I can't help but wonder how much of the Chat** hype is driven by a frustration with the state of modern user experiences. The dream it seems to tap into is "You don't need to deal with the arbitrary whims of 5 different groups of web designers, just talk to one thing and get a single response." When faced with the state of the modern web chatbots actually are preferable, sorry.
A great problematic side effect of the web being so ad-driven is it leads to confusing the user interface, which can host ads, with the information. We need publishers to be able to make money from content without ads, and to be able to make money from providing it in raw form via APIs to third parties. It's that or the chatbot intermediaries are going to take over.
I can't wait for the major llm to place ads in the responses to extract more money
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You know this is coming with Uber: you book an Uber to a fancy restaurant and get Macdonald’s ads in the app, and then the driver’s app picks a route that drives past Macdonald’s and tells them to offer you a $5 off coupon on any order in the next 10 minutes.
So basically the same experience one gets in some countries, where the taxi driver or tourist guide, bring people into some friends shop, and one only gets out after buying half of the store, unless they are good at standing by their opinion no matter what.
It’s a segmentation issue. The ad buy was for “people going to restaurants” but it might have been “people going to {type} restaurants.”
Thought it’s probably not that simple. A naive ad buy might not care to target, or targeting is too expensive and you’re ok wasting some impressions because it might be all-in cheaper, or {brand} has the media budget to pay to be in front of your eyeballs all the time.
I suspect a more sophisticated chatbot will upsell the restaurant's offerings. "Would you like a bottle of champagne chilled and waiting for you? The Mushroom Bruschetta with Brie, Sage and Truffle Oil appetizer is the special of the day" that sort of thing.
Then you get there and find out it hallucinated and ordered you the cheesesteak eggrolls. But this is okay because you love cheesesteak eggrolls and come on... truffle oil? Really?
If they are taking an Uber to of the fancy restaurant and passing a McDonald’s chances are highly likely they will take a very similar route on the way home. They will still want to stop at McDonald’s for a $4 Large fry or an ice cream cone but no coupon this time. The line is now longer which increases the ride time and the drivers perceived profit.
Hahaha this is so spot on that I would take a bet against anyone who thinks this will NOT happen. Of course it will. I see no reason to believe AI will change the fundamental power structures, incentives and disrespect for human beings. New tech often has a little honeymoon phase where you get a few breadcrumbs more in order to try the new thing.
Anyway, it’s not like the different actors desperately trying to steal your attention today will go away because the UI is different. So if the issue with todays tech is ads, upselling, cookie forms etc then hoping that it will “go away” with LLMs is hilariously hopeful.
The people who think AI will distribute power rather than concentrate it are naive and optimistic at best. I prefer to call them delusional and insane. They keep repeating the same thing (developing technologies only entrenched giants can use at scale) and expecting different results (equitable society? where's the profit in that?).
I fear an LLM that is trained to provide ad-based responses in ways that don’t clearly disclose to users that the answer is an ad. YouTube review video culture already has a huge problem with this and it’s not even AI-driven.
Once companies start training models to respond based on advertising inputs (and you know they will eventually), it’s gonna be even harder to trust anything it says.
This is a certainty. The chatbot will be constantly upselling. "Would you like fries with that?" or "Extra cheese on your pizza is only 50 cents, add it?", only more sophisticated. And like some ordering systems today, you won't be able to bypass it. The "yes, please add more things to my cart" answer will be the default and easy answer, declining the offer will take more effort.
I'm not sure if it's the same story since it's from June, but a few days ago WTOP played some audio from one of their reporters trying to order from a drive-thru...
AI: "Would you like to add a peach pie for $1.50?"
Reporter: "No."
AI: "Would you like to add a peach pie for $1.50?"
Reporter: "No."
AI: "Would you like to add a peach pie for $1.50?"
It keeps asking until you say yes then it will always add the extra cheese just like last time. You have to specifically ask for no extra cheese. Then it will always ask for it again.
People will learn creative prompts like telling it you have a potato allergy to make it stop asking if you want fries. But then it will add "hold the fries" to every order all the time and ask: Is there potato in that?
One will have to pretend the food is not for you and order take out/eat in your car.
You see someone else eating in their car, could it be... yes, he is eating fries! You raise your hand and say "potato allergy?" he responds, haha yeah... puts his finger in front of his mouth and goes "ssst!"
Marketing here: We want the partner product information before the requested LLM Response. You have your priorities upside down. Also, no one reads entire paragraphs anymore. So, if you could do that that would be nice.
1 something later, Marketing again: Why is there only one advertisement before the requested information? Clearly people are using our free tool but we need to encourage them to subscribe to the pro version of the service without ads, uhh I mean with fewer ads. So, if you could do that that would be nice.
2 something later: The free version is to fast. We want people to watch the video ads while their answer is generated, one 15 second ad seems fine? No wait, make it 3 x 30 minutes. So, if you could do that that would be nice.
3 something later: We've had an important meeting and we've decided that 27 text ads before the content is the best approach for now. We will let you know if we want more... ehh I mean when. So, if you could do that that would be nice.
Ad blindness has fucked me so many times on web UIs.
There have been a couple of particularly vivid incidents where the company put some sort of interaction on a page and positioned it and shaped it like an ad. So I bitched about how that button wasn't on that page and it was literally front and center (specifically, slightly right of center with text wrapped around it), but positioned like an ad so I didn't see it.
I've experienced this with gigantic download buttons. Took me several seconds of scanning the page to realise the huge green download button was the real thing and not a scam ad as they usually are.
> The dream it seems to tap into is "You don't need to deal with the arbitrary whims of 5 different groups of web designers, just talk to one thing and get a single response."
This calls to mind the old joke: "a person with one watch always knows what time it is, a person with two watches is never sure."
But the thing is, a person with one watch can't be sure the time they have is correct. For more complicated things, don't you want multiple answers? How do you know the one answer you got is the best one?
