Sierra Says Conversational AI Will Kill Apps and Websites

Conversational UI is great for solving concrete problems, but terrible for getting an overview of what's possible/being offered. I'd never enter a store where I couldn't browse but only talk to a salesperson either.

Maybe one day, AIs will be sophisticated enough to just give me what I want without even having to ask – but mind reading arguably isn't conversational anymore.

What a lot of this misses is the issue of bandwidth. Chat based interfaces are great when your area of investigation is incredibly narrow and you want highly focused, precise answers.

It's terrible when you want broad swaths of input that you're scanning through to discover new things. Text is an extremely low bandwidth communication tool.

This likely won't go anywhere.

Clay had a bit of a track record at Google for creating chaotic, visionless orgs heavy on product management, and for burning 100s of millions of dollar to the ground through expensive acquisitions and nearly immediate reassignments and value destruction (e.g. Eyefluence).

The market for this sort of enterprise chat service is already in a rapid race to the bottom, and the executive "vision" here is a B2B margin play.

On the other hand, making much more approachable by conversational approaches is going to unlock a lot of users, maybe people who didn't use apps or websites much anyways.

Something agents might not be able to do well is provide transparency that's available at a glance on a screen in words or icons, that listening/reading sentences makes more painful.

Yes somehow books/reading dominates as a vehicle of information transfer, versus conversing with someone that has the knowledge of the content, even when both are available? If the latter were strictly better, we'd have a lot more oracles around.

Isn't this obvious? There is the concept of interface in the context of social communications science [1] and it seems that the conversational AI will eat them all. Frankly, not saying that apps or websites will be killed but will be neglected to that single interface.

Nowadays, there are many searches where it is much easier and quick to get a result using ChatGPT or Gemini than the Google search engine, yet Google has around 90% of the market now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_(communication_studi...

I hope not.

Disclaimer: I'm the guy who still resists https every chance I get because people can see my static web site serving one of 10 files, but we must not lose the ability if a newb to cose their own browser or web server.

Thought it was the point and click adventure company.

That naming is blasphemy.