
Chatbots have struggled to live up to the hype - imartin2k
http://marketingland.com/inside-chatbots-year-growing-pains-210182
======
whatevorama
Geez I guess no one bothered asking users if THEY like chatbots? IMO chatbots
are the online equivalent of getting an automated response from a phone line.
like calling CVS pharmacy "press one" for pharmacy, etc... You get the point
of it, but it's basically a tool that only benefits businesses because the
user experience is very poor. I wonder why no one tries to make this whole bot
thing have more of a personality? It seems so bland. If they modeled it after
ONE person instead of using "data" to sound neutral, they would be more
successful.

~~~
olavgg
Have you ever called support over phone and waited a long time for a simple
question? Annoying, yes? A chatbot can often answer that simple question
immediately. So yes, people do like chatbots as long they at least manage to
get most of the simple questions right.

For example in our case, clients often have problems logging in. With our
chatbot they can easily get a one time password sent to their phone. With a
regular search/faq they would have never known about that, because they are
often too frustrated with the UI experience for finding that information. With
a natural language conversation, it is easier :-)

~~~
shriphani
can't a button saying "can't login" on your website solve this problem?

~~~
rlayton2
Yes, but how many buttons would you need to add?

~~~
sogen
Two buttons: 1.- Forgot password? 2.- Send

~~~
mcbits
Forgot password, send password, change password, change contact info, check
warranty status, estimate next release date, download product manual, how to
replace the battery, does the license allow commercial use?, which product is
better for an apartment?, I'm looking for more information about your upcoming
event in Tulsa - or was it Toledo?

~~~
na85
Sounds like your site has poor navigability. I would be irate if all those
things weren't available.

~~~
mcbits
The problem is how best to expose those and 100,000 other potential buttons to
the user who has better things to do than "navigate".

An obvious solution is a search box, but most sites also have terrible search
functionality, so users have learned to ignore it. For the rare gem that has
useful search, dressing it up as a chatbot could get people to actually try
it. Too bad it looks like a lot of devs are just dressing up their shitty
search as chatbots, so users are being trained to ignore them as well.

------
jklinger410
The developers of RPGs like Morrowind would be better suited at building
chatbots than the companies currently trying, I think.

Much like the examples in this article, I haven't seen any bots that can
present information in a way that is easier than a normal interface, or that
even counts as "conversational."

Maybe I'm being an asshole when I say this, but it just doesn't feel like
these chatbot companies have put in the sheer man-hours to work out
conversations. They're feeding you the information they have, through a small
number of prompts that they predetermine. 100% useless.

Where are the creators of Cleverbot? Shouldn't they be using their platform to
capitalize on this? That was the most conversational bot I'd seen so far and
it came out forever ago.

~~~
chillacy
I think you're right that chatbots need to be way more conversational, but I
don't think having every company re-implement Cleverbot would be beneficial.
Certainly Siri does this, but that gets old after awhile, and it's annoying
when siri thinks you're looking for a joke or something clever when you just
want information. I think the parallel to real life is when you call customer
support, or order food at Wendy's. The conversation is usually extremely
railroaded towards one specific subject (though within that domain, you can
dive deep, like "are the pickles super sour or are they more like fresh
pickles" that chatbots can't do yet)

~~~
jklinger410
I definitely agree with you on this. I think somewhere in the middle-ground is
perfect, obviously.

I think I should be able to ask your chatbot how their day is going, but I
don't think I should be able to shitpost with it for 3 hours.

The reason I bring up Chatbot is because they seemed to at least have the
conversational part figured out.

Also, Siri is really not such a part of this conversation because it is
honestly the only chatbot that I can think of that accomplishes a portion of
what we're talking about here.

~~~
behnamoh
Siri can't even tell jokes, while Cortana is capable of telling jokes,
singing, and much more.

These little things - even though programmed by some other person - can spice
things up and make the bot look even more natural.

Go home Siri.

~~~
eginhard
The other day, (French) Siri replied to "What are you doing this evening?"
with "I'm playing hide-and-seek with Markov models".