Ha! I asked Bard a couple of nights ago about some TV series (circa 2021) trivia - "does xxx die in season xxx of show xxx?". The answer looked suspicious so I clicked "view alternative answers" or something. I only read the beginnings which were "yes, ...", "no, ..." and "yes, ...". Really satisfied my curiosity right there...
then the tech caught up with the hype. Or maybe the hype caught up with the hype.
Note one motivation for chatbots is to eliminate the problem where any update in a mobile app requires waiting for the app store whereas a thin chat client never needs to be updated but instead you can roll out new features entirely with back end changes.
hey yeah chatbots are kind of like the text version of mobile UIs.
Amazon, threads, instagram, offerup, facebook. They hide any useful navigation options and present you with a list that must be navigated in order, therefore ensuring ads placed in between the list items will be the only thing on the screen for at least 1 attention cycle.
Terrifying to think of a future where your device doesn't have any real capability because all the websites and apps are just AI driven chatbots/suggestion engines.
> We need publishers to be able to make money from content
Do we? For some types of content maybe but for others it will only attract people who are only there to make money and won't care about quality if they can use tricks to get content in front of viewers instead of better content that was made available for free by people actually interested in the topic.
I some way, being able to monetize websites is THE cause for the drop of quality in the web. Maybe other forms of monetizaition might provide slightly better incentives than ads but the core problem remains - when there's money to be made, the will be people trying to make it without regards to anything else.
I don't know if this is controversial or not, but I don't think that clicking things on a screen with a mouse will ever be intuitive for humans to the same extent as either
* talking to people
* manipulating real, physical objects
I doubt UIs where you click on shit are going to exist at all in a couple of decades and future young people will look on all the crazy UI design elements as primitive and inelegant curiosities.
Similar to how regular people think about pre-win3.1 DOS computing I suppose.
I refuse to talk conversationally to computers. They are not humans, they are there to be given commands and carry out those commands without a lot of back and forth. I don't even use any of the voice interfaces with my devices, I've disabled Siri and "Hey Google" on all of them. I won't use a chatbot on a website. I simply draw the line and reject this fantasy that a computer can or should be treated like or behave like a person.
I understand. Yet natural language is the natural and most intuitive interface, directly built into our brains. I'm convinced that the default user interface will be LLMs while tech-savvy folks will continue to use command-l'ne like interfaces in the future. For normies, traditional GUIs will most likely be both harder to comprehend and slower to use than LMUIs* when they're maturely implemented. After all these years spent with a smartphone, my older relatives still can't do the simplest operations on their phones. And this is because they don't care (to learn), no non-tech person ever wants to spend their lives learning mere tools more than a software developer wants to learn about the intricacies of their car, and they're justified in that.
* I coined the term rn. Tho probably someone else already did it.
Hear, hear. It's like how for years search engines have been carefully guiding us into writing search queries as folk sentence questions. In the beginning of search entering a few terms was good enough to be shown relevant information. I don't want to have a conversation with a search engine either!
I have been poisoned by AskJeeves and I didn't use it much...
Sometimes it makes sense to ask a question, because well it should be one many people have already asked, but most of the times I just want keyword search.
Operating a computer with mouse and keyboard is manipulating real, physical objects. I move my mouse and point it towards something, that is quite real. The computer is a tool, I do not want to talk to it. Imagine talking to your hammer and asking it to drive in a nail instead of just doing it.- Voice commands are hilariously inefficient. For simple commands like open an app, set an alarm etc. they suffice but fore more complex operations its just horseshit.
You must not have kids. We try to limit screen usage, but when my oldest was two he was finding iPhone lock screen features that we didn't even know existed.
>The dream it seems to tap into is "You don't need to deal with the arbitrary whims of 5 different groups of web designers, just talk to one thing and get a single response."
Except that's the business' perspective, because it means paying less people, rather than consumers, who generally wanna talk to and haggle with humans, which requires a business to pay more people.
I cancelled Paramount Plus when I heard about the content deletions. I paid for ad-free and they started showing me unskippable preroll ads for their own shows before anything. They absolutely do not care about their customers.
Isn't it just cable all over? In the beginning cable sold itself as TV without ads, then came the ads. It seems to be exactly what's happening with streaming now.
Dane with dazn, they started serving me ads before starting any stream last month so I'm going to cancel the subscription at the first opportunity I have to get into the cable company shop (because of course you cannot do that via web)
The premise of the article is really "No one wants to talk to your chatbot, because users will already be primed to the chatbot integrated in their smart speaker or phone or whatever device they are using - which will be the device vendor's product (i.e. Google's, Apple's, Amazon's etc) and not yours."
That's a different premise than simply being pessimistic about chatbots as an UI paradigm in general.
Absolutely. Most comments here seem to take the title at face value.
Based on how low companies are willing to go to in the support space, it won't be at all surprising when all of them move to some form of ChatGPT-enabled crapbot, specially adjusted to maximise whatever metric the company wants at huge financial and psychological cost to the user. It's gotten so bad it's hard not to think of employees of such scummy companies as scum for supporting and enabling this toxic ad-driven hell.
my company is experimenting with a chatbot for support.
Of course if you ask it to do something impossible with our product, the answer is a very long thing telling you where to click, which will never work.
It just won't ever say "can't be done".
When asking things that can in fact be done, it seems to get right the general direction, but the details are wrong. Of course a user without in depth knowledge will not know that.
Of course, it probably saves them thousands in support salaries. Of course, it's a little harder to quantify how much it's costing them in lost goodwill and sales, but who cares about the long term, right?
My take away is a bit different: if a user lands on your site/app, they don't want to talk to a chatbot.
If they did, they would have asked ChatGPT or another chat assistant instead.
"When they do come directly to your site or app, they are not looking for a chatbot. They are looking for a UI that works. They know why they came to you. They expect your UI to do what it should do."
>My take away is a bit different: if a user lands on your site/app, they don't want to talk to a chatbot.
But part of that is Siri, Google Assistant, et al. often just say "here's a website" when you ask a question like "Hey Siri, does Walgreens on Blob Street have the FreeStyle Libre 3 in stock?"
