligent back off is a thing. Understanding when you don’t understand something is a thing. Conversation management is a thing. UX matters.
Also, trying to fake chatbots with people, and then saying “We’ll just train up a model and get rid of those folks” was never going to work, because you’d always have to have people, because you set your bar at hard AI then. Sure, that’s a decent strategy of you already have a call center that you’re trying to cut costs on, but for a startup, that’s just hubris.
It's been fun figuring out how to tackle UX problems like onboarding and engagement with Slack as the primary channel (versus email). I think chat is replacing email for many teams and so there's a big opportunity to rethink traditional workflows with a "chat first" user experience.
For example, with my bank, automated telephone banking is often much more efficient and quicker, than talking to a human CSR/Banker, for moving money around in my accounts.
I disagree with this. It may be easier, but it is in no way faster. For those who don't use computers very often I can see it being slower. But for people who use computers on a daily basis, for mice to still be a commonly used input device is disappointing. With constant context switches, moving an object across the desk with you wrist, while keeping your fingers in the same place to click, and carefully putting the cursor just in the right place isn't nearly as fast as the same interface using typing. Or comfortable for that matter.
I'm not saying I disagree with the article as a whole.
EDIT: typo
Who knows what is really going to happen if I press Tab here? Will it really bring me to the next field or some random link in the other side of the page?
I wouldn't doubt that once the web finally settled down from this hype, people will find ways to get the full potential out of both GUI and the keyboard in a consistent way.
The web is the only reason I need a mouse during work anymore.
Yup. Spreadsheets proved this many years ago.
I don't see one mention of "chatbot" on their page, it's always virtual assistant. Even just checking out their marketing material it looks pretty compelling. https://research.structurely.com/customers
We made a deliberate decision not to call ourselves a chatbot, as the stigma around them is poor and didn't want to get lumped into that category.
We decided that an A.I. assistant is more aligned with our product - which is backed by humans - but a very vast majority of our conversations are handled entirely by A.I. only.
Every conversation here was 100% A.I. https://research.structurely.com/customers
Good chatbot companies have to deliberately not call themselves chatbots. X.ai is another good example who calls their "chatbots" A.I. assistants on purpose.
The most obviously useful technology, usually is only obvious in hindsight.
We are using chatbot https://www.summarizebot.com as a part of our marketing strategy. And this works. Potential clients in Slack and Facebook are using our chatbot and after getting interested in our SaaS solutions. The conversion rate in Slack is quit good since a lot of businesses are using it. The strategy is being successful since out potential leads are able to see and use our main technologies in the bot. Chatbot for us is like smart demo of our existing technologies and features.
Chatbots, to me, just don't feel very organic - it's very much a request/response paradigm, often with a limited set of useful responses (perhaps I have just encountered the basic ones). If that's all we're getting, I'd much rather just hit buttons on a screen, than type an entire question in the hope that the bot understands it (when it doesn't, it's just an annoying guessing game).
Plus, as other comments have mentioned, it's very hard to see what the bot is actually capable of. With a good screen based UI, the capabilities are much more obvious. If it's not fit for your purpose, you can just quickly move on.
It's in the uncanny valley where it seems almost human like but a major turn off because it doesn't act like one.
It's probably just better to have the bots act like robots instead of "chatting".
I haven't jumped on the crypto bandwagon even, but I was working on a project midway through last year. It was a concept that would help people over come anxiety and depression so they could self-actualise and live a better life.
The thing with many people -- from out experience -- was that they don't necessarily always want to speak to a professional but they do want to share what they're feeling with someone they can trust. That's often a friend, but unfortunately friends aren't always in the best place to advise and sometimes inadvertently can make the situation worse. So we decided to build a bot that was anonymous enough to create enough abstraction but friendly enough to help. The content was driven by experts in the field.
Anyway. The whole concept just kept failing. We could barely get people past the first stage of questions. We tried so many different platforms, we did so many user studies and we kept trying to iterate but it just kept failing and all this time I did wonder in the back of my head if an app would have been a better idea. Now I know it would have probably at least been a better idea than a bot.
Side note: It's "piqued" my interest... http://www.dictionary.com/e/pique-peak-peek/
Chatbots are basically command lines with some guidance for non expert users. Convenient when you don’t want to build a bunch of custom GUI for new features but often gives a worse user experience when the commands are dreadfully buried in long winded conversations.
