
Chatbots were the next big thing: what happened? - cjauvin
https://blog.growthbot.org/chatbots-were-the-next-big-thing-what-happened
======
chatmasta
Chatbots were never the “next big thing” by any measurable metric other than
artificial hype created by the companies trying to create a new platform for
extracting revenue and data from users.

For this argument to make any sense, there would need to be data that showed
growing usage of chatbots, followed by a plateau and then a drop off. I’m not
sure what that data looks like, but I’m pretty sure there was never a high
growth phase where users were actually interacting with the chatbots. It was
all hype created by Facebook and a few idiotic VCs who wasted money on what
they thought would be the “next App Store.”

I, and many others, were saying around the time of this hype that chatbots
would never become a category defining product, simply due to inherent
usability flaws in their design that have been discussed ad nauseum.

The only people surprised that chatbots failed to become the “next big thing”
are the people who mistakenly thought they ever would be. This assumption was
never grounded in any real data of user desires or real problems. Chatbots
were then, and are now, a solution looking for a problem. I’m not surprised at
all.

~~~
qznc
I fully agree with you. I also dismissed Google Glass and other hypes. I feel
smart about that.

On the other hand, if someone would have pitched Facebook to me, I would have
also dismissed it. I keep that mind to stay humble.

For any trend/hype there will always be people dismissing and praising it.
Thus, if it is successful or not, there will be people who say "I told you so"
afterwards.

It does not matter what a comment on HN says. You personally have to decide,
if you want to speculate/invest in some hype or not. You have to decide which
new technology you learn and which ones you ignore. In hindsight, it would
have been great to learn machine learning five years ago.

~~~
jandrese
Eh, Facebook was a natural evolution of social networks going back to MySpace,
Friendstr, SixDegrees. Each one fixing mistakes of the past and becoming the
next big thing until their own mistakes caught up to them.

The one that I dismissed was Twitter. In fact I thought it was a joke when I
first heard about it, something making fun of how long winded boring blog
posts on services like Livejournal tended to be. I also thought Vine would be
doomed to fail.

~~~
captain_perl
I also thought twitter was a joke until I realized most Americans are too lazy
to write a blog post, or even read one.

“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American
public.” - Mencken (paraphrased)

[http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2011/09/no-one-ever-went-
brok...](http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2011/09/no-one-ever-went-broke-
underestimating.html)

~~~
dboreham
Twitter is the weird thing it is because it began with an SMS interface (hence
140 characters). It took off originally because you didn't need a smart phone
or a data plan or a PC to use it.

~~~
vilmosi
I thought it took off because they managed to get celebrities on it.

~~~
TheKarateKid
This. Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore were amongst the first celebrities on
Twitter to actually post the content themselves rather than by a manager/PR
agent. This got a lot of media attention and many other celebs followed
shortly after.

I still remember finding it strange to see how Ashton and Demi personally
wrote short messages, since every form of communication from famous people at
the time were formal statements released via the press.

------
dchuk
It’s just like why all voice interfaces are shitty: no one has any idea what
the thing can or cannot do. They have a hidden user experience but the
interface makes it feel like you’re talking to a human, but it’s so far from
being a human.

These interfaces are almost like a dark pattern because of how bad they are.

~~~
degenerate
The audio interfaces are so bad I resort to one-word answers to every
question, to get me to a human as fast as possible.

 _" Hi, in a few words, what can I help you with today?"_

> "billing"

 _" It sounds like you have a question about your bill. I can help you with
that! If you can give a few words to describe the reason you are calling, I
can help you with your bill."_

> "billing"

 _" OK, let me get you to a representative who can help!"_

... instead of spending 10 minutes wrangling with the vapid AI, I can actually
move on with my day after speaking to a human. Was this the future we
envisioned in the 90s? I think not. Some systems let you spam 0 (zero) and it
transfers to a human, but more and more are requiring you to interface with
the system in some way, even if disabled or impaired.

~~~
lostcolony
'Agent' or 'representiative' will usually do it faster.

But I hear you. I recently wanted to change the ownership of my cellphone
account. "Change ownership", "It sounds like you want to change cellphone
plans, is that correct?", "Agent", "Okay, let me get you to a representative".

The only tasks these things are equipped to do, are the tasks that I can do
via the company's online portal, and in a much less frustrating manner. I
wonder who is actually using these things.

~~~
gear54rus
It's likely that these are for company itself. Ain't no one got time to deal
with questions that are already explained on the website. This is made to
filter mindless or lazy drones who don't want to search and its totally fair.