But in what TFA describes, Siri would do something like
>I need to ask walgreens.com, is it OK to send your question to them?
Yeah ok
>Walgreens.com says yes the Blob Street Walgreens has the FreeStyle Libre 3 in stock
It would be beautiful if this could be achieved with a standardized API you virtual assistant could just connect to (it could read the documentation and craft a call, then send it...)
Also, very importantly, it's not saying not to build a chatbot, but to recognize that the main consumer of your chatbot interface will be a user's primary LLM, not the user themselves.
The headline is exactly the kind of thing the largely anti-AI attitudes online today will blindly vote up, but the message of the article couldn't be further from the appearance of the headline.
It's about the nuanced infrastructure of a future where chatbots exist in multiple layers, not about a future without chatbots.
Hmm, I may have caused that because I swapped out the linkbait 'your'. That's a standard move in title debaiting here, but in this case maybe it skewed the meaning. Sorry! I'll put it back.
The chatbot as it's used in most cases is not a UI paradigm, it's the complete lack of a UI. Just a phone tree cobbled together by some basic heuristics. Even a FAQ is a better UI if done well.
The main pet peeve about chatbots is that now they're on almost every page, popping up with "I am here to help, what would you like to buy today" and the more atrocious ones that are implemented instead of a call center to reduce the number of human operators to the minimum possible.
Before LLMs I actually tried those chats a few times. If the bot had actually tried to solve my issue (or at least collect some basic data, then open a support ticket) I wouldn't have minded it.
However what actually happened was that it started the chat with some (pre-scripted) smalltalk, giving the impression I could just write my inquiry in freeform - then completely ignored my text and just asked me a series of scripted questions and directed me to a help page (which I already knew) in the end.
I think LLMs could really be an improvement here, because there is at least the possibility they could give you some answers that are actually tailored to your problem.
Of course it might just as well be that we'll now get a very charming and deeply empathetic response that exactly sums up the gist of your problem and then ... redirects you to the generic help page.
When I worked in an internal team at a bank, we chose to make a bot to replace the FAQ when the number of daily tickets where the response that could be summed up as 'rtfm' hit 30.
It might have been frustrating for the users, but at least we avoided basic questions and our tickets at least we're filled correctly.
I hacked a bypass for the secops who worked a lot with us and at least knew how to fill tickets.
To be honest it was a hack i did in a day instead of doing my real job because it was less boring, a week after the chat bot was online, I was not really on the support side (i automate stuff). I probably gave the bypass to 6 persons, documented it but i'm pretty sure no one on my team really knew it was there because i left a month later (and also, only one person from the original team was still there.
The real issue (it's also a response to the comment with management and no human interaction) was that our onboarding was shit. Not only our tools for our clients, but also our internal onboarding (i did work on that too in even if it wasn't my job, because i lost weeks in useless processes, to avoid new hires the same pain).
Make a tutorial for your tools. Two even. A long-winded one, and one with only the commandlines , executables and scripts.
> the more atrocious ones that are implemented instead of a call center to reduce the number of human operators to the minimum possible
This is what's driving me crazy. The stupid "I want to sell you our crap" chatbots are easy to block (uBlock rules exist for most of them, as they are often existing products integrated into websites) but the chatbots people are forced to engage with are the ones that exist to replace callcenter workers.
First companies reduced the influence and power of callcenter workers to make them useless for customers. Now they're saving a buck dumping human operators and letting the powerless chatbots tell the users "sorry but I can't change your situation, have a nice day".
With advances in voice synthesis, I expect chatbots to replace phone operators any day now, probably with a prompt like "you are a company X helpdesk operator. Try to upsell to any customer as much as you can, and try to make them feel pleased even if you can't help them solve their problems".
The Verizon website has the worst chatbot I've ever interacted with. It's the worst because it's mandatory and useless. It's just about the only way to start a tech support interaction, and it is completely incapable of actually solving any problems beyond telling you to power cycle. (Granted, probably half of all of Verizon's tech support problems can be solved by power cycling) But then it's also self-unaware and misleading. It will straight up tell you "yes, I can do that", and then twelve statements and twenty five minutes later tell you "sorry, I can't do that, you need to call this phone support number". What a shit pile. I hate chatbots and I also hate Verizon.
Now they're saving a buck dumping human operators and letting the powerless chatbots tell the users "sorry but I can't change your situation, have a nice day"
I saw a television ad a few days ago where the entire point of the ad was for the company to show off that it has real, live customer service people answering the phones in Arizona.
"I'm Brittany, and I'm a real human being, here to help you!"
It was the one tiny glimmer of hope that the market may sort this out. But it won't.
Call centers themselves are implemented as a way to reduce the number of human operators to the minimum possible. Used to work on dashboard software that monitors them (almost 20 years ago), and it's a metric of organizational success when you get a caller off the line without letting them talk to a human. All the hoop jumping and maze-like options etc are explicitly for this purpose.
Even back then there was talk about when chatbots would be good enough to remove as many humans as possible from the process. And considering how low paid some contact center workers are, it's pretty sad.
Yes. One of the systems was called "adherence." TSYS was using it in 2007 or so. Calls were supposed to be resolved within a certain time or you were penalized.
Same with your arrival time, bathroom breaks, lunch, leaving. You are/were tracked by the minute and penalized for any deviation in either direction. And they canned people all the time for straying too much.
It was the most sadistic workplace I've seen in the first world.
They don't just pop up - they pop up the moment the page loads, getting in your way.
A little bit tuning, say, to keep the popup from happening until the browser has been idle for N seconds, would go a long long way to reducing this frustration.
I don't use this expression often, but I think it fits in this context. This article is pure grade A poppycock.
Are there any metrics to back this up? This bullshit has been spewed since 2014: chat/voice as a service-to-service protocol and has yet to actually materialize.