From phone directory systems to automated help-desk responses, I've spent more time in recent years trying to get around an automated hurdle to talk to a human than waiting on a forum response in 2004 or sitting on hold back in the days of 1-800 help numbers.
Chatbots were a predictable failure.
Maybe I'm just older now. Settled in my ways so to speak. But I've dedicated my professional life my tradecraft of media production and publishing. At some point the technology tools stopped focusing on improving life or solving the problem.
- The first VR movement was WAY too premature. - 3D TV's were DOA. - 4k+ / High resolution is a drastically misused/misunderstood medium and technology. - The current VR movement just simply doesn't have a platform that can support the level of processing and bandwidth needed to be worthwhile. - Apple has lost it's way. - I don't even know what Google actually does now, but I cared more when the search engine was amazing. - There's too much media, not enough curation. - Blogs and personal websites were the golden age of great information - RIP copy editors - Social Media is a game of smoke and mirrors - WHO IS CLICKING ON ALL THESE ADS?!? Nobody I know, yet the big players are making billions? Are the ads worthless? Are we going to wake up one day to see the internet crashing and burning the same way cable television is? Don't get me started on newspapers. - AR is back? Why?!? - I'd love for RSS to make a comeback, if there was anything left to subscribe to. - AI seems to be the future but I've yet to be impressed. The things that are promising are far out of reach from everyday users that it just seems far far away at this point. - Fortnight seems to have hit the nail on the head.
It's no accident that Amazon and Google are currently leading in the consumer voice assistant market: they had large, pre-existing base of users and enough intrinsic first-party functionality to bootstrap their assistants into rudimentary usefulness, but then they built platforms where third-parties could compete for users the same way it happened for apps. In the app boom, aside from a few runaway hits, the only ones who reliably got rich were the platform-owners.
But in a lot of cases, a traditional UI (whether visual or command line focused) is simply far more usable than a bot, and people/companies realised that. As much as it may sound old fashioned, talking to everyone is not necessarily better than using a keyboard/mouse/controller/whatever, and having a bot that has to figure out what you want with far less sophistication than an actual person makes it even worse.
The technology isn't there yet for chatbots to be as useful as they need to be, and in many cases, bots and chat interfaces and what not simply aren't a good solution for the problem at hand either.
It's just bunch of people who look at existing phenomenon that's working (people use chat a lot on the phone), and then trying to turn it into something completely different (if people chat a lot, that probably means people want to buy stuff over chat a lot!), powered by dumb money (stupid VCs in case of "chatbots", and stupid ICO crowds in case of "blockchains")
The reason these things don't work is because the people who build these things don't truly understand why something is working, because the original product they tried to replicate was not easy to understand.
Same reason why it's so hard for dumb electronic companies to copy Apple. They think they know, but all they're copying is the superficial stuff, and they never work.
Like, was the company in financial distress, and the first product wasn't doing well, so they said "I know! We'll make a chatbot!"?
A pivot is like a "Hail Mary" pass... risky and unlikely to work -- something that only makes sense when time is running out and you have nothing left to lose.
Or... if your company pivoted when the end wasn't near, the leadership was greatly incompetent, which means you pretty much never had a chance in the first place.
Interesting to note: the poster read the signs and made the right move at the right time in any case.
They can pivot into being a company that is alive, though. Remember that Slack was a pivot from an online game.
You can also see a piece of the game on Slack's 404 page! http://slack.com/404
Also emails delivered from this sort of interface need some means of indication that they were a spoken format, not typed such that the reader properly understands the context.
To me, a verbal UI seems attainable by lowering the bar of what we expect from the AI. Lower the need for AI to interpret your requests from general english to limited keywords. Allow for an adjustable vocabulary for spoken word recognition to accomodate a smaller dictionary with less mistypings. Make it clear the produced content is dictated and not hand-written quality
http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps....
Whether or not anyone wants to admit it, the whole "talking to robots" thing... I mean, the world is already empty and lonely enough without adding another layer of "inexorability" to the processes we engage in, in order to accomplish pretty basic tasks.
You get the point.
Crypto is the next big thing right now and like all these "big things", it's going to fall flat on its face as well
(1) Assume humans are too stupid to be able to adapt their communication and learn something about what that API is capable of and what commands it understands.
(2) Credit humans with the ability to do it; perhaps even evolve their communication abilities a little to go along with this brave new world populated by AIs.