~~~
Bartweiss
I've noticed that companies without IVR lines have switched from hold music to
recordings that repeatedly list all the things you can handle online instead.

It's annoying when my issue isn't on the list, since I'll have to hear it 50
times. And it's incredibly aggravating when my issue _is_ on the list, but the
website doesn't actually work right. But it's not hard to understand why it
happens.

~~~
lotyrin
I was on hold with my insurance to file a claim, the IVR loop said for the
third time "Did you know? You can file your claim online!" so I gave in, hung
up, went online and all the form asks for is my contact information (phone +
email) and my preferred method, so I enter email.

I get an email "Hey, I need to contact you so we can proceed, what method
would you prefer?" I reply "Email, please" provide the information I assume
the rep needs and which the online form should have been able to ask me and
offer "What else do you need".

"Is there a time I can call you and [go over the script and fill out a form on
my computer, as if you'd just stayed on hold hours ago]?"

10/10

~~~
behringer
I see you too have had to deal with AAA.

------
wjoe
I always found the chatbot idea odd, it felt like a step backwards in terms of
interaction. We started out with very basic input methods to computers, like
punch cards. Then we moved onto a command line interface where you could type
in words. Then we eventually got GUIs, graphics, websites, all sorts of
complex and nuanced ways to interact with a computer.

To go back to interfacing with a program using written language seemed like an
odd step. It's never been the most efficient way of doing something, and it
requires very advanced technology to accurately understand what people are
trying to say, in whatever slang, shorthand, or bad spelling/grammar they use.

Besides, it's not really dead, the tech just moved to "voice assistants"
rather than "chatbots" \- really just spoken word rather than written word.
And I'm not convinced that's the "revolution" most people are expecting
either. I'll stick to clicking buttons and typing things into my terminal.

~~~
jhbadger
Yes, it kind of reminds me of those old text adventures where you had to guess
what the computer would understand

>get sword

I don't know what "sword" is.

~~~
esolyt
Yes. There is a reason why we don't have text based adventures anymore.
Because we can have new ones with beautiful graphics and interfaces.

~~~
astrobe_
The human-machine communication issues are the same in both cases. When a
video game doesn't understand what you're trying to do, nothing would happen
or you get a negative, non-specific feedback. You think it is better because
you get distracted by the colors, lights and sounds but the communication
channel is as narrow, if not narrower actually.

By the way, what OP says may be true of a game like Dunnet. I don't know if it
is no more maintained or if it is kept that way because nostalgia, but more
recent text-based games (that is, one that could have been programmed by your
father instead of your grandfather) do way better than this. Just try some
popular MUD (the MMO version of text adventures), I'm sure you'll be
surprised.

------
gwbas1c
Whenever a company's phone is answered by an AI, it never does what I ask it
to do.

At that point I just push 0 and repeat "speak to a human."

Why, oh why, would any rational person think that this kind of technology was
about to suddenly take over everything?

This is a typical example of groupthink delusions.

~~~
scrooched_moose
Unintelligible grunting works too. After a few "I'm sorry, I didn't get that"
it always transfers me to a human.

The most annoying part of the experience to me is the menu items are always
~25 things I can trivially do on the website. No, I'm not calling to check my
balance, pay a balance, update payment information, etc. I'm calling because
your website specifically said that function isn't available online and I need
to speak to a representative.

~~~
raverbashing
My guess is that most people call for stuff that's easily doable in the
website, but they can't or won't use it

~~~
duderific
My father in law, who at 71 is fairly tech savvy, still defaults to calling
when he needs help with something. He's always saying "I was on the phone with
Apple for 3 hours yesterday" or "I was on the phone with Xfinity all day
yesterday."