~~~
Kurtz79
When I set a short timer the answer sometimes is something like:

"Make sure you don't overcook that egg" or

"The suspense is killing me".

------
niftich
The examples given are just embarrassing. What weather service doesn't
understand zip codes, or, y'know, the name of an entire US state?

Last year, I said:

 _" Chatbots are a fancy name for when your API is accessible through some
well-known IM service. They come with all of the monetization issues of APIs,
but they're surfaced in an environment where you have no pre-existing
relationship with the client, and you can't even charge them for access. This
essentially limits the business model to where you give away the chatbot and
make money some other way; or you recognize you have no business model and do
it anyway."_ [1]

The discoverability factor is amusing: apparently everyone complains about
discoverability, just like they did with Apps and websites. First-comer Kik
isn't big enough for advertisers, meanwhile, Facebook added bots just to have
them and isn't doing anything to promote them because it realized it has all
the users, and botmakers will give them business regardless.

The discoverability question always boils down to "how will people find my
stuff, in favor of my competitor's stuff?", which just proves that the
chatboot "boom" is _just_ like the app boom and the website boom before it
[2]: a gold rush to make it big early, then as the dust settles, the roster of
victors will have emerged and they'll maintain those rankings for years.
Others can still establish niches for themselves, but they are deluded if they
think runaway success is a realistic goal.

All this means, as the article points out, that most of today's chatbots are
just phone trees in text form -- which still has value, but is a lot less
enticing as a get-quick-quick scheme.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309116#13309844](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309116#13309844)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12863565#12867493](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12863565#12867493)

~~~
TheCoelacanth
And as with all gold rushes, it is the people selling the pickaxes who are
really making money off of it.

------
sorich87
As a owner of a bot building platform
([https://www.botamp.com](https://www.botamp.com)), it's very disappointing to
read articles like this. All the hype around chatbots, the high expectations
that will obviously never be met (at least not with current technology) are
hurting adoption of these very useful tools.

Actually, for this very reason we don't even have the word "chatbot" on our
homepage.

When people say things like "stay in contact with everyone who clicked on the
ad to open a conversation with the bot", "Discovery is the biggest challenge",
it shows that they just don't get it.

No customer, ever, will open their Messenger just to hold a conversation with
your chatbot. Customers don't actually want to "discover" your bot so that
they can chat with it. Why would they want that? They have more important
things to do with their lives. :)

What customers want when they write to you on Messenger is finding information
or performing a transaction. When you understand that, you can quickly see the
benefit.

E.g. add a bot that will instantly reply to frequently asked questions to
decrease the load of your customer support team. And when the bot doesn't
understand requests, don't make it say "sorry I don't understand", just leave
the question and a human will reply later (and maybe send a message with
expected timeframe for human response).

When you have a chatbot which can replies to more than 30% of customer queries
(for some of our users, we've seen bots reply to more than 90% of questions),
it'll save plenty of money and time for your business.

About discoverability, well, how did your customers find your Facebook page in
the past? Why do we need a special way to "discover" now? Maybe for "game and
entertainment chatbots" a bot store would work, but I just don't see how it
would work for serious businesses.

How can a business leverage bots right now?

    
    
      - quick data collection
      - instant answers to frequently asked questions
      - surveys and polls over chat
      - lead nurturing via Messenger (engagement rates > 70% compared to low read rate of email)

~~~
hw
> E.g. add a bot that will instantly reply to frequently asked questions to
> decrease the load of your customer support team. And when the bot doesn't
> understand requests, don't make it say "sorry I don't understand", just
> leave the question and a human will reply later (and maybe send a message
> with expected timeframe for human response).

Why not just present your users with your FAQ and a search box prior to them
chatting with an agent? If most customers write in to support on questions
that they would've found answers to via an FAQ, wouldn't that work? You don't
need a bot for that, and it's just more load on a customer to try and
understand the interface to the bot.

