This conception makes sense iff you believe in ChatGPT as the universal user interface of the future. If anything the agentic wave is showing that the chat interfaces are better off hidden behind stricter user interface paradigms.
So perhaps chatbots are an excellent method for building out a prototype in a new field while you collect usage statistics to build a more refined UX - but it is bizarre that so many businesses seem to be discarding battle tested UXes for chatbots.
Thing is, for those who paid attention to the last chatBot hype cycle, we already knew this. Look at how Google Assistant was portrayed back in 2016. People thought you'd be buying starbucks via the chat. Turns out the starbucks app has a better UX
>changes bass to +4 because the unit doesn't do half increments
“No volume up to 35, do not touch the EQ”
>adjusts volume to 4 because the unit doesn’t do half increments
> I reach over, grab my remote, and do it myself
We have a grandparent that really depends on their Alexa and let me tell you repeatedly going “hey Alexa, volume down. Hey Alexa, volume down. Hey Alexa, volume down,” gets really old lol we just walk over and start using the touch interface
The only reason for the voice interface is to facilitate the production of a TV show. By having the characters speak their requests aloud to the computer as voice commands, the show bypasses all the issues of building visual effects for computer screens and making those visuals easy to interpret for the audience, regardless of their computing background. However, whenever the show wants to demonstrate a character with a high level of computer mastery, the demonstration is almost always via the touchscreen (this is most often seen with Data), not the voice interface.
TNG had issues like this figured out years ago, yet people continue to fall into the same trap because they repeatedly fail to learn the lessons the show had to teach.
Maybe this is how we all get our own offices again and the open floor plan dies.
"...and that is why we need the resources. Newline, end document. Hey, guys, I just got done with my 60 page report, and need-"
"SELECT ALL, DELETE, SAVE DOCUMENT, FLUSH UNDO, PURGE VERSION HISTORY, CLOSE WINDOW."
Here's hoping this at least gets us back to cubes.
This general concept (embedding third parties as widgets in a larger product) has been tried many times before. Google themselves have done this - by my count - at least three separate times (Search, Maps, and Assistant).
None have been successful in large part because the third party being integrated benefits only marginally from such an integration. The amount of additional traffic these integrations drive generally isn't seen as being worth the loss of UX control and the intermediation in the customer relationship.
A UX is better and another app or website feels like the exact separation needed.
Booking flights => browser => skyscanner => destination typing => evaluation options with ai suggestions on top and UX to fine-tune if I have out of the ordinary wishes (don’t want to get up so early)
I can’t imagine a human or an AI be better than is this specialized UX.
Have you ever worked in a corporation? Do you really think that Windows 8 UI was the fruit of years of careful design? What about Workday?
> but it is bizarre that so many businesses seem to be discarding battle tested UXes for chatbots
Not really. If the chatbot is smart enough then chatbot is the more natural interface. I've seen people who prefer to say "hey siri set alarm clock for 10 AM" rather than use the UI. Which makes sense, because language is the way people literally have evolved specialized organs for. If anything, language is the "battle tested UX", and the other stuff is temporary fad.
Of course the problem is that most chatbots aren't smart. But this is a purely technical problem that can be solved within foreseeable future.
Imagine going to a shop and browsing all the aisles vs talking to the store employee. Chatbot is like the latter, but for a webshop.
Not to mention that most webshops have their categories completely disorganized, making "search by constraints" impossible.
Also, the chatbot is just not going to have enough context, at least not in it's current state. Why those measurements? Because that's how much room you have, you measured. Why black? Because your couch is black too (bad choice), and you're trying to do a theme.
That's kind of a lot to explain.
It's quicker that way. Other things, such as zooming in to an image, are quicker with a GUI. Bladerunner makes clear how the voice UI is poor for this compared to a GUI.
Ah yes, it's just a small detail. Don't worry about it.
I don't think it's necessary to resort to evolutionary-biology explanations for that.
When I use voice to set my alarm, it's usually because my phone isn't in my hand. Maybe it's across the room from me. And speaking to it is more efficient than walking over to it, picking it up, and navigating to the alarm-setting UI. A voice command is a more streamlined UI for that specific task than a GUI is.
I don't think that example says much about chatbots, really, because the value is mostly the hands-free aspect, not the speak-it-in-English aspect.
Most of the practical day to day tasks on the Androids I've used are 5-10 taps away from a lock screen, and get far less dirty looks from those around me.