I think if you're from a certain era, you just pick up the phone first and
want to talk to somebody, even if it might be pretty easy to find what you're
looking for online.

~~~
cpmouter
Must depend on eras, yes, because personally I avoid using the phone at all
costs. I'd rather take my eyes out with a spindle gouge than talk to someone
over the damn phone

------
mikesabat
1\. "Chatbots" is horrible branding. Especially with the hype coming near the
unfortunate timing of Russian bots interfering in the US election.

2\. "Chatbot" makes me think the user is leading the conversation. The bot is
interpreting what the human says, and then the bot tries to respond
appropriately. This leads to customer service or operations (like calling a
car) use cases. These specific use cases are hard to pilot, hard to get right
and really tricky to show value to the user or the company. I've never seen a
compelling problem/solution/use case for customer service chatbots. The math
doesn't work.

3\. Messaging is a real channel. It has advantages over phone calls, email,
direct mail and even face to face conversations. Chatbots just aren't the
right concept for the messaging channel. Dentist reminders work great for
instance.

4\. If you like thinking about this stuff, I do a podcast all about messaging.
It's called The Chat Bubble, and this episode is a good place to start if you
want to go deep on FB Messenger. [http://thechatbubble.com/2017/11/edit-
content-the-playbook-o...](http://thechatbubble.com/2017/11/edit-content-the-
playbook-overview-the-4-top-marketing-use-cases-for-facebook-messenger/)

~~~
ntsh34nteu09
I'm curious about #3. I've done some online chats with tech support where I
was chatting with a real person, and I found them infuriating. First there was
the very fake small talk the reps are required to do. Then there are the long
pauses between when I input information and when they react to it because
they're clearly chatting with 4 or more different people at the same time.
Then they don't really read what I wrote carefully and give answers that make
no sense or that I've already said don't work.

Like anything, it depends on how the person on the other end acts, but in my
experience, they're set up to make the interaction repulsive.

------
michaelbuckbee
I think it's equally wrong to just write off chatbots. They are a User
Interface tool that works in some areas and doesn't in others (and recently
has been dramatically misapplied).

Chatbots work well as an input when your hands are otherwise occupied:

\- driving/directions (Google Maps telling you where to go)

\- cooking (reciting a recipe)

They work well when you're requesting a specific thing:

\- "Play Everlasting Light by the Black Keys"

\- "Add Eggs to my shopping list"

\- Responding to Answers in Jeopardy: "What is Syracuse?"

They can work as an alternative CTA in certain narrow areas where they
function like a traditional "wizard". I've seen some ecommerce stats for
things like "Are you shopping for a Fathers Day Gift? Does your dad like
sports? Does your dad like gadgets? Want to see some popular gift ideas?"

Where they don't work:

\- complex NLP dependencies

\- data entry

\- when there is an expectation set that you're talking to a human.

~~~
wepple
I’m curious, are there any good Alexa/ghome apps that do recipes _well_

As in, not just reciting but allowing me to ask how much of X is needed or
what the next step is? That would be great

------
untog
Users never wanted chatbots, really. But platforms wanted them because it
meant yet another way to ensure content is locked away inside their platform.
So, platforms shout to the high heavens, and everyone rushes to adopt they
realise there is no audience.

~~~
bsbechtel
And customer service costs for companies could be reduced to basically zero.

------
bpicolo
> An oversized assumption has been that apps are ‘over’, and would be replaced
> by bots

That was never going to be the case for sufficiently complicated tasks with
enough decisions to make. Same reason Google Home/Echo are awkward interfaces
for almost anything other than getting music to start playing.

GUIs on phones/desktop are tremendously productive because they're information
rich and trivial to use. I can search, choose, customize, and purchase an item
on Amazon in like 15-30 seconds flat. A bot isn't going to beat that for the
general case.

~~~
rahoulb
> GUIs on phones/desktop are tremendously productive

They used to say that GUIs were toy interfaces and only CLIs could offer real
productivity. I don't know where chatbots are going but I wouldn't expect the
current state of the art to be anything like where they end up.

~~~
niftich
The reason the productivity of CLIs was often extolled is because throughout
most of interactive computing's lifetime, CLIs and scripting have been
intertwined.

