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Comment by ChrisArchitect | Hacker News Reader

Spare me the paragraphs of 'how did we get here' history and get to the point that's already in your title.

Based on what many site operators see anecdotally, people actually do want to talk to the chatbot because they just want answers to their questions and hand holding. How it's implemented/effectiveness is variable -- they will talk to it for a bit if they perceive they are being helped in some way. Chatbots and general site chat interfaces didn't spread everywhere without at least some data

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The paragraphs upon paragraphs of history made me click out of that article. There’s no relevance to the point being made.

In regards to ChatBot usage, in my limited interaction with support bots, they are usually quite useless. Each time I use one, it’s a game of ‘get to the actual support agent’.

Why else would one chat with a bot?

All other functions are self-service anyway, at least I've never interacted with a chatbot that could do anything useful, besides being forced upon me to navigate the "why do you want to talk to a person, so I connect you with the right one?"

With all due respect, if I am interacting with your chatbot it's usually because your website provides zero ways to reach an actual human. I have lost count of the amount of times I had a specific problem not addressed in the FAQs, looked for a contact form for 10 minutes then reluctantly clicked on a chat button, only for the bot to continue to try to direct me to the answers I have already indicated did not help me. If I get lucky there's one option buried below a dozen other questions that lets me talk to a person (or, hell, even a sufficiently annealed language kernel) who can demonstrate a knowledge of the system outside of the two or three most likely footguns to avoid.

The problem (and I don't even know that the article adequately addresses it) is not that your bot is insufficiently good. It's that the bot is substituting for a support agent that wouldn't be sufficiently useful, because the support agent would also be made to operate according to a script, because the whole goddamn system is designed to make human interaction into an API. Because that's what businesses want. It's "scalable". And it only has the perverse incentive of making it hard enough to solve moderately complex problems that the user gives up.

I think the point was that novel chatbots will still be created, but they need to be talking to your existing assistant (Siri/Alexa) rather than you going directly to them?

His point seems to be that assistants like Siri and Alexa will be the entrypoint for LLM type interactions, which is sort of non-sensical considering most people are using chatGPT right now. I think this could have been an interesting article about how interacting with chat bots still kind of sucks but instead we got some unsubstantiated view that assistants that a lot of people have already written off are going to take over the space.

Many have written them off because they kinda suck a lot now. But they will be much much better, won't they? 5 years lets say? What kind of LLMs will we have then? If it's reliable, why not just have one interface?

I think that's still not a safe assumption, I don't think it's understood enough to know if the poor performance isn't just a fundamental limitation of some kind. You can already see models taking alternative approaches as they hit diminishing returns on the transformer innovation that triggered the massive improvement. I am just a punter onlooking though, no expert.

That's the same, people go to a place where chat interaction is the primary interface to talk to their preferred chatbot. That can be ChatGPT. But no one goes to allstate.com to talk to their chatbot.

A lot of people have used ChatGPT, but it's far, far from most.

Bold of you to think everybody is using Siri/Alexa/other conversational crapola. So many questions: in which language is this one set right now? Is my accent in that language "native" enough? Is yelling around the house an option at this hour? Do I want the passersby listening in? Do I want my conversations being sent to their tech overlords? So many "no" answers that the average techie wouldn't seemingly understand...

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