
Ask HN: Is anyone actually excited about using chatbots? - skewart
There is a ton of buzz around chatbots these days. Major tech companies like Facebook and Microsoft are rolling out bot platforms. It seems like every day a new startup launches with a chatbot product - either a bot for doing something people usually do in an app or website, or a tool that helps other people create bots for doing things people usually do in an app or a website.<p>The thing is: all the excitement I&#x27;ve seen is coming from people who are hoping to make money from other people using chatbots. I haven&#x27;t seen much excitement from people actually using chatbots. Am I wrong?<p>Do you ever use chatbots? If so, what do you use them for? Why do you use them? What&#x27;s great about the experience?
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markbnj
I'm not sure "excited" is the right word. Some technology is going to break
through the keyboard/mouse/touch barrier and bring us into more natural
contact with all the data and processing power around us. It's almost
certainly going to be based on language. What else is there? Gestures have
been tried, as have custom "swiping" languages, but the momentum is shifting
strongly toward natural language. So maybe not "excited" but definitely
"fascinated."

~~~
skewart
That's a really interesting point. And it certainly would be phenomenal if we
could interact with computers using natural language.

At the same time, fascination doesn't necessarily make a person an active user
of any particular product.

~~~
onion2k
_A person_ doesn't have to be an active user of a chatbot for it to be useful.
Chat could be the ultimate discoverable API - with bots talking to one
another.

~~~
Matthias247
Or the ultimate undiscoverable API. It is quite similar to speech input in
cars. If you don't know what is valid to say and what not you are quite lost
and will probably only use a subset of the total available API. And
writing/yelling random things against a device just to check if it will work
is something that most people won't do.

This applies to human users, but I think it would be similar for non-humans as
well.

~~~
onion2k
It wouldn't be hard to build in tools to aid discoverability. A 'help'
function that returns a list of features for example. That's pretty much what
WSDL[1] tries to be, but that's really to hard to use well. If there were a
much more flexible "natural language" interface to it then it'd make finding
and consuming APIs both easier and more robust.

I'm just musing on the possibility really. I'm absolutely sure there'd be
difficulties in the technical implementation, and obviously it'd be quite
inefficient compared to a known and well-defined API, but if it could be made
to work the advantages may outweigh those problems. Plus, implementing it for
humans goes 90% of the way to implementing it for computers too, so it's
almost zero-cost if you're considering a chat interface to your service. It's
something to think about anyway.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Services_Description_Langu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Services_Description_Language)

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drdeca
Chatbots on irc and things like reddit (e.g. mirroring images or quoting a
bible verse from the name, or getting info about a user),or twitter (eg the
wolfram tweet a program bot, or the deep forger bot) can be convenient for
some things, but I'm not particularly motivated to make any purchases with
one, or do anything with one that requires registering, or anything that makes
me think it profits by collecting information about me.

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astletron
I can think of many cases where I prefer a text-based interface to a phone
call. I can't think of any case where I specifically prefer a bot-driven text-
based interface to a human-driven text-based interface, though. If chatbots
let companies build more and more effective text-based interfaces to replace
call centers, then I'm at least a little excited, but it's the result and not
the process that has my interest.

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onion2k
Most Slack integrations are essentially first-generation chatbots (parsed and
tokenised text input linked to a finite state machine to actually do things),
and they're hugely popular among users. I see Microsoft and Facebook's moves
as bringing those things to a wider audience - instead of telling Hubot to
deploy some code using Slack we'll tell a brand we've bought something from
that an order has been delayed using Facebook.

People already seem to prefer to interact with a brand using Twitter than the
phone. There's no reason why many Twitter interactions need a human being
behind them.

Chatbots are essentially Blade Runner for customer relations. Sort of.

~~~
skewart
> People already seem to prefer to interact with a brand using Twitter than
> the phone.

Do you think they prefer to use Twitter because of the conversational UI? I've
always thought it was because Twitter is public, so brands respond to
complaints quickly out of fear that they will look bad otherwise.

~~~
onion2k
I don't know why, but if it is speed and visibility as you suggest, a chat bot
hooked up to Twitter would be a really valuable asset to a business.

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pknerd
AS others said, they are not new but the way are being used is something which
matters, specially AI bot. Like we used to hear _There 's an app for that_, we
soon will hear _There 's a bot for that_

I tried to develop an FB bot and record details here:

[http://blog.adnansiddiqi.me/develop-your-first-facebook-
mess...](http://blog.adnansiddiqi.me/develop-your-first-facebook-messenger-
bot-in-php/)

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brudgers
The question hinges on the definition of "chatbot". Since I never get excited
by the prospect of chatting with a scripted human, I'm not excited about
chatting with a bot. On the other hand, natural language API's available via
text appeal to me as an alternative to the-hamburger-of-intuition thinking
that dominates interactive design.