If I use the touchscreen I have to:
1 unlock the phone - easy, but takes an active swipe
2 go to the clock app - i might not have been on the home screen, maybe a swipe or two to get there
3 set the timer to what I want - and here it COMPLETELY falls down, since it probably is showing how long the last timer I set was, and if that's not what I want, I have to fiddle with it.
If I do it with my voice I don't even have to look away from what I'm currently doing. AND I can say "90 seconds" or "10 minutes" or "3 hours" or even (at least on an iPhone) "set a timer for 3PM" and it will set it to what I say without me having to select numbers on a touchscreen.
And 95% of the time there's nobody around who's gonna give me a dirty look for it.
I don’t know any people that do Siri except the people that have really bad eyes
I do that all the time with Siri for setting alarms and timers. Certain things have extremely simple speech interfaces. And we've already found a ton of them over the last decade+. If it was useful to use speech for ordering an uber, it would've been worth it for me to learn the specific syntax Alexa wanted.
Do I want to talk to a chatbot to get a detailed table of potential flight and hotel options? Hell no. It doesn't matter how smart it is, I want to see them on a map and be able to hover, click into them, etc. Speech would be slow and awful for that.
At least in my domains, the "battle-tested" UX is a direct replication of underlying data structures and database tables.
What chat gives you access to is a non-structured input that a clever coder can then sufficiently structure to create a vector database query.
Natural language turns out to be far more flexible and nuanced interface than walls of checkboxes.
Not an agent, but I've seen people choose doctors based on asking ChatGpt for criteria and the did make those appointments. Saved them countless web interfaces to dig through.
ChatGpt saved me so much money by searching for discount coupons on courses.
It even offered free entrance passwords on events I didn't know had such a thing (I asked it where the event was and it also told me the free entrance password it found on some obscure site).
I've seen doctors use ChatGpt to generate medical letters -- Chat Gpt used some medical letters python code and the doctors loved the result.
I've used ChatGpt to trim an energy bill to 10 pages because my current provider generated a 12 page bill in an attempt to prevent me from switching (because they knew the other provider did not accept bills of more than 10 pages).
Combined with how incredibly good codex is, combined with how easily chat gpt can just create throw away one-time apps, no way the whole agent interface doesn't eat a huge chunk of the traditional UX software we are used to.
-diehard CLI user
and if the apps are trusting ChatGPT to send them users based on those sort of queries, it's only a matter of time before ChatGPT brings the functionality first-party and cuts out the apps - any app who believes chat is the universal interface of the future and exposes their functionality as a ChatGPT app is signing their own death warrant.
It's just like Google and websites, but much more insidious. If they can get your data, they'll subsume your function (and revenue stream).
This is exactly the same playbook as has already been played multiple times in the past(and currently playing) by existing companies.
These companies initially laid out red carpets for such builders, but once they themselves had enough apps, they started to tighten the rope, and then gradually shifted to complete 100% control and extortion in the name of "security" or other made-up-excuse.
No-more walled garden. If something like this has to come (which I truly believe is helpful), it should be buiild on open-web and open protocols, not controlled by single for-profit company (ironical since OpenAI is technically non-profit).
I'm not sure that claim is justified. The primary agentic use case today is code generation, and the target demographic is used to IDEs/code editors.
While that's probably a good chunk of total token usage, it's not representative of the average user's needs or desires. I strongly doubt that the chat interface would have become so ubiquitous if it didn't have merit.
Even for more general agentic use, a chat interface allows the user the convenience of typing or dictating messages. And it's trivially bundled with audio-to-audio or video-to-video, the former already being common.
I expect that even in the future, if/when richer modalities become standard (and the models can produce video in real-time), most people will be consuming their outputs as text. It's simply more convenient for most use-cases.
I could see chat apps becoming dominant in Slack-oriented workplaces. But, like, chatting with an AI to play a song is objectively worse than using Spotify. Dynamically-created music sounds nice until one considers the social context in which non-filler music is heard.
There's a whole bizarre subculture in computing that fails to recognize what it is about computers that people actually find valuable.
Getting an AI to play "that song that goes hmm hmmm hmmm hmmm ... uh, it was in some commercials when I was a kid" tho
Absolutely. The point is this is a specialised and occasional use case. You don't want to have to go through a chat bot every time you want to play a particular song just because sometimes you might hum at it.
The closest we've come to a widely-adopted AR interface are AirPods. Critically, however, they work by mimicing how someone would speak to a real human by them.
Also their playlists are made by real people (mostly...), so they don't completely suck ass.