I agree that people don't like to talk to chatbots in general (cue the intentionally ambiguous click-baity title) but they won't have any problems talking to Alexa vs ChatGPT or other custom system if they're forced to. They will dislike or like all of them equally. Source? Trust me, bro. Just like the author of the article.
Let's not forget that the Alexa org has been losing billions per quarter and revenue never materialized from people ordering shit from Amazon. So... people also don't want to talk to that Chatbot and that chatbot may actually join its extinct brethren.
Hard disagree. Most people already type questions into google when they want to know stuff. That's part of why Google's algo is so borked now for technical users, needing to use NLP to field complex search queries and not using straight PageRank.
It's way easier, IMO, to type the question into ChatGPT and it just gives me a paragraph or two about how to make a certain cocktail or cocktails with some arbitrary ingredients, about what Octopuses eat, or popular restaurants in my area, or even how to approach some microservices architectural problem. No need to go through five links where the author gives you their entire fucking life story to embiggen content for SEO, just to get a recipe
Even in it's current primitive state it's replaced search engines for me to a certain extent. Try asking it
If it reliably scrapes the net for relevant info and analyses it for me, that's it - end of search as we know it. I'll hardly ever use search again.
Are you sure you're replying to the right comment?
Leaving that aside, let's break it down:
> That's part of why Google's algo is so borked now for technical users
Does ChatGPT fix it for technical users? Or does it make it worse?
> No need to go through five links
Of course there's no need and also no way to know if GPT is hallucinating or not. You get one (maybe horribly wrong) answer.
> If it reliably scrapes the net for relevant info and analyses it for me, that's it - end of search as we know it.
For information scraped until September 2021? Yeah, it's very useful to find out information about the Russian invastion in Ukraine, for example.
> I'll hardly ever use search again.
I do X, I am human. Therefore, all humans do X. There may be a problem or two with that line of reasoning.
Don't get me wrong, I hate Google as much as the next person but search-search is not going away anytime soon. More like enhanced by GPT, like they do nowadays.
> Most people already type questions into google when they want to know stuff.
I do that because I want Google to search for a webpage where that question (or similar; how Google figures this out I do not know) is asked and hopefully there is an answer.
I’m under no delusions that the search engine can understand me.
Frankly I only use the “ask a question” format when I can’t think of the right set of keywords to get what I want.
> No need to go through five links where the author gives you their entire fucking life story to embiggen content for SEO, just to get a recipe
Not yet, but it's comming. The publicly available i.e. "free" LLMs are all going to start embedding ads, as others on this thread have already pointed out. I see no possibility that this will not happen.
I think their main point is that trying to get users to use _your_ chatbot is a losing battle since 1) people are more familiar with/have lower friction interacting with mainstream/first party chatbots and 2) this is similar to when sites tried to establish a first party relationship with users via bookmarks but lost and became second party to search engines.
They don’t provide metrics but the analogy seems reasonable to me.
Spare me the paragraphs of 'how did we get here' history and get to the point that's already in your title.
Based on what many site operators see anecdotally, people actually do want to talk to the chatbot because they just want answers to their questions and hand holding. How it's implemented/effectiveness is variable -- they will talk to it for a bit if they perceive they are being helped in some way. Chatbots and general site chat interfaces didn't spread everywhere without at least some data
The paragraphs upon paragraphs of history made me click out of that article. There’s no relevance to the point being made.
In regards to ChatBot usage, in my limited interaction with support bots, they are usually quite useless. Each time I use one, it’s a game of ‘get to the actual support agent’.
All other functions are self-service anyway, at least I've never interacted with a chatbot that could do anything useful, besides being forced upon me to navigate the "why do you want to talk to a person, so I connect you with the right one?"
With all due respect, if I am interacting with your chatbot it's usually because your website provides zero ways to reach an actual human. I have lost count of the amount of times I had a specific problem not addressed in the FAQs, looked for a contact form for 10 minutes then reluctantly clicked on a chat button, only for the bot to continue to try to direct me to the answers I have already indicated did not help me. If I get lucky there's one option buried below a dozen other questions that lets me talk to a person (or, hell, even a sufficiently annealed language kernel) who can demonstrate a knowledge of the system outside of the two or three most likely footguns to avoid.
The problem (and I don't even know that the article adequately addresses it) is not that your bot is insufficiently good. It's that the bot is substituting for a support agent that wouldn't be sufficiently useful, because the support agent would also be made to operate according to a script, because the whole goddamn system is designed to make human interaction into an API. Because that's what businesses want. It's "scalable". And it only has the perverse incentive of making it hard enough to solve moderately complex problems that the user gives up.
I think the point was that novel chatbots will still be created, but they need to be talking to your existing assistant (Siri/Alexa) rather than you going directly to them?
His point seems to be that assistants like Siri and Alexa will be the entrypoint for LLM type interactions, which is sort of non-sensical considering most people are using chatGPT right now. I think this could have been an interesting article about how interacting with chat bots still kind of sucks but instead we got some unsubstantiated view that assistants that a lot of people have already written off are going to take over the space.
Bold of you to think everybody is using Siri/Alexa/other conversational crapola. So many questions: in which language is this one set right now? Is my accent in that language "native" enough? Is yelling around the house an option at this hour? Do I want the passersby listening in? Do I want my conversations being sent to their tech overlords? So many "no" answers that the average techie wouldn't seemingly understand...
Many have written them off because they kinda suck a lot now. But they will be much much better, won't they? 5 years lets say? What kind of LLMs will we have then? If it's reliable, why not just have one interface?
I think that's still not a safe assumption, I don't think it's understood enough to know if the poor performance isn't just a fundamental limitation of some kind. You can already see models taking alternative approaches as they hit diminishing returns on the transformer innovation that triggered the massive improvement. I am just a punter onlooking though, no expert.
That's the same, people go to a place where chat interaction is the primary interface to talk to their preferred chatbot. That can be ChatGPT. But no one goes to allstate.com to talk to their chatbot.
