
Bots Are Hot (1996) - vincvinc
http://www.wired.com/1996/04/netbots/
======
ruddct
Putting aside the nomenclature differences between 'bots' in today's media and
bots in this article (defined, broadly, as a kind of helpful software), can
someone tell me why entrepreneur/VC types are investing heavily in the ongoing
submarine[0] that is 'bots'?

Serious question; I completely fail to see why there would all of a sudden be
a gold rush here.

* There hasn't been some shiny new technology introduced (open source machine learning, maybe? Messengers with APIs have existed for a long time)

* There isn't some massive consumer shift happening that's new (messaging has been around forever. It's been crazy popular outside the US for a long long time.)

* There isn't some crazy new business model everyone's chasing

* There hasn't been some crazy UX breakthrough that solves text interface problems (high learning curve, ambiguity about what the service can do)

I can, however, understand why Facebook and Google want people to build bots
on their new platform, hence the submarine reference.

Any ideas?

[0][http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

~~~
elorant
Because soon enough every company out there would want to include one in their
website, regardless whether it’s based on some half assed AI. Depending on how
good the implementation will be, bots could solve some real problems in the
customer support front. And there would be top dollars in training bots (aka
customizing the software) to adapt to specific needs. Instead of having FAQs,
which no-one ever reads, you’ll have bots. And you could choose from a variety
of them, starting from a few dozen bucks per month up to thousands.

There are hundreds of use cases I can think of. A doctor implements a bot on
his/her site and it asks potential patients questions about their condition.
It feels much more friendly than reading a FAQ. The same goes for a lawyer
firm. Or how about a bank’s call center. Actually, every call center out there
could be replaced by sophisticated bots. Or a bookstore that asks you to name
a few of your favorite books and then makes recommendations. Come to think of
it, the market here is huge. That’s why all the big players are moving in.
Microsoft is already building APIs for their platforms.

As for Google, judging by the fact that they’ve invested shitloads of money in
AI research, bots could really give them an opportunity to capitalize on that
know-how.

~~~
a_small_island
>A doctor implements a bot on his/her site and it asks potential patients
questions about their condition

And the bot misdiagnoses or has a malfunction, leading to the patient not
getting the correct treatment they required. Yikes.

~~~
girvo
> _And the bot misdiagnoses_

vs. a regular doctor doing that? Which happens all the time, actually. Its
really interesting how we expect computers to be far more accurate than we
ever expect humans to be!

Of course, I'm being a little disingenuous: You can sue a doctor, you can't
sue a bot.

~~~
thaeli
> You can sue a doctor, you can't sue a bot.

But you can sue the company that made the bot, and the company that employed
it. With humans the employer can often dump responsibility on the "fall guy"
who made the mistake, while with bots you often have to (properly) consider
any failure as a system problem.

------
ben_jones
As a teenager I ran a pretty high margin business operating botting software
for a popular MMORPG. Bots would autonomously play characters in the game in
order to "farm" items that could be sold to other players in the game. Virtual
currency could then be transferred over a "black market" forum, usually with
paypal as a medium. Just to be clear all this was legal, it merely took on the
visage of "illegal" because it violated the TOS of the game and could you your
in-game character(s) banned.

The software was written by mostly teenagers and by all modern metrics was
absolutely atrocious. It required constant maintenance, crashed all the time,
and was riddled with bugs that would reveal your character as a bot and get it
banned. But the exchange value for the virtual currency was so high it didn't
matter, I was still making hand over fist.

I didn't write any of the software I used at the time but it's a pretty
frequent daydream of mine imagining the literal millions of dollars I could of
made were I able to go back and re-write that software knowing everything
about software development I know now.

The beauty of bots is that they do not augment the productivity of the user
like most software, they replace it with something that is a consistant
multiplier better.

~~~
cheez
As someone who has rewritten software with the benefit of hindsight and
experience... I'm still in awe of how simple and functional my old (sometimes
crashy) code was without any forethought.

~~~
dasil003
Yeah, one of the first professional jobs ca. 2001 was to replace the student
group registration form and database at my 40k-student state university. I
replaced an old ColdFusion app with a few pages of PHP backed by MySQL. The
design was horrendous, the error handling worse, and yet somehow it was an
incredible leap forward in terms of performance and UX.

I think the bottom line is that there is often very juicy low hanging fruit
that you can get to just by a minimal amount of knowledge and sheer force of
will. The deeper knowledge and experience will give you a lot more things to
think about which will help with edge cases, scalability, maintainability,
robustness, etc; but while those things may be necessary for some projects, in
many cases they end up bringing only small marginal gains.

I'm at the point in my career now where I'm actively cultivating beginner's
mind to avoid being paralyzed by my knowledge of all the ways things can go
wrong.

------
seizethecheese
WebVan -> Instacart, Amazon Fresh

Napster -> Spotify

Chatbots (1996) -> Chatbots (2016)

Just because an idea failed, doesn't mean that it's resurrection is
necessarily derivative or vacuous. Timing is everything, 20 years is a
lifetime for applications of tech concepts.

~~~
asimuvPR
Ideas never fail. Just the execution of them. Which heavily depends on a wide
array of factors.

~~~
seizethecheese
That's a little pedantic. I would say that the idea includes the plan for
execution, and in many cases perfect execution cannot resuscitate an idea that
is too early.

~~~
asimuvPR
Its black and white (at least in my opinion). I have an idea for something.
How I bring it to reality and under which circumstances will either tell if my
execution of the idea fails or succeeds. But the idea is still there. In a
sort of idea limbo of sorts.

------
wcummings
Yeah, but it's different now. Now we have AI buzzwords!

~~~
throwanem
We also have many orders of magnitude more computing power on which to
implement the concepts behind those buzzwords. Maybe it'll make a difference.

------
api
Someone tell me a bot I should try to become convinced bots are the next big
thing.

------
shaohua
"But one thing is certain: the numbers and varietiesof bots are exploding. The
bot diaspora has begun."

------
8ig8
Darn. I assumed this was about HotBot based on the title and date.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotBot](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotBot)

~~~
yolesaber
It is incredible to me that not only does that site still exist, but it has an
Alexa ranking of 124,967 as of Feb 2016

------
PhasmaFelis
Heh, 1996. I'm suddenly nostalgic for the era when the Net was new and Wired
was still edgy and exciting, instead of just one more content mill.

------
ygmelnikova
Spent a few years developing a bot with similar features to Alexa, called
LFReD back in 1998. Was possible to carry on a conversation with LFReD via
cordless phone, control lights, look up wikipedia articles etc.

Idealabs approach me at one point offering to buy my botsinc.com dom.

Two things killed development. The first was the quality of the speech
recognition. 85% accuracy sounds impressive, but in real life, it's terrible,
especially combined with background noise. (I had a love bird that would
squawk every time i tried to train the recognizer :) The SR has only recently
caught up enough to be acceptable (just). The other was the AI. Every 'rule'
had to be hand coded. eg: "if SR = 'hello world' then tts 'hello'". I don't
think they'll get past that last issue anytime soon, and I believe the Loebner
prize is still very safe.

