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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

The premise of the article is really "No one wants to talk to your chatbot, because users will already be primed to the chatbot integrated in their smart speaker or phone or whatever device they are using - which will be the device vendor's product (i.e. Google's, Apple's, Amazon's etc) and not yours."

That's a different premise than simply being pessimistic about chatbots as an UI paradigm in general.

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Absolutely. Most comments here seem to take the title at face value.

Based on how low companies are willing to go to in the support space, it won't be at all surprising when all of them move to some form of ChatGPT-enabled crapbot, specially adjusted to maximise whatever metric the company wants at huge financial and psychological cost to the user. It's gotten so bad it's hard not to think of employees of such scummy companies as scum for supporting and enabling this toxic ad-driven hell.

my company is experimenting with a chatbot for support.

Of course if you ask it to do something impossible with our product, the answer is a very long thing telling you where to click, which will never work.

It just won't ever say "can't be done".

When asking things that can in fact be done, it seems to get right the general direction, but the details are wrong. Of course a user without in depth knowledge will not know that.

Our CEO loves it.

  > Our CEO loves it.

Of course, it probably saves them thousands in support salaries. Of course, it's a little harder to quantify how much it's costing them in lost goodwill and sales, but who cares about the long term, right?

As a probabilistic model trained to always provide an answer. You need to allow "Can't be done" as a valid response.

Find top queries that should have but didn't have this answer and add it to the examples of your bot.

My take away is a bit different: if a user lands on your site/app, they don't want to talk to a chatbot.

If they did, they would have asked ChatGPT or another chat assistant instead.

    "When they do come directly to your site or app, they are not looking for a chatbot. They are looking for a UI that works. They know why they came to you. They expect your UI to do what it should do."

>My take away is a bit different: if a user lands on your site/app, they don't want to talk to a chatbot.

But part of that is Siri, Google Assistant, et al. often just say "here's a website" when you ask a question like "Hey Siri, does Walgreens on Blob Street have the FreeStyle Libre 3 in stock?"

But in what TFA describes, Siri would do something like

>I need to ask walgreens.com, is it OK to send your question to them?

Yeah ok

>Walgreens.com says yes the Blob Street Walgreens has the FreeStyle Libre 3 in stock

It would be beautiful if this could be achieved with a standardized API you virtual assistant could just connect to (it could read the documentation and craft a call, then send it...)

That also sounds pretty dangerous though

Also, very importantly, it's not saying not to build a chatbot, but to recognize that the main consumer of your chatbot interface will be a user's primary LLM, not the user themselves.

The headline is exactly the kind of thing the largely anti-AI attitudes online today will blindly vote up, but the message of the article couldn't be further from the appearance of the headline.

It's about the nuanced infrastructure of a future where chatbots exist in multiple layers, not about a future without chatbots.

Hmm, I may have caused that because I swapped out the linkbait 'your'. That's a standard move in title debaiting here, but in this case maybe it skewed the meaning. Sorry! I'll put it back.

The chatbot as it's used in most cases is not a UI paradigm, it's the complete lack of a UI. Just a phone tree cobbled together by some basic heuristics. Even a FAQ is a better UI if done well.

The problem is, the only people left who want to talk to chat bots are the ones making chat bots.

No normal person will care what the article says when reading that headline, they've already been burned by modern support.

The title applies to almost everyone’s chat bot… except for a couple.

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