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Comment by wjoe | Hacker News Reader

I always found the chatbot idea odd, it felt like a step backwards in terms of interaction. We started out with very basic input methods to computers, like punch cards. Then we moved onto a command line interface where you could type in words. Then we eventually got GUIs, graphics, websites, all sorts of complex and nuanced ways to interact with a computer.

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.

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Yes, it kind of reminds me of those old text adventures where you had to guess what the computer would understand

>get sword

I don't know what "sword" is.

The awful thing is that the old Infocom parser was better at figuring out what you are saying than many of these sexy new NLP systems...

The parser in text adventures got really, REALLY advanced.

Some of the current interactive fiction (as the genre is now called) would surprise you.

Have any recommendations?

The best place to look for cool and innovative (and free!) IF games is the Interactive Fiction Competition [0].

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.

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[0] https://ifcomp.org/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Plotkin

[2] http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=22oqimzgf8snv002

Thanks so much!

For anyone else interested, I'll save you five minutes:

        sudo apt-get install gargoyle-free;
        wget http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/Rematch.gam;
        gargoyle Rematch.gam

Zork is one of the first games in this genre and it's surprisingly good at parsing commands.

You can play it at https://classicreload.com/zork-i.html or http://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/5zyoqrsugeopel3ffhz_v...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork

The Infocom games were actually after a lot of earlier games like Colossal Cave (aka "Adventure") and the Scott Adams (not the Dilbert guy) adventures. As such, their parser was actually pretty advanced compared to the 1970s games and understood whole sentences rather than the traditional two words.

Yes. There is a reason why we don't have text based adventures anymore. Because we can have new ones with beautiful graphics and interfaces.

The human-machine communication issues are the same in both cases. When a video game doesn't understand what you're trying to do, nothing would happen or you get a negative, non-specific feedback. You think it is better because you get distracted by the colors, lights and sounds but the communication channel is as narrow, if not narrower actually.

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.

Worse even: it forces you to choose between a natural feeling conversation and a useful conversation.

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.

> 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

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).

CLIs are great for executing known actions. GUIs are for discovering what you can do.

That's a great way of putting it. Also, GUIs attempt to use human natural reasoning (about objects, space, movement, etc.) and have some kinesthetic components (the mouse, pointing, dragging).

…You've never seen a man page?

To me it was a way for engineers to make interfaces without having to worry about any are design. An engineer-turned-marketing-person would call it "CLI 2.0". The problem was the non-designers still don't know UX at all and natural language is hard so you end up with a sub par, poorly design interface that doesn't understand you.

I keep seeing references to design/UX, and IMO they are way off the mark. The problem is far more fundamental than that. If the only problem were design/UX, then proper chatbots would've taken off by now.

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.

It's interesting to think about. In some ways GUIs are more primitive than text interfaces. The scathing characterization of GUI as "caveman's point and grunt interface" isn't entirely wrong. But at the same time, chat bots are spoken word. Text is a later invention, which was created for a reason. It has much higher information density, allows you to look at multiple tings at the same time and skip irrelevant detail, etc.

My pet theory is that there are a bunch of investors somewhere salivating at the thought of dominating a market for selling products to baby-boomers who are becoming impaired with age.

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.

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