I think bots are going to be big in customer support or in conversations
between a customer and a business, but I feel like a lot of bots are being
built to try and replace the human connection between customer and the
business, which I think is the wrong approach.

~~~
sorich87
> Why not just present your users with your FAQ and a search box prior to them
> chatting with an agent?

Because e.g. the user asked the question on Facebook Messenger. And you don't
want to send them to your website when you can reply instantly, right there.

> You don't need a bot for that, and it's just more load on a customer to try
> and understand the interface to the bot.

I'm actually advocating for bots with no interface, no IRC-like commands. The
customer sends the question via chat. If the bot understands it replies
instantly, if not a support person replies. Simple. No "type X for whatever"
or "sorry I didn't understand your request".

> I feel like a lot of bots are being built to try and replace the human
> connection between customer and the business, which I think is the wrong
> approach.

We're definitely on the same page. :)

~~~
intoverflow2
> Because e.g. the user asked the question on Facebook Messenger. And you
> don't want to send them to your website when you can reply instantly, right
> there.

You're defending the use of a bot for a scenario that only occurs because the
bot exists.

~~~
sorich87
No, please read the full thread. The scenario is the following:

There are currently hundreds of thousands of Facebook pages which receive
dozens of customer support questions every day via Messenger.

My point is that a bot can be used reply instantly to frequently asked
questions and leave more sophisticated questions to humans. I'm not defending
any fancy use of bots. Just simple use cases like this.

------
olavgg
Making a chatbot is really hard, because you need a lot of data and it needs
to be of good quality. You cannot use a random chat message log and train your
model, it will usually have way too much noise. Instead I highly recommend
that you build it from scratch. Then you will start getting great results. You
also have to use a proper spell checking algorithm and understand the basics
of how a full text search engine actually works and know the purpose of using
stop words and synonyms.

I would love to present our virtual assistant "James" to the rest of the
world, but we have only recently started to build english training data.
Currently it only understands english with the use of synonyms, so it isn't
working as well as it should.

If you're interested in trying it out you can play with it on the webpage of
one of the largest banks in Norway [http://srbank.no](http://srbank.no), the
chat icon is at the bottom right. You can ask questions in English, but it
will unfortunately only answer in Norwegian at this time, so you have to use
google translate too see if it answered correctly. "James" do support language
detection though, but we have just recently starting to add the english
answers. In a few weeks and James will answer in English :-)

Currently James can predict over 1500 intents related to banking and
insurance. Here are some of the more complex questions James can handle:

Want to open a savings account for my daughter

Can I adjust the limit on my sons bank card

What can you tell me about my pension

Do you have a pension calculator?

I was out drinking last night and lost my credit card

If anyone says that chatbots aren't working and will never work, I can say
this with real data to back me up, it works very well! The feedback we have
gotten the last few months has been amazing! And I'm 100% sure that chatbots
will become a big industry the next years. Complex UI's will finally be good
riddance.

Feel free to ask me anything if you have any questions.

~~~
timac80
I tried the chatbot - I must admit I'm surprised how well it worked actually!
Got me interested, I hope you don't mind a few questions:

When you write 'built i from scratch' what do you mean? That you handcrafted
all the data?

How long did it take to develop this bot, and what technologies did you use?

~~~
olavgg
Yes, all the data we use to train our model on, is handcrafted by our AI
trainers. What they do is figure out all the different questions that are most
common to ask for each intent we want to predict. We have built a tool that
helps them creating all these sentences, often we use templates with keywords.

It is still under development, we started at the end of last summer. We use
Torch and Python-NLTK.

~~~
prokerhov
Why have you chosen torch instead of staying completely in python? I assume
that you use nltk for tagging, entity regoncition, ... and torch for your
classifier.