Also, following the Beatport top 100 tech house playlist, and hearing how many tracks aren't actually tech house makes me wonder about who makes that particular playlist.
That's how I feel about a lot of AI stuff.
Like... It's neat. It's a fun novelty. It makes a good party trick. It's the software equivalent of a knick knack.
Like 90% of the pixel AI features. There's some good ones in there, sure, but most of them you play around with for a day and then forget exist.
This isn't me making a cute little website in my free time. This is thousands of developers, super computers out the wazoo, and a huge chunk of the western economy.
Like, a snowglobe is cute. They don't do much, but they're cute. I'd buy one for ten dollars.
I would not buy a snowglobe for 10 million dollars.
Everyone wants the next device category. They covet it. Every other company tries to will it into existence.
One way to consider it that I like as an EE working in the energy model realm; consider the geometry of an oscilloscope.
Electromagnetism to be carved up into equations that recreate it.
Geometric generators that create bulk structure and allow for changing min/max parameters to achieve desired result.
Consider a hardware system that boots and offers little more than blender and photoshop like parameter UI widgets to manipulate whatever segment of the geometry that isn't quite right.
Currently we rely on an OS paradigm that is basically a virtual machine to noodle strings. The future will be a vector virtual machine that lets users noodle coordinates.
Way less resource intensive to think of it all as sync of memory matrix to display matrix and jettison all the syntax sugar developers stuck with string munging OS of history.
Other app-like interfaces like NotebookLM can be useful, for me one or two real uses a week.
Then there is engineering small open models into larger systems to do structured data extraction, etc.
I am skeptical about the current utility of agentic systems, MCP, etc. - even though I like to experiment.
Someone else said that at least the didn’t go on and on about AGI today - a nice thing. FOMO chasing ASI and AGI will drive us bankrupt, and produce some useful results.
I’m building a tool that helps you solve any type of questionnaire (https://requestf.com) and I just can’t imagine how I could leverage Apps.
It would be awesome to get the distribution, but it has to also make sense from the UX perspective.
Out of curiosity, why iff?
e.g. Coursera can send back a video player
I remember reading some not-Neuromancer book by William Gibson where one of his near-future predictions was print magazines but with custom printed articles curated to fit your interests. Which is cool! In a world where print magazines were still dominant, you could see it as a forward iteration from the magazine status quo, potentially predictive of a future to come. But what happened in reality was a wholesale leapfrogging of magazines.
So I think you sometimes get leapfrogging rather than iteration, which I suspect is in play as a possibility with AI driven apps. I don't think apps will ever literally be replaced but I think there's a real chance they get displaced by AI everything-interfaces. I think the mitigating factor is not some foundational limit to AI's usefulness but enshittification, which I don't think used to consume good services so voraciously in the 00s or 2010s as it does today. Something tells me we might look back at the current chat based interfaces as the good old days.
We are at a moment where we're trying to figure out how to design good interfaces, but very soon after that the moment of "okay, now let's start selling with them" will come and that's really what we're going to be left with.
In that regard, things like adblockers which now a days can be used to mitigate some of these defects you talk about are probably going to be much more difficult to implement in a chat-app interface. What are we going to do when we ask an agent for something and it responds with an ad rather than the relevant information we're seeking? It seems to me like it's going to be even more difficult to be in control for the user.
But I think it's going to be like Kagi, you'll pay for a subscription to a good-enough one, but the main companies will try to make their proprietary ones too feature rich and too convenient so that you'll have no choice but to use their enshittified version. What we have now might be a golden age that we will miss having.
But, for better or worse, I do think what's coming may be a paradigm where they are effectively one big omniscient super-app.
I imagine the Star Trek vision is pretty accurate. You occasionally talk to the computer when it makes sense, but more often than not you’re still interacting with a GUI of some kind.
I’m not very bullish on people wanting to live in the ChatGPT UI, specifically, but the concept of dynamic apps embedded into a chat-experience I think is a reasonable direction.
I’m mostly curious about if and when we get an open standard for this, similar to MCP.
The former is like a Waymo, the latter is like my car suddenly and autonomously deciding that now is a good time to turn into a Dollar Tree to get a COVID vaccine when I'm on my way to drop my kid off at a playdate.
What users want, which various entities religiously avoid providing to us, is a fair price comparison and discovery mechanism for essentially everything. A huge part of the value of LLMs to date is in bypassing much of the obfuscation that exists to perpetuate this, and that's completely counteracted by much of what they're demonstrating here.