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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

I've yet to see a single product that was improved by being a chatbot.

For a chat bot product to succeed, it has to be indistinguishable from a real human in every way. Otherwise the user will know its capabilities are limited, but won’t know in what way exactly they are limited. This is a perfect recipe for endless frustration as you slowly uncover every way in which it does not work how you expected it to, impeding whatever simple talk you wanted to complete.

If I had nickel for every time a chat bot or phone bot told me to speak to it like a human, and then was completely incapable of handling that, I’d be rich.

Being indistinguishable from human is a high and low bar. Chat is just a medium and it's not usually the best medium (for me). When I use it, I expect speed and care less if it's a human or AI. For example, I had a billing issue with my electric company. I used chat because I didn't have a week to ping-pong emails back and forth (they might cut my power). I also didn't have time to call them and sit on the phone for 30+ minutes. I knew it was something a human would need to get involved with. So, it's really just chat that is helpful as a medium. The bot part almost always gets in the way of speed to answer/solution.

That my personal experience anyways, would love to hear more about how a chatbot was actually helpful to someone. Whenever I see those chat pop ups on a SaaS home page, it makes me think do people actually type "show me the pricing page please" instead of just clicking the link to the pricing page. It has to be just a friendlier nicer way to collect emails and phone #s for sales to follow up with (?). I totally don't get it.

Your competitors' products are relatively improved when you deploy a chatbot.

You also increase the revenue of Acme Chatbots Inc, who will use those proceeds to hire more people to sell you a better, more comprehensive package.

i've seen one - my workplace briefly experimented with a chatbot for taking vacation time. you would say something like "i'm on vacation from tuesday to friday" and it would parse it, extract or convert the input to a date range, and submit a vacation request through the official tool. it would then ask if you also wanted to display your vacation status on your calendar and set up an email autoresponder, and do them for you if you answered 'yes'. i was sad when they removed the bot - i think they did it because they streamlined the website, but even with the new improved web workflow i still preferred the experience of doing it via chatbot.

This sounds interesting. Although this use case is very infrequent. If this had a wider use case, like something used daily, that just might be be a viable product!

it was infrequent but it was really pleasant to use. it was just a frontend to the internal websites that did the same thing though, so it was more of a feature than a product.

So true, it's an inferior user experience is most all cases where a UI could suffice. (A game product could be the exception)

The early adventure games used a interpreter that was basically like a chatbot. It got quickly replaced by more direct controls.

Typing “walk north” instead of just pushing the up arrow or clicking with a mouse was pretty frustrating

Google Search is better as a chatbot when using a voice UI.

I don't know of any others that I would put in the same category.

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