What kind of model is possible in LUA-torch that could not be done in python
with caffe/tensorflow?

~~~
olavgg
Because it is a lot easier to tune and debug your model in Torch without
diving into C/C++.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13428098](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13428098)

We may switch to pyTorch though, but Lua works rather well for now.

------
techwizrd
I work for GYANT[0], and we're building a chatbot for doing medical triage,
patient follow-up, and answering health questions. We're young (launching this
Thursday actually), but it's already been pretty successful in a number of
countries (like Brazil) with a few hundred thousand users with minimal
marketing. My girlfriend was able to use it without issues to go from "my
throat hurts" to visiting a doctor in 24 hours because she likely has
tonsillitis. The interest and response from the medical, the pharmaceutical,
and the insurance communities have been very positive and they're approaching
us left and right to bring this out to more users.

Chatbots were probably overhyped and oversold to people. Not every platform
needs to explode overnight and produce SV unicorns. I think there is immense
value in chatbots as a platform, but expectations should be tempered. I've
seen little to no overt marketing to regular users that they can ask a bot
rather than looking for an app or website. Most users don't really want to
download and learn another app and create another account for every little
thing. Additionally, many budget phones in emerging markets have limited data,
limited storage space, and minimal specs for downloading and running apps for
every little thing.

That said, this article is pretty terrible. It almost seems like they chose
the worst possible examples to fit a given narrative.

0: [http://gyant.com/english/](http://gyant.com/english/)

~~~
thedailymail
How has your company's interaction with regulators been so far? From your
description and the animation on the top page of the Gyant website, it looks
like the chatbot is claiming to diagnose medical conditions, which in most
cases would put it under FDA oversight.

~~~
techwizrd
We honestly haven't faced much scrutiny from regulators yet (although I expect
that may change once we become more popular). We fall pretty squarely into the
existing rules on symptom checkers which have become pretty prolific on the
web.

~~~
chinathrow
Does that mean you have to write after each message your bot sends a
disclaimer such as "This is not medical advise, go see a doctor"?

Those symptom checkers have them most of the time - I just can't see it fit
within a bot as well.

~~~
techwizrd
Not really. We have a legal agreement, and then the users state their chief
complaint. We record their symptoms as we ask them questions and produce a
list of possible conditions along with their disposition (e.g., Go see a
doctor in 24 hours, visit an emergency room, home care, etc.) based partially
on the Schmitt-Thompson protocol. Schmitt-Thompson is the current battle-
tested standard for medical triage.

------
seibelj
I worked for a year at a super hyped chat-bot company that raised a lot of
money pre-revenue, pre-customers, etc. The difference between the press /
marketing and the actual product built was incredible. Last I heard they are
ditching everything they already built and starting over.

~~~
iamacynic
aka it was a bullshit factory.

------
make3
They were promoted to go with the current AI hype, but none of the bots
deployed actually use any AI because the technology isn't there yet

~~~
Fricken
When the technology _is_ there, I think it will be a big deal. Who knows how
long that will take, though, mastering conversational language is getting into
AGI territory.

------
jameslk
The power of chat bots is in marketing. They compete with email marketing as a
more responsive medium. This is because platforms like Messenger allow much
greater interaction from the user than email. Most think of chat bots as a
textual experience, but you can actually build entire UIs with Messenger that
include images and buttons. In a way, it can be thought of as less frictional
minimalistic website via chat. Eventually you will be able to buy things
directly in chat, closing the loop entirely.

~~~
whatevorama
Good point there is greater opportunity if bots were able to use visuals as
opposed to just words.

------
mattszaszko
Chatbots are really just a way to push and pull messages on messaging
channels, nothing more, nothing less. How much automation you put behind it is
really up to you. And yes, many early examples forgot about their users. Yes,
it is cool to write a bot that can do something cool for a fraction of use
cases, but as always, solving a real problem trumps being cool.

Now chatbots can be used as a content distribution channel (see publishers’
bots), app replacement (Swell is a great example, and they are in the next YC
batch, congrats to them), but I’d like to point out how makers miss the point
on arguably the largest use case for messaging in the business world today,
customer service. Yes, most bots that address this domain can’t live up to the
expectation either. And really, just think Job to be Done, the customer wants
a quick, accurate and preferably personal reply to their question or issue, it
is that simple.