If I get stuck talking to a chatbot I know I've already lost half the battle. A lot of the times when I call in for support, I need decisions and actions to be made.
For safety reasons, I do not expect many companies to allow for fully automated chat bot interactions. So I'm stuck trying to get through to an actual person who can actually do something.
I think there are multiple facets to this argument (both for and against). Yeah, a lot of chatbots are so "stupid" or at least so obviously non-human that as a user, I have absolutely no desire to interact with them. They waste my time and I end up doing the same thing as I sometimes need to do with automated phone systems: press the virtual equivalent of "0" to try to get connected with a real human.
But that is starting to change: some chatbots can now start understanding and interacting like humans. As a user, when that's the case, I don't personally care what is powering the thing behind the scenes. In fact, I'd generally prefer a bot if it's as good as a good human: the number of times I've had 45 minute or longer sessions with some human support agent that:
1) Just didn't listen to what I was looking for
2) Had difficulty communicating because I started a chat on an evening/weekend and got routed to someone who had English as a second language
3) Couldn't actually figure out how to solve some problem, so I had to start a new conversation of the same substance the next day
4) Didn't actually log the notes of my chat for the next agent, so I had to repeat myself
etc
is just completely off the charts and it's anecdotally gotten worse in my experience in the past few years.
Also, many times I've had to wait 5 minutes for an agent to respond at all (presumably because they're way oversubscribed) and then had the "chat with an agent" thing time out and disconnect me entirely after 10 minutes is so frustrating.. Yeah, I went and grabbed a water/coffee/went for a bio break because your agent hasn't responded to my last message for 7 minutes. But then you disconnect me after 5 minutes of "inactivity" and ask me to hop on a new chat with the next agent that will not have any history from the previous chat? I could do with a lot less of that in my life.
Same experience here. It always depends. 2 month ago I was surprised, that a chatbot was able to solve my somewhat complex problem in no time, with a text by text guide. It was also able to awnser follow up questions.
This is a very shallow glance at how "chatbots" have been used in the customer service space, especially in the past 10 years. If you look at what the term has been referring to in the last decade or so, it's not really the AI assistants like Alexa or Siri. The best ones are primarily a customer service tool that helps people triage problems on their own and reduce the need for a human in the loop. They're not do-it-all human assistant replacements. I agree, generally, with the premise that a better UI > an OK chatbot. And ultimately, there are a whole host of problems that chatbots with complex decision trees or even LLMs can't solve, so a chatbot alone isn't really the solution. The combination of chatbot + escalation path to human agent does work pretty well, though.
Please dont editoralize titles. The actual title is "No One Wants To Talk To Your Chatbot", which is slightly different in tone from "No One Wants To Talk To A Chatbot".
In this case it is not a clickbait. It is explained in the article.
Note other comment in discussion here: "Spare me the paragraphs of 'how did we get here' history and get to the point...". The author of the article directly places the blame not on the corporations, but on the reader (developers) who turns away from the inconvenient truth. The truth is so inconvenient, that commenters are trying to editoralize the content by removing the history part. There are a lot of fresh arrivals in IT now. These people don't know that the industry has already experienced several waves of chatbots, and these waves have brought nothing but annoyance. The current wave is no different from the previous waves. Removing the word "you" changes the audience of the article to consumers of chatbots, but the initial article is aimed at their creators.
In my opinion, the original title is intentionally misleading. There could have been many other alternative titles to summarize the article which wouldn't have caused such confusion. I feel like the original author intended for this to happen.
At least with some websites, you can eventually get through. I managed to get through the one at adobe by complaining incessantly about it and asking for a human for probably 20 minutes, and was routed to an actual human who solved my problem of not finding the download link for an old version of some of their software by giving me a direct download link to this version in about 30 seconds. If the process had merely started with the customer service representative rather than the bot, I'd be raving about the experience of solving my problem in moments.
I'm starting to think I should write my own bot who can do the 20 minutes of back and forth with the customer service bot. Then ping me when its time to actually pay attention.
Chatbot is fine as a search alternative, and there's stuff I find more convenient asking chatgpt than looking up and synthesizing myself to figure out the answer.
Chat is the worst possible interface to a fixed menu system, which is the only way it gets used in public facing customer service.
If a company had an optional "faq chatbot" you could talk to, nobody would complain. It's using it to block human interaction while pretending to be able to help that infuriates people.
I was kinda hoping the article was about how terrible a user interface chat is.
All the implementations I've seen so far fall into one of two categories: deterministic or non-deterministic.
The deterministic ones (e.g. that comically bad Mcdonald's job application bot) operate like those old telephone interfaces, where you need to work your way through a conversation tree to input data. This should be a simple form.
The non-deterministic ones, which are actually powered by LLMs are worse. Here there's no structure, no guarantees, and a fuzzy, stochastic approach to everything. Fine for some things (e.g. coding support or whatever normies do with ChatGPT) but terrible for controlling an application.
Yeah for a chatbot to work you really need to force the non-deterministic approach to converge to the actual actions that can be taken. For the experience to be good I think you need to provide training data, such as a user story/feature request (when I ask for X, provide X, fuzz over 1000 different ways of asking for X).
I found maybe the first chatbot I found helpful today. LlamaIndex has a chat bot built into its documentation. Helped me answer some quick questions and gave me a mostly working code snippet for my use case.
A documentation bot is a great idea. I’d like a man-bot in Linux.
I’d like to be able to type “hey tux, restart networking”. Don’t make me dig through /etc and figure out what kind of system this is. Tell me what it’s going to do and if I say “yes”, do it.
What's funny is I have yet to encounter anyone IRL who talks to Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant often enough to notice.
Maybe building chatbots as a layer beneath the existing virtual assistant platforms would be a viable user experience, and I'm sure there are people who would use them—but how many? I'd be interested in statistics on how many smartphone users actually use the voice assistant for more than a couple simple questions once or twice a month.
It's funny that the article is a list of predictions that the author got wrong followed by a new prediction. I'm willing to bet they'll be wrong about this one as well.
