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Comment by Ecstatify | Hacker News Reader

I wish chatbots would follow my dead loved ones to the grave

The current state of chatbots is embarrasingly bad. I still haven't seen a chatbot use-case that can't be solved better with an FAQ section + documentation search and a human as second line of support.

I use Alexa on a daily-basis - which can be seen as a chatbot. It provides plenty of useful functionality, especially Alexa-auto which I bought my wife for Christmas. She loves the ability to add items to her todo list whilst driving, asking it questions about the weather, playing music, performing communcation tasks, etc.

> I use Alexa on a daily-basis - which can be seen as a chatbot.

More general virtual assistants (Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri) are at a completely different power level from most chatbots. Most chatbots use cases that I come across are some company thinking that they can replace human support with a language model trained on their custom knowledge base. They expect something as good as Alexa but which also has knowledge about the company's product and the results are always disappointing.

In all fairness I used to hate them but I have seen one or two customer support bots used in a way that definitely helped me get the answers I needed. Perhaps the fact that these bots are generally set up by consultants that understand search rather than some random intern that probably set up the documentation search is the deciding factor there.

I don't get the hate for chatbots. Sure they are not perfect yet (it's a hard problem to solve!) but I see them as early-stage technology, which will improve over time.

No comment on this news article though.

People don't particularly care if they will improve over time if they are made to deal with broken early-stage technology now.

Chatbot mania began in 2016, it’s now 2021 what major improvements have there been? What’s one website that has a good chatbot?

Chatbots are great until they don’t work which is all the time. You need to ask questions in a specific way to get an answer. From a user point of view it’s a terrible experience. Most companies don’t value the time of their users that’s why chatbots have been deployed on many websites.

I've personally played some text adventure games from the 90's with better input recognition than some customer service chatbots. They almost feel like trying to figure out the commands from those games sometimes.

'I need help with payment'

Sorry can you repeat your question

'Payment information'

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'Help with payment information'

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