So what we (Bicycle AI) did to make our clients better at this Job is we are
fusing human and AI for a faster, affordable and scalable solution for SMEs. I
hear you say, wait, isn’t this like Digital Genius, well, nope, we integrate
with Intercom for example and we have a team of AI supervisors who approve the
answers suggested by our AI.

This means our clients can provide blazing fast customer service for their
customers 24/7 and according to their volumes. Simple as that. We use past
conversation history and product docs to generate our suggested answers. We
can go live pretty fast and can take care of around 60-70% of incoming
conversations, escalating the complex cases after engagement.

Aaand, we are in alfa stage with emails.

So when it comes to harnessing automation in customer service, we believe that
customers should not be the ones dealing with the rough edges.

------
bluetwo
Amazing that people pouring money into the latest buzzword have once again
come up empty handed.

------
reggieband
One idea I've been mentioning whenever this sort of thing comes up are those
20-question bots. I remember several years ago being blown away by its ability
to guess some extremely specific and random things. I always thought it would
be an interesting interface for a "find" function in an OS. I think it might
work as front-line support as well.

------
terribleplan
Spoiler: People don't want to talk to chat bots to interact with a company.
Same reason they get frustrated at IVRs.

~~~
slouch
Interactive voice response (IVR) is a technology that allows a computer to
interact with humans through the use of voice and DTMF tones input via keypad.

------
throwaway91111
It's just a shitty interface to the same software people already use. What am
I missing?

------
finchisko
The way I see it, chatbots should be there to save companies money on first
line of support by reducing number of personnel to customer interactions..
Like answering the most frequent questions and only if bot cannot answer those
questions then it will redirect to real human. Not as replacement for the UI
as they're used today. Also bots should be part of your website/app and not be
integrated into third party service like fcb messenger. And companies should
constantly check and improve the bot to better respond to FAQs (so developing
bot is actually never ending process).

~~~
andybak
Just like phone menus were meant to. Except they have become mostly
universally loathed.

I can just imagine how much more annoying a "cute" pseudo-AI will be when I
just want to get through to a human being.

~~~
finchisko
let's say bot should be 90% confident that is still giving value to the
customer. if not redirect to human.

~~~
Spivak
If you really believe you've created a bot that your users want to use then
put it to the test.

Advertise that they can get connected to a human by typing 'human' and see how
popular it is. I would be impressed if a bot could get to 10%.

I don't think you need a confidence metric, the humans using the bot will be
happy to signal to you that they're not receiving value.

~~~
finchisko
I can only agree with that.

------
ThomPete
Chatbots are sociable command lines.

In some ways they are great because they make command line more popular in
some ways the are completely useless as they turn something which should most
likely be automated into a manual process.

~~~
0x445442
Yeah, as a developer that spends most of my day at the computer, the exciting
thing about "bots" is the potential coelecensce of disparate UI paradigms

------
cocktailpeanuts
Whenever I get on one of those call center lines, I always try the command
"Agent", instead of following their rabbithole of decision tree.

These "bot" cult members say this time it's different because now we have deep
learning and it's different from the shitty comcast/verizon call center lines
where you have to walk down the decision tree.

But the problem is 99% of these people have no idea what they are talking
about. They probably saw the Lee Sedol match and thought AI has made some huge
breakthrough almost like quantum computing. It hasn't. The accuracy has gotten
better and that surely enables a lot of things, but this has nothing to do
with what these idiots are trying to build.

If you look at the type of people considered "experts" in the chatbot scene,
you'll immediately understand how ridiculous this is. Most of them are non
technical people who don't even know how to write a simple program.

It's hilarious watching these "chatbot experts" talking about how the "old
approach" to AI was all about stupid decision tree whereas "NOW with deep
learning you can actually let the machine learn!" haha welcome to "machine
learning".