I'll note that just because websites ended up needing SEO it doesn't mean creating websites was a mistake. Early on in internet history there were two important fights: the first was about whether we needed websites at all. One view held that the _internet_ was valuable but websites were a novelty. Applications on your computer that you install would leverage your internet connection to transmit data. The second view held that you'd eventually only have a single application on your computer: your web browser (essentially every computer would be a chromebook). Obviously we ended up much closer to view 2 but it's not hard to imagine a world where view 1 won - just look at the way people install apps on phones.
The other important fight was whether the web should be more like broadcast or cable. One view held the web would be agnostic of your provider - you pay for access to the internet and then you can access whatever you want. The other view held that each provider would have its own unique set of websites that subscribers would get access to. If you are old enough to remember AOL keywords you might be able to see how this vision was in the works.
It seems like the author was upset the open internet (first view) won.
The author and I agree about one thing: the first time ever I feel like voice can be a first order input mechanism. I know that we've had Siri and Alexa for a while but they've been a chore to use as perfectly articulated in the author's section "Language Has Been the Logjam".
Now it seems their world view is that we'll all be writing plugins for Siri or Alexa or whatever voice platform is dominate. That sounds to me like saying "don't bother making websites or apps - just make APIs" (by the way that was another real worldview that got some traction about 15 years ago). So let me present two alternative scenarios that could play out:
First - we could end up with a proliferation of bots each bespoke. I know many different people. I wouldn't ask my friend from IT about organic chemistry and I wouldn't ask my biology professor buddy about directions around my town he's never visited. If our programs become more lifelike it's possible that same circuitry in our brains that allows us to remember people can be coopted to remember programs and they'll want each one to be distinct.
Second - maybe there will be a common voice interface but each bot will still generate its own text. Just like not every company builds a web browser but everyone still makes their own websites. Like the SEO and app stores mentioned in the article you might have to play by the rules of the platform you're on but ultimately you're still running your own LLM for your application.
>A bit like nobody wants to be subscribed to half a dozen video streaming services yet here we are.
Are we? That surprises me. I sure don't. I figured nobody watches that amount of tv & movies to justify that. And at some value of $num_of_services people simply find a torrent tracking site and raise their middle finger? (Whatever you think of the ethics of that or the ethics of hollywood companies etc etc)
There are so few movies I want to see that buying a dvd, ripping it then adding to my kodi library is a pretty small expenditure so maybe i'm an outlier? But man alive does hollywood (and the european, asian and other equivalents) produce a mountain of manure with a "worth your interest" half-life measured in weeks and that's if you're not disgusted with the ethical or moral stance from the start - whatever your ethics and morals you're not learning much from celluloid, ever beyond how to retch.
The uncomfortable truth is that tacit collusion is widespread among large businesses, even in the absence of overt ownership consolidation. There's no free market solution for that, no matter how much you idolize tech entrepreneurs. And it's literally textbook economics / game theory, it should be a surprise to no one.
I felt like this before I used - of all things - Bank of America's "Erica" chatbot to find an option in their app that was eluding me. I asked how to change the option, and it responded with a link to the exact screen I was looking for. The reason I couldn't find it was because it was called something different than I thought. I never would have found it otherwise.
That's when I realized a core use case for these sorts of bots: Navigating complex interfaces. As much as UX designers want to make UIs "intuitive", there comes a tipping point of complexity where a UI can only do so much to guide you. Bots are like that kid next door who's "good at computers", or a tech support agent on the phone, who can help you do something you just couldn't work out on your own because of terminology or misunderstanding.
As much as people are wary of Microsoft's Copilot integration into Windows due to the legacy of Clippy and Cortana, I think it's going to be a huge success and an archetype of future HCI.
Up to now, "useless" was implicit in "chatbot". From here? I've been a skeptic, but after some of the things I've seen and heard recently, at this point I'm no longer sure.
The fastest way to lose my business is forcing me contact you by WhatsApp (already bad enough), and then hitting me with a bot asking for a bunch of info, numbered options, etc. Block and delete follows.
>I am here to tell you, no human wants to talk to your chatbot.
Well, I am a human and I most certainly do. I've had great success with Amazon's customer service chatbot, Meta's CS bot, and many others. Sometimes they do help me with what I need and it speeds up my workflow. Sure, chatbots don't always accomplish what I want, but their existence is a net positive for me. I have never once looked at a chatbot and said "If only I could use Siri instead". Never.
Looking past a lot of unnecessary verbiage, I think he's saying that everything that you might want a chatbot on your website to handle should instead be integrated with ChatGPT (or its replacement) in the future. And that you should just have your web app, doing its thing, and not bolt on an isolated version of a chatbot that is only used for interacting with your specific site. The assumption is that people will want to talk to chatbots, just not your chatbot: they want a one-stop shop with every chatbot in the same app.
I see the point, not sure I agree totally.
I'm not someone who ever wants to talk to a chatbot, but sometimes I am forced to. I suppose that it is better in such cases to have a single place I go for that. On the other hand, if my confusion begins on your website, I would hope that your website would help me resolve it: if I have to go from yourwebapp.com, to a third party application, then type "how do I do X on yourwebapp.com?" that seems convoluted. Perhaps a browser-level integration, or at least replacing the proprietary chatbot with a doorway to that single, unified chatbot.
Hmm, I dunno. Sounds like whoever runs such a chatbot would have their hands around the throat of the web, doesn't it?
I kinda like them actually. What I object to is the fact that they're used to BS people rather than address problems, and that often they're actively trying to fake out users.
The thing is that some corporations have a policy of lying to their customers. I once sat in a bank arguing for an hour with a branch and regional district manager about specious overdraft charges, until it reached a point where I itemized details of the charges and their increasingly contradictory/counterfactual statements on a sheet of paper and invited them to try out their act in a courtroom. At that point I received a large refund.
