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Comment by anal_reactor | Hacker News Reader

> the tailored browsing methods already in place are the results of years of careful design and battle testing

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.

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> I've seen people who prefer to say "hey siri set alarm clock for 10 AM" rather than use the UI.

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.

In an alarm, there is only one parameter to set. In more complex tasks, chat is a bad ui because it does not scale well and it does not offer good ways to arrange information. Eg if I want to buy something and I have a bunch of constraints, I would rather use a search-based UI where i can fast tweak these constraints and decide. Chathpt being smart or not here is irrelevant, it would just be bad ui for the task.

You're thinking in wrong categories. Suppose you want to buy a table. You could say "I'm looking for a €400 100x200cm table, black" and these are your search criteria. But that's not what you actually want. What you actually want is a table that fits your use case and looks nice and doesn't cost much, and "€400 100x200cm table, black" is a discrete approximation of your initial fuzzy search. A chatbot could talk to you about what you want, and suggest a relevant product.

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.

Funny, I almost always don't want to talk to store employees about what I want. I want to browse their stock and decide for myself. This is especially true for anything that I have even a bit of knowledge about.

The thing is that "€400 100x200cm table, black" is just much faster to input and validate versus a salesperson, be it a chatbot or an actual person.

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.

Even when going to a shop, I prefer to look into the options myself first. Explaining a salesperson what I need can take much more time, and then I am never sure if they just try to upsell, if I can explain my use case well etc. The only case where I opt for a salesperson first is when I cannot translate my use case to specification due to high degree of technical or other knowledge needed. I can imagine eg somebody who knows nothing about computers ask "I want a laptop, with good battery, I would use it for this and that", the same way they would ask a salesperson or a technical friend. But I cannot imagine using such an LLM to look for a table where I need it to fit measurements etc, or anything that is not inaccessible in terms of product knowledge. If I know the specifications, opting for an AI chatbot is inefficient. If not, it could help.

> 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.

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.

Even when my phone is in my hand I'll use voice for a number of commands, because it's faster.

I'd love to know the kind of phone you're using where the voice commands are faster than touchscreen navigation.

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.

My favorite voice command is to set a timer.

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.

and less mental overhead. Go to the home screen, find the clock app, go to the alarm tab, set the time, set the label, turn it on, get annoyed by the number of alarms that are there that I should delete so there isn't a million of them. Or just ask Siri to do it.

One thing people forget is that if you do it by hand you can do it even when people are listening, or when it’s loud. Meaning its working more reliable. And in your brain you only have to store one execution instead of two. So I usually prefer the more reliable approach.

I don’t know any people that do Siri except the people that have really bad eyes

God I miss physical buttons and controls. being able to do something without even looking at it.

> 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.

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.

Alarm is a good example of an “output only” task. The more inputs that need to be processed the less a pure chatbot interface is good (think lunch bowl menus, shopping in general etc.)

> 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.

Ah yes, it's just a small detail. Don't worry about it.

I don't understand how come that a website for tech people turned into a boomerland of people who pride themselves in not using technology. It's like those people who refuse to use computers because they prefer doing everything the old-fashioned way and they insist on the society following them.

Maybe you can have discussions with a chatbot instead. They always agree with you.

I'm sure some very smart Chatbots are working on it.

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