Show HN: Semiform – A new kind of web form, powered by LLMs
semiform.ai
semiform.ai
I'd have a couple of concerns if I was looking to adopt this:
- Is it actually quicker than filling in a form, especially for questions which would normally be radio buttons or checkboxes? For example on the conference signup example I have to type the days I'll be attending rather than just clicking a couple of checkboxes
- The validation doesn't seem very strict. For example on the conference signup again, I entered 'John Smith, Saturday and Sunday, 4XL' and it recorded my t-shirt size as XXL. The fact that there's no user-visible validation step is problematic because in real life, if I submitted my response by email I'd have no way of knowing that the AI had misclassified that response. As the form creator I don't want to have to look through the raw text of every response to check if it's been recorded correctly.
I think the site feedback example is the best use case; at the moment I wouldn't trust it to work with anything with more concrete real-world effects like getting the wrong size t-shirt or being registered for the wrong days
- Agree that it may not be quicker than filling in a form depending on the use case. To me the potential benefits are more about responding via email or text, avoiding churn from long and complicated forms, etc.
- The 4XL case is really interesting. There is actually backend validation happening on this form that forces the T-shirt size to be one of XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL... but to your point that's not visible to users. Maybe there's a way to make that more visible, or maybe that's just a bad use case for Semiform. Need to think more about this in general.
If the user marks it as correct it could have a verified tick or something on the admin side, and then form creators would only have to manually check over the ones without a tick (with the option to see the original text of the user's response and a form to correct the data)
Obviously it would also be useful for the form creator to author the question so that the possible options are given when they're non-obvious, but users don't always read :)