IF you build a chatbot that's designed to only ever say and do things that benefit the bot's owner, of course people are going to hate it and demand to be connected to a human or give up in frustration. If you make a bullshit-free one that is designed to resolve problems in a manner consistent with the UCC or clear corporate commitments (not a sub-sub-sub-clause on page 73 of a densely written TOS agreement that not even the CEO has ever read), then you might find customers like it.
A really nice scenario would be a 3rd party chatbot that would read all the crap on an average web-site and answer questions. First, that will force companies to have support docs in normal text without javascript garbage like 50 vaguely-named, individually-expandable-only, dynamically generated (so no view source search) sections. Second, even if the UI is still terrible at least chatbot can point at the right section and cut out the generic advise, legalese and such.
Another one is augmenting/replacing "community support", the kind Microsoft or Steam use. On Steam forums or Microsoft forums/QnA thing (on the latter, even with the certified/semi-official helpers), most responses are either "why don't you reboot/reinstall/uninstall everything else and try again", or even more useless. And the useful ones are often "I found this other post [that you wouldn't discover using keyword search unless your google-fu is lvl 80], and it offers a solution". A chatbot that read all the posts would be a huge improvement.
I would gladly use a chat bot if they were even remotely useful. But the thing everyone seems to do which is to present you a bunch of buttons anyway is no different from a web based menu and the only thing I use them for is to get connected to a human who can actually do something.
I would LOVE if I could go to a website, click chat, and actually chat, and have my issue resolved, by a bot.
I agree with the author. I write personal chat systems that use my data on the backend (the last book I wrote is on this topic), but I am not so interested in third parties doing this for me.
What I am interested in is having the simplest possible experience with my digital devices while getting work, writing, and play accomplished.
I want to emphasize something: when I wake up in the morning, I have intentions for that day on stuff I want to accomplish and for pleasurable activities like meals or hikes with friends and family. Unless something hugely unexpected occurs during a day, I want to meet my intentions for the day.
I want my devices and the distributed software systems I interact with through my devices to meet my intentions for a day to all work smoothly.
In general, I think Apple, Google, and Microsoft are on the right track. That said, it is a necessary time waste to monitor these companies and make sure the power dynamic is not too grossly in their favor.
No one wants to talk to customer service either. Even with humans, I'd much rather not try to explain my problems to a person who may not be a native speaker, who may not understand well the problem domain, and who may not have much power to do anything.
But even talking to an actual pro is most of the time something I'd rather avoid -- it's after all best if whatever I need is doable without needing extra help.
I think a chat bot is going to be very rarely seen as an actual perk by an end user, except in some specific domains like game NPCs. It's more likely to be used as a first line of support or similar to save costs, as something better than a phone menu system.
I can see them also being a perk for users of very large systems like AWS, where reading the docs can get overwhelming, and search may not work well because you may need to know the specific terms you have to search for.
> "If you have a chatbot, it is for Sir or Alexa to use, not people."
This raises a group of interesting questions:
- Should computers talk to each other in natural languages? In voice? Is that going to work, or just create inter-machine misunderstandings?
- Whose agent is it anyway? It would be useful to have a personal agent that works for you, not for someone who's trying to sell you something. We may see that as an expensive paid product, but the free ones work for the man, not for you.
- It's worth getting a basic understanding of the law of principal and agent. Who works for whom? What is the authority of an agent? Who takes on risk, the principal or the agent? Who pays when an agent exceeds their authority? The legal system had to get this figured out centuries ago, and the failure cases are well-explored.
I wish the author would share data instead of their opinion. At the library, I heard high school students proudly say, "I used SnapChat's MyAI to do my homework assignment."
I have access to data in a social app that has users sending thousands of messages to the ai.
> I wish the author would share data instead of their opinion.
Yeah, anecdotally I'd agree that the author's premise is completely empty.
As for the insight that I'll want my chatbot (Siri, Alexa, etc.) to talk to other chatbots (ChatGPT, Bard, etc.): Sure, if an LLM is the only interface to something, use that. But direct access to apps and services via direct integration is also (obviously?) necessary and desirable.
That makes a lot of sense and tracks with the way I wish voice assistants would work. Specifically there is structured data that I want to search (e.g. what move type does 4x damage to pokemon of type1, type2?) using the voice assistant. ChatGPT seems to get it right, so I wonder if/when Siri and Alexa will.
I guess someone will sooner or later develop the "ai.xml" standard for websites to give their chatbot endpoints to the AI assistants. Or maybe it can just be another opensearch kind of thing.
It really depends. If the chat is high quality and actually doing something helpful, then I want to talk to it. The adoption rate and usage stats of ChatGPT disagree with the tile.
The article is not arguing that chatbots are unpopular with users, as the commentators here seem to be assuming.
TLDR, didn't RTFA: The author is arguing that most LLMs that are fine-tuned should operate at a layer of abstraction beneath Siri etc, so that end-users can talk to the "AI Assistant" that they are used to, and in turn Siri or Google Assistant or whatever interface they're used to can query the LLM.
3. Call extra attention if you're asking a question, and make it easy to respond to.
Example:
>>>> Q: About the latest quote from the vendor, do you think we should
A) Negotiate and close it as-is. (We'll need to open another one immediately.)
OR
B) Batch it with the new customer requirements that just came in.
4. Keep each email to 1 purpose. Many emails > 1 email.
5. If you feel the urge to write a lengthy email, don't. Have a meeting instead.
6. Pretend you're writing an X (formerly known as a tweet) or an HN title. Keep removing words until the message cannot be made simpler. Adjectives, adverbs, and articles are the enemies of clarity.
7. If the message is succinct, put it all in the subject line followed by "<EOM>".
8. Don't have non-factual discussions over email. Have a meeting instead.
9. Email is subject to discovery. Never send anything that can be used against the company or you.
If I have one I can't help but write, I'll add in a 1 line "TLDR" or "Executive Summary" at the top, then have details below. I do spend some effort to be funny or at least amusing in the long writing. Not sure how successful that effort is.
