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Comment by Kwpolska | Hacker News Reader

If people turn to the chatbot to ask "how to use the product" questions, it’s a sign your docs are unhelpful and do not provide useful answers. You do need support staff to help with questions specific to a situation, like how to resolve unexpected errors, or to handle billing disputes.

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Or it’s a sign they didn’t try to read the docs.

Also, in a few years when done right I actually suspect people will start expecting and preferring bots to reading docs. I’m still pissed when I get connected to a bot but I think they’ll soon get good enough.

People don't read the docs. It is a tiny minority that will read the docs and the bot trained on your documentation does provide helpful answers based on your documentation. If the bot answers are unhelpful, but then also the people reading wont get helpful answers from your docs - then you need to improve the documentation. These are two separate problems.

With ChatGPT, you can ask it to give you a working example for exactly what you're trying to accomplish. Often, you can get this kind of information from docs themselves, but it might involve reading a lot of text and tinkering. You can just press 'fast forward' and get straight to the working solution.

There's no reason to not have a chat bot at this point, other than cost.

Not necessarily. Some people just prefer the chat interface over pouring over docs.

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