------
erikb
I feel disappointed when I read articles like this. It seems the whole
production side of the market doesn't get yet what it's supposed to do. But
it's so obvious.

If you chat with a bot you have near-human expectations. Yes it should be
flexible and not just one-purpose. That's the reason for chatbots instead of a
button. And if you can't provide that you need to use bots to make human
labour cheaper, e.g. telephone bots who make support hotlines cheaper by
getting some of the details out of the way before sending you to a human.
Success will come to companies who can work in this gray area where bots and
humans interact to provide a service together. I think Amazon did the same,
when they started their suggestion engine, where actually humans would do the
sorting at first, then supported by machine learning and finally they got
replaced by pure software.

~~~
mason55
The worst are the phone trees that have you type in all your info and then
when you finally get to a human you have to repeat it all.

------
bedros
I feel the AI hype is similar to the cleantech hype in the 2000's

everyone jumped on bandwagon for FOMO (fear-of-missing-out)

------
ReverseCold
I like chatbots a lot, very useful for translating text quickly or reminding
someone else in the group to do something.

The small games are pretty fun too, perfect for killing time when bored.

There are also things which would otherwise have to have been a separate app.
I don't want to download another app.

~~~
maaaats
Chatbots are useful for doing stuff with simple commands.

Chatbots with AI where they try to have a "conversation" is often just a lot
of hurdles to do something that should be trivial.

~~~
autokad
it reminds me of mIRC bots of the late 90s that would +o you in a channel upon
joining, kick people who -o or kicked you, or did other simple reactionary
things.

~~~
spike021
IRC bots still exist and are _relatively_ easy to write. Very useful things.

------
oneplane
They failed because it's not new nor is there a direct replacement market
available. Just like video calls, it's not that it's not there, it's just not
as 'wanted' as the creators of such tools think it is.

------
ganfortran
And why is this News. They don't have a product to sell other than a toy demo.
No chatbot company can offer an easy to understand, measurable interface for
customers to customize towards their own usage case, with expected outcome.
You can tell me in bareface that your product is magic, and when it doesn't
work, it is due to the bad weather. Though, I think DL based NLP technique is
the future, however, chatbot is not the right conveyor for that vision, much
more like a lot of money hungry dudes riding the hype to monetize their demo
technology.

------
arameghiazaryan
Where Chatbots are useful? Best use cases?

~~~
whorleater
Bringing forms to the masses. My parents will not for the life of them fill
out an excel sheet or an online form for _anything_ , but slap a chatbot in
front of it that asks 1 question at a time and suddenly they're game.

