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Comment by lysecret | Hacker News Reader

The first thing you realise when you start playing with LLMs and want to build a product around it is that you might not need a UI anymore but a text interface might be at the same time easier to build and much more intuitive. In this case the messengers have a big opportunity to become the next big platform. Telegram seems to be the one with the best apis. This shift might even make it possible to create a new messenger app with some LLM app as killer feature. In a way ChatGPT could have been that messenger app.

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This was my immediate thought when they released chatgpt plugins. They had this little demo where it generated a recipe, pulled the calories from wolfram alpha and then generated a one click to order link for doordash.

It's no stretch of the imagination that this will replace many, if not most app ui's. For the time being there's still some programs that are much better off with a dedicated interface, but the future where the starting point for most day-to-day computer interactions is a unified natural language text input is very near.

It's striking to me how close this matches the depiction in the movie "Her".

Messenger apps like telegram do have an opportunity here, but I think the most likely way for this to play out is that apple and google will eventually make their assistants the front and center way of interacting with your phone and their won't be much that messenger apps can do about it, even if they are substantially faster at implementing this.

> Messenger apps like telegram do have an opportunity here, but I think the most likely way for this to play out is that apple and google will eventually make their assistants the front and center way of interacting with your phone

Wasn't the Allo app supposed to do that?

Made by Google the company who threw away an existing social network (Reader) to build a social network (Google+) that they threw away as soon as many enough had figured it out and started loving it.

(I'm still looking for a replacement for Google+.)

101% chance Apple puts Siri's brother Shrini in iMessage as a default option. I'm calling it now

Now Google... put em in Gmail and Calendar webapps as a sidebar integration and a big-ass button on mobile

Will natural language be a predominate form of interface in the near future? Absolutely yes. But will it replace majority of interface? I am doubtful.

The reason for my doubt is that if you look around yourself; you will see a variety of amazing human computer and human machine interfaces, because no single interface has been universally suitable and more importantly the most or even reasonably efficient for all use cases. There is little reason to believe human language is an exception.

Switches, buttons, knobs, joysticks, motion sensors, and an array of other interfaces will persist until brain-computer interface is ubiquitous.

This is sort of a "what's a computer" question. I find that for a number of specialized digital interfaces, I don't want natural language. I don't want to stand there and talk to my microwave, I just want to punch in the number. I'd say about half the time I sit down at my TV I don't know what I want to watch, I want to scroll through some options. It feels like the more specialized the purpose, the less likely I am to want to talk to it.

> It feels like the more specialized the purpose, the less likely I am to want to talk to it.

This is the essence of it; and it follows not just for "shouldn't be a computer" appliances but also software. People in tech tend of to forget about the array of hyper-specialist software that exists in the wild, from little point of sales to industrial machines.

I have little interest in talking to a coffee machine or automated transport ticket machine. Flat White. Day ticket. That would do, thanks.

Uh, I might have a language barrier here. Doesn't predominate imply a majority?

But besides this I do see your point. Mechanical interaction with buttons, switches, dials and the like offer a great interface and they haven't been universally replaced by touch screens for a reason.

I was thinking more of the ubiquity of specialised phone apps. I checked my phone just now and I have apps for public transport (i.e. train tickets and routes), taxis/ubers, multiple apps for ordering food, fitness/workout tracking, todo apps, calendars, smart home control, weather, general search, news and lots more. I'd say that most uses of most of those apps would be more convenient through a single chat like interface.

Haha, I just pictured iPhone users if one day all the colorful icons disappeared and they were presented with a white on black text prompt instead) Not gonna happen.

sound logic. google circles should have taken on Facebook too.

but no matter how good the api is if you must install something worse to talk to your friends.

IM applications are the new socialnetworks, and as such will be decided by network effect, everything else will be a consequence.

so, the best solution is the one that can be shoehorned into the whatever api quality the top IM application offers, which is not telegram

Pity that _using_ telegram is a frustrating, spam filled messaging experience. Nothing nets me as much annoying automated spam as simply having an account there. More frustratingly, disabling messages from unknown contacts doesn’t appear to be a feature.

I wonder why your account is attacked by spam so often. Conversely, I've never had any account get so little spam as my Telegram account. My email gets literally dozens of spam mails per day. Telegram, I'd say less than once per month.

Exactly yesterday I thought that I got a spam message, it turns out that the sender is a SpaceX fan and a real interesting human, not the crypto-pushing bot that I had suspected at first when I read the greeting "hi".

> Conversely, I've never had any account get so little spam as my Telegram account.

I don't get that much spam in Telegram either, but this must be an exaggeration. My WhatsApp and Signal accounts get completely zero spam.

My five year old Telegram account has received exactly zero spam messages in my entire time there. Being a country that actually punishes companies for selling your phone number and personal information without your consent makes everything more pleasant.

I mostly get them from people finding me from my group chats, really. I don't think Telegram shows my number to people (or has it), so I don't tend to get spam that way.

I don't have a Whatsapp account. But I agree about Signal, I cannot recall ever seeing spam there.

If you setup username, you are going to get a lot of spam messages. I guess.

Username in telegram is a public identifier that allow anyone to grant the permission to message you.

The other ways to grant this permission are

1. Add contact with phone number (can be disabled in privacy setting)

2. Have a message/forward message somewhere you can see, and the original sender is you. (Identity forward of forwarded message can be disabled in privacy setting)

3. Be in the same group with the target (chat admin can disable member listing)

Notice, this is a one time setup. A account only need to grant this once, and then he can message you at anytime.

> More frustratingly, disabling messages from unknown contacts doesn’t appear to be a feature.

On the android client you find this option under privacy. Pretty sure it never hasn't been there

You cannot disable message from unknown contacts, their messages goes to a "archived" folder, but they're still there.

There are privacy settings, you know?

Did you set every option to 'Nobody' or 'My contacts only'?

I’m not the other person, but there’s no privacy setting for normal messages, in the iOS version at least. So it’s impossible to block messages from randoms.

Yes, because most people actually want to be reached by people who are yet not in the contacts.

The only way to do so is to have a username or phone number of recipient. Usernames are searchable if they are "Public Usernames". Phone number could be hidden from anyone.

I don't see how someone can contact somebody on the messenger yet without an ability to.. actually send a message. Sure, there could be an option to block everyone not in the contact list and use some other medium to relay the contact request[0] but most of the time this is useless for messenger.

But of course I have my POV skewed, because I prefer to use services defensively from the start so I had almost no unsolicited messages on Telegram, WhatsApp and Instagram.

[0] Hey, if you interested in $TOPIC contact me on Telegram, @username! But first send a couple of avian carriers with your phone number and username so I could add you to contacts first!

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