
Ask HN: Your opinions about bots? - kyloren
Facebook, Microsoft are putting lot of effort behind pushing bots inside a conventional ui.<p>What&#x27;s your idea about bots? Worth investing?
======
wingerlang
I don't like these "bot assistants" that seems so popular nowdays. Like who
wants to type some string that may or may not be picked up correctly by some
bot?

Some examples I see is something like

\- "hey $financialbotnam"

\- "Hey $user what do you want?"

\- "Please send me my transations for groceries, bla and bla for july 24 2032
until august 23 2064, thanks"

\- "Okay!"

\- "Your transactions are bla and bla"

\- "Thanks $financialbot, and what about my blah and bleh?"

\- "bla bla bla"

And so on, seems just.. annoying.

That being said, on my local phone-website there have been one of those "Ask
Sara" bots (since like 10 years) which I found works okay for what it is, but
I suspect (and treat it like) it is just some search. So I usually just ask
some keywords.

Which is kind of my point against the bots, I don't want to type stuff..

And I don't use voice stuff like for Siri etc. But if I did I might have a
different opinion.

------
vikyan
I am very bullish on bots, with certain reservations of course. Do I think
they will replace apps? Probably not. But I do think they are creating new
"field" for which they are the best use case.

One type of chatbots that I think will be revolutionary is making chatbots
that bring people together. Messenger just hit 1 billion users[0] so that's a
huge userbase that's already connected together just by virtue of having a
Facebook account. Chatbots imo have the advantage of not needing a "share with
your friends" button that apps do. For chatbots, sharing and social
connectedness is already built into the platform and the winners will be the
ones that take full advantage of this.

Of course I might be biased because I am currently building a chatbot and have
made one that is slowly gaining traction. But this is just my opinon, and the
verdict is still out on whether this is just a fad or here to stay.

[0] [http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/20/12235476/facebook-
messenge...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/20/12235476/facebook-
messenger-1-billion-users-milestone-ios-app)

------
lumberjack
Well eventually when they become smart enough they will surely be useful.

At this point I cannot say to Cortana, "the Camera App doesn't work, it
probably requires some drivers, fix it" and get any meaningful help out of it.

------
danm07
toomuchtodo's comment is on the money, it is a bit of a fad right now with the
recent acquisitions. But only by a margin.

AI is a bit of a counter-intuitive market: it's a high growth segment, but the
structure of the market top heavy, and several things make it an unattractive
investment:

1\. Democratization: much of the technology is the public domain, meaning
anyone with a CS degree can muddle together their own (and many have). That
means if you invest, you investing in pure AI, which means you're investing in
cutting-edge technology - i.e. Research, which very difficult to assess.

2\. Dependencies & Go-To-Market: intelligence (i.e. pattern predictions)
that's actually useful on a market wide basis require massive amounts of
training data. There are a couple of resources, like ImageNet & Yahoo's data
dump, but in the interim - AI needs to be domain specific. As such, the
dependency is a widely used application (i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Google).
You see the dilemma. Therefore, what seems the likely outcome is acquisition.

3\. Unit of Economics: For this sector, it's the accuracy of its predictions.
This is almost too one dimensional to assess as the basis for investment.
Acquisitions decisions are made almost exclusively by the R&D department.
Therefore, if you invest, you need to know what makes one AI different/better
than the next.

IMO, it's too early to put money in. The structure of the market is still
nascent, heavily favoring incumbents (Google & Amazon offering AI predictions
as a service). It's difficult to see how an AI startup can break in, and how
it can be profitable.

Take the above with a grain of salt, as it's tailored to my risk appetite.

------
ruler88
Our obsession with AI has come and went several times in recent history.
Conversational AI is becoming more promising thanks to neural network.
However, I don't think we are quite there yet in terms of the technology or
the application.

The thing is, if a company is actually able to figure out how to do this
conversational AI right, that company is be a game changer.

~~~
nso95
A lot of bots don't use any sort of machine learning, many are quite simple

------
nivertech
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11915194](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11915194)

------
kleer001
Bots streaming from big popular commercial corporations? Not worth the time.

Bots emerging from finance, law, academia, eastern european kids in a garage?
Treasure.

------
toomuchtodo
It seems to still be in the fad phase.