No intelligent human wants to talk to an API in natural language when they have some idea of the capabilities of that API and the commands it understands.
Downloads of new mobile applications have been decreasing in growth steadily for years now[0]. Instead, user's spend more time inside their existing applications, particularly messenger applications. Take a look at just a few of their user bases:
- Facebook Messenger - 1.2B+ [1]
- Whatsapp - 1B+ [2]
- Kik - 300m [3]
Add to this the fact that Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Slack and others, with a combined market cap in the trillions, were simultaneously contributing to the support of chatbots in one way or another.
It's a classic rendition of the Hype Cycle[4]. We're probably somewhere in the "Trough of Disillusionment", but give it a few years and we'll get to the "Plateau of Productivity", and chatbots will probably make their way to a more useful purpose.
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/29/forget-apps-now-the-bots-t... [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/12/messenger/ [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/1/10889534/whats-app-1-billi... [3]: https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/11/kik-already-has-over-6000-... [4]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle#/media/File:Gartner...
The first one leads to subpar bots that can't respond to most things, the second means humans have to fill the 'long-tail' of potential responses by hand, which is impossible.
They provided guard rails so to speak. If you don’t really strong hints about what you can do — and at least recognize intents you can’t handle — you’re screwed. There is always some asshole who sees “Hi, I can tell you about restaurants and entertainment. What are you looking to do?”, and answers “What’s the atomic weight of boron in nanofirkins?”
LSTMs do reasonable cocktail talk if you want someone to answer your emails for you as an agent, and expert systems shells are actually useful for navigating legal documents and insurance forms (with a ton of human intervention). Otherwise, it ain't really a problem that needs solving.
My friend was all neck deep into hype. Yet never could explain how would he train the chatbot to learn all the facts about the business(es). And in end all chatbot could do is act like decision tree with some NLP to extent it could understand few variations.
Which is great but very few limited business use cases, and poor use case for support unless you want your users to hate you.
(because the press, and experts -- whether real or just self-claimed -- and enthusiasts have plenty of incentives to hype new things and few reasons not to)
But that's independent of whether or not the new thing actually has merit.
Even when the new thing really is the next big thing, the hype almost invariably runs far ahead of schedule.
Personally, I think the jury is still out on chatbots.
Imagine how humans could do more useful and productive things. More time for study and contemplation. AI powered chatbots could relieve us from the burden of ever having to chat online.
Voice interfaces hold the promise of releasing us from the tyranny of screen time. I imagine walking the dog and replying to emails with my headphones. Might seem silly now, but would love that. NLP/NLG just isn't there.
- I could navigate them much faster than I could navigate a phone tree.
- They were very accessible in the sense that I wouldn't have to install a custom app but instead use a platform that I am very likely to be on already. As a developer, this also allowed me to set up an unlock-my-door app for my friends much easier.
I think millennials especially are used to getting things done themselves since they're so accustomed to UIs that walk them through getting tasks done. There's a sense of finer control in user interfaces that chatbots have a hard time solving for.
If there is an option to type, I got for it the first thing. Anything else feels gimmicky.
On a similar note, I suspect in another few years we'll be reading an article titled:
> "AR was the next big thing: what happened?"
I don't think I've seen this many replies in unison. It's an amazing testament to how poorly these systems work at all levels.
After all, if AI is as ubiquitous and threatening as many are claiming, then why has the literal least complex implementation of it, a chat bot, failed completely?
I'm don't work within an industry where chatbots were a solution.
From this naive position, what are the exemplary examples of chatbots?
We can already see this with voice assistant integrated to mobile devices and in the near future VR's and robots.
It will be interesting how it works out once everything gets standardized.
In a serious vein, they were more of an annoyance than help.
Similar to the Paper Clip from Microsoft. (Sorry, don't remember the name)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bd1mEm2Fy08 Google Duplex Demo from Google IO 2018 - YouTube
> "Our electric grid system is not stable. If it can be down or you have rolling brown outs or black outs and we know that is possible. If you don't have base load that means something, some type of energy that will run 24/7, rain, shine, no matter what happens is uninterruptible. The only two things you have that does that on a uninterruptible basis is coal and nuclear"
This isn't the first time I've wondered at the applications of natural-language processing software in political [speech]writing. I'm not sure where best forum is for people to discuss these ideas, but I apologize if this was too political, regardless, for this site.