Even better is when someone writes a "help please" email that is long and has the answer to their problem in the original email (in a log message or something) and then it gets escalated and ends up with 50 emails "adding thus and so department/person" and then I get it, and read the first message, and can answer the problem.
I wouldn't mind it, at times. I do wish it was less formulaic with it always asking if it got it right. :(
Really sucks, as that is a rhetorical style I also like to use. Asking "does that answer the question" is a very natural thing to want to know. And it can help keep me from spinning wheels even harder.
Constantly asking, "Is there anything else I can help you with?" is obnoxious.
People are comfortable typing keywords into a search box to find what they need on a website. It seems to me a well structured chatbot can offer at least that much capability and perhaps a little more--especially if it's answers are constrained to a single website or document set and other steps are taken to prevent "hallucinations."
I'll talk to a chatbot if it can shortcut what customer service can do without asking a million obvious questions or making me wait.
~30% I've used it, Amazon's customer service chatbot handles issues like missing orders quickly. What it doesn't handle are more complex inquiries like getting a refund on Alexa celebrity voices.
If interfaces were gamed to keep the users 'engaged' so can the chatbots. At first they may concentrate on what's essential and provide some value, everybody will vie for their betterness but with time things will enshittificate for the same reasons UI became unusable or frustrating.
Expedia has only a chatbot that requires an itinerary to get you to a human, and yet for some of us the login system itself is broken so good luck finding any help. Chatbots are remorseless in keeping you out unless you're logged in. This is the future for all big companies.
I think the article is somewhat incorrect. I really dislike all these custom chatbots. But it is also fairly easy to measure how good they work. And for the sites I work with at least the chatbots perform better than other options and they do offload work from the support teams.
That's an interesting thesis: that everyone will want to use their own chatbot (gpt-powered Siri or Alexa) instead.
I suppose it's possible, but I suspect the author overestimates how much of a positive relationship most people have (or will have) with voice assistants.
Chatbots are everywhere here in the Middle East it seems. And a surprising amount of them won’t let you type any text. Or rather, the bot cannot comprehend any text typed by the user. Instead you have to click choices presented by the chatbot.
>They will log into their smart phone and expect all the other apps and skills to integrate with their personal clouds, arbitrated by their trusted personal virtual assistant.
I don't know anyone that trusts Siri, Alexa, or (Hey) Google. Or ChatGPT, for that matter.
No one i know of misses Alexa or Siri as the entrypoint for 3rd party chatbots. Most people simply use ChatGPT without even thinking about Alexa or Siri anymore. So the whole premise of the article is pretty empty and hidden until the last paragraph..
They don't want to talk to chatbots, but they want to talk to a human. So as long as chatbot can pass a Turing test in a specific context, they're getting exactly what they want.
I do want to talk to your customer service. I do not want to talk to the bunch of untrained, low-paid sales drones you force to screw your customers over, that you call "customer support".
Maybe people use these chatbots for different things but for me they're only ever as useful as what they let you do.
LLM technology letting them carry on a more realistic conversation with me, all that stuff, I don't really care about. All that matters is what it's empowered to do, where it can hook into the real system underneath. I don't really have much sense that this will be expanded vs. the kinds of systems we have now.
These are the chatbots that don't work. They're simple scripts that can not handle new information, and fail to recognize requests that fall out of a very narrow path of wording.
It's good at some tasks, but it's ranging from inferior to inadequate for many others. The biggest drawback is its opaque affordances. It's not immediately apparent what is the range of things I'm able to ask a chatbot about, even if its language processing is advanced. This is a problem with humans as well. Like if you ask me which questions I'm able to answer, I won't be able to provide an answer.
Overall I feel like natural language interfaces is like 3d cinema. It's a novelty more than bringing much actual value.
And judging from the comments, no one did. Thank goodness they didn't, because reading it would have wasted their time more than what they did, which was leaving comments related to their take on the prompt (which is the title of the article)
Why, of course they want to, and they do. Not _you_, perhaps, but it’s like billboard ads: the thousands of eyeballs ignoring them are being outweighed by the few who react and drive revenue.
That reminds me of a billboard in my town, like enormous LED panel displaying adverts... that someone put behind a huge tree. So in the summer you can only mostly see the corners of the billboard. I wonder if their customers know nobody sees their ads.
My mind has been changed on this recently after I showed a very close friend the Pi app [1]. Almost immediately they were using Pi all day everyday as a kind of "rubber ducky" to process decisions and just generally brainstorm with - the same way you would with a therapist, close friend or colleague.
For example, this person literally has an ongoing chat with Pi to "help find enjoyment in daily life" via the voice interface. Not only that but basic help with research etc... instead of googling. That's amazing and staggering. I mean it's literally like the movie Her (without the romantic subtext).
Holy crap, thanks for sharing this. It's the first time a conversational AI has impressed me. I can just about find the edges (short memory, relentlessly positive) but in the space of an hour it's given reasonably good advice on social situations, answered questions about how it works and even recommended some great niche bands based on my existing tastes. Just as you said, its knowledge seems to be extremely broad.
There's a contrast between Pi and the kind of chatbot discussed in the article. When we talk to Pi we don't expect it to do anything for us - it just gives advice and makes suggestions that we can take or leave. The resulting stream of tokens matches our expectations enough to satisfy us.
A chatbot on a company's website however, probably we are talking to that because we want something to happen. "Please fix my account", "my last bill was wrong" etc. As the chatbot isn't integrated with the company's processes it can't actually change the state of the outside world and so talking to it will be a frustrating experience. I wonder if this will improve if/when chatbots get better integrated with systems? Will companies even dare to do this for real?
Hi! We've thought the same and started creating an AI Assistant that is a step further from a chatbot. Check out www.prometh.ai PS Still in early stages
A great problematic side effect of the web being so ad-driven is it leads to confusing the user interface, which can host ads, with the information. We need publishers to be able to make money from content without ads, and to be able to make money from providing it in raw form via APIs to third parties. It's that or the chatbot intermediaries are going to take over.