~~~
phamilton
I identified the pain of simple data collection from customers years ago. I'd
be very curious to see if chat bots actually helps, as every other attempt
I've seen has been pretty rough.

~~~
swsieber
I would say yes. There was an article about a chat bot used to aid
immigration: [https://www.engadget.com/2017/03/28/immigration-chat-bot-
can...](https://www.engadget.com/2017/03/28/immigration-chat-bot-can-help-you-
with-the-h1-b-visa/)

------
puranjay
Maybe it's because I am an introvert, but I have a simple question for
estimating the success of any development:

"Does this product reduce the number of social interactions I have to have?
Does it let me do something without interacting with another individual?"

Chatbots, because developers keep trying to make them more "human", fail the
second part of the question. They "feel" like talking to a person at times,
which is something I don't want. I'll just tap a few buttons instead.

------
dredmorbius
A chatbot, voice or text, is a response generator, where responses are
prompts, requested information, or state change (e.g., place order, cancel
service). It's no more interactive than other tools, and the more divorced the
interface from text, the more levels of complexity are thrown at it.

Talking at a CLI interface is no more a "conversation" than typing at one.
Despite the fact that interactive computer systems were called
"conversational". (Don't believe me? There are books on the subject, from
1968: [https://www.worldcat.org/title/conversational-
computers/oclc...](https://www.worldcat.org/title/conversational-
computers/oclc/6755846)
[https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=kw%3Aconversational+comput...](https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=kw%3Aconversational+computing&fq=yr%3A1900..1980+%3E&qt=advanced&dblist=638))

I've been thinking about world models and communication a great deal. In this
context, talking (or typing) with a chatbot is a great deal like arguing with
an idiot. If the chatbot's world model doesn't include the actions or
questions you're trying to address, there's simply no way to get it to
understand. Quite literally, _its world doesn 't include such things._ Though
unlike the proverbial wrestling with a pig, in this case, you're the one far
more likely to be annoyed.

Which gets to another major problem: such systems are constructed, and serve,
the interests of their creators and clients: the companies which create them,
frequently _not_ the same as those who deploy them, the clients.

Users' interests are at the bottom of the priority stack.

Some weeks ago I had the pleasure of calling the local (and pathetic)
newspaper company after our Sunday paper failed to arrive. I was greated, on
three successive phone calls, to a several-minutes-long pitch for services I
had absolutely no interest in, _when trying to address a problem created by
the company in the first place_. To put it mildly, I was not pleased.

And my standing recommendation to cancel the subscription (substituting it
with a much superior national paper) seems to be bearing out.

Chatbots which treat interactions as captive sales opportunities will, I
suspect, not greatly enhance customer affinity to brands deploying such
strategies.

------
milquetoastaf
Anyone know how Visabot has fared? [https://visabot.co/](https://visabot.co/)

------
Tepix
I installed some obscure instant messenger app to try the latest and greatest
Microsoft chatbot a couple weeks ago.

Walked away very disappointed. The chatbot would give incoherent unfitting
answers every three sentences or so. It was also unable to keep in mind what
had already been written.

------
retox
Where did all the hype over shitty chat bots come from? It seemed to fill up
HN and every tech publication overnight. Now even Skype, an application for
chatting with real people, has a bots tab. It was clear from the get go it was
just another way to push ads.

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joeyspn
Unless chatbots pass the Turing Test they'll be perceived as a poor UX
solution vs human interaction. I see them useful in chatops tho. We techies
like automation, even if it's dumb, but non technical users expect much
more...

------
bovermyer
Really, what we actually need are fully sentient artificial intelligences.

At that point we get into some very interesting social questions, though.

------
127001brewer
Does anyone else remember "Chatbots" on BBSes (of long ago)? Are these modern
versions any better?

------
dwighttk
Misunderestimating the long tail

~~~
altstar
What is misunderestimating?

~~~
dwighttk
reference to Arrested Development... Not a real word. But kinda works anyway.

------
toolslive
brings back memories of natachata.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natachata](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natachata)

Rumour has it there was this one guy who wanted to marry her ;)

------
shard972
Just don't tell congress about it.

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moxious
It's a bit disorienting to see this, and on the same day threads elsewhere in
HN, with the HN collective wisdom that automation and AI is soon to bring an
end to most kinds of human work

~~~
mwfunk
I don't think that's the consensus at all. I don't think there is a consensus,
honestly. The only people who would say such a thing are the same
overenthusiastic (bless them, but still) CS undergrads and/or aspiring social
media climbers who also post about how self-driving cars are already a solved
problem that will be universal by 2020, or that we'll reach the singularity by
2035, or that Linux will inevitably devour Windows on consumer desktop PCs by
2005, or that by the 1960s every large first-world city will have a single
skyscraper-sized computer with resources shared by all residents via teletypes
in every home.

Futurism is an extremely useful exercise as long as it's treated as a thought
experiment based on current trends rather than actual prognostication.

The median HN post is probably wiser or better informed than the median post
to Slashdot or /r/programming or whatever, but at the end of the day it's
still an Internet forum for anonymous tech enthusiasts, with all of the
potential for bias and tunnel vision that that implies. You still have to wade
through mountains of garbage to find gems of insight, there's just sometimes a
little less garbage and a little more insight here than elsewhere. I don't say
that to cast shade on HN, rather I think accomplishing something like "a
little less garbage than proggit" is a freaking miracle and that's why I read
HN every day.