It was possible and commonplace to invoke parameter-oriented CLIs from another
process, and use the CLI as a perfectly adequate API, while other interface
paradigms like TUIs and GUIs never quite achieved such ease of programmatic
manipulation.

~~~
yoz-y
CLIs are still vastly more productive for repetitive tasks and are quite
passable as an API. For one-off things GUIs are usually better.

------
neya
For me, Chatbots felt like almost a violation of my privacy. Many marketing
industry related sites would get your permission to send you an eBook, but
would slowly after a couple of days drop you a random message about an upsell
to their event/conference/webinar/coaching (some random high ticket value
item) and it's terrible than email spam because email is not intrusive, but
chatbots are VERY intrusive. Suddenly, my phone would buzz, my chrome would
send me a notification and my watch would vibrate all at the same time only to
find out that this shitty marketing firm had sent me something I don't care
about. And the worst ones are the ones that keep sending you stuff with no way
to opt out unless you resort to blocking them. These should be made illegal.

Another case study - I worked with a large pizza chain to implement chatbots
onto their site. In the end, I (although I knew I'd lose money) told them that
their basic add to cart, checkout experience on their e-commerce site was far
better than a chatbot asking you 101 questions to make a f __g pizza. I didn
't advice them based on just intuition, we actually setup Google analytics and
saw that the conversion rates were far better on the E-Commerce site and that
it was impossible for the IT team to keep up with the marketing team that kept
running promotions which led to tons of edge cases for their ordering flow.

So, another example of great technology, great potential, but destroyed by
greedy marketers, poor implementations and businesses that simply want to ruin
an otherwise perfectly customer work flow.

~~~
mikesabat
To your first point, Facebook has clear policy against sending a marketing
message more than 24 hours after a user messages in. They just haven't been
enforcing it. You can definitely report them in the app.

With SMS, in the US, it is illegal if a company is sending unwanted texts.
Covered in the TCPA - Telephone Consumer Protection Act ~2015. Any legitimate
provider will automatically opt you out of the campaign if you reply STOP. You
can also copy the text and forward it to the number that spells SPAM (7726).
They will send a bounceback and ask you what number sent the message.

It's super cludgy, but the carriers do seem to act on complaints, although it
can happen slowly.

------
floatingatoll
Chatbots have no ability to interpret unexpected responses, and are very
infrequently trained correctly. My electric company has a good chatbot,
because when I said:

"The electric pole outside my apartment looks like it's going to fall over"

It ended up using that sentence to determine that I should go to emergency on-
call, which is all it needed to do; further parsing was irrelevant. But then I
called Fedex this morning and told their chatbot:

"My package has a delivery exception."

And it simply couldn't wrap its head around the problem at all — apparently
Fedex doesn't train it to recognize terms displayed to shippers! — and so I
had to battle through the usual "operator, domestic, 1234" route.

If you have a chatbot, be absolutely sure to train it on every word your
company uses for official purposes. The electric company clearly recognizes
"pole" \+ "falling" as an emergency, but Fedex doesn't recognize "exception"
because their mindset is "which division of Fedex Multinational Conglomerocorp
do you need", even though they directly asked "why are you calling".

~~~
JackCh
I bet the electric company probably takes all instances of "electric pole" to
be a probable emergency report, since that is probably the most frequent
reason for somebody to be mentioning an electric pole and it's safer to
default to assuming an emergency.

I bet if you said something like _" This electric pole isn't good for the
aesthetic of my neighborhood, please bury your wires."_ it would assume that
to be an emergency too (or maybe mentioning buried wires would take you to the
"call before you dig" department...)

~~~
floatingatoll
Yes! Precisely correct, and as it should be. If I’m calling to discuss an
electric pole, no computer system is going to react properly, no matter how
many phone tree options it has. Better to risk a false positive of an
aesthetic complaint now and then, than to have someone give up and hang up and
then their house burns down later.

------
p3llin0r3
We've had a better alternative to "chatbots" for a long time, it's called a
command line.

All of this obsession over "natural language processing" is annoying to me.

I have a Google home, and it can't do even the most basic things and struggles
to understand whenever I tell it to do something.

It would be nice if I could just talk to my Google home as if it was a command
line, with very explicit and specific commands that do powerful things.
"Google take a note. Do the laundry." "Google play spotify on the living room
speaker" etc. Instead the interface is an unhelpful mess that doesn't know how
to help me get it to do what I want.

I feel that it is the same with chatbots. Stop trying to process natural
language, and give me a command prompt with good documentation and user on-
boarding.

~~~
ryandrake
Actually I could see chatbots being useful if they behaved more like command
line applications, with functionality known ahead of time and a language model
that doesn’t change. Then I could just prepare a script and do something like:

    
    
        cat cancel_service.script | /use/bin/comcast_dialer
    

and let the bot talk to my script and execute the needed task.

------
erikb
I think all people with some technical insight could've told you that 3 years
ago. But still I'm happy the world finally realizes it. Now it only(!) takes
another 5-10 years until my employer figures it out. Some of these bigger
companies just start to bet on chat bots, but of course will fail at the same
hurdles as everybody else.

------
madeofpalk
'Next big things' are never the next big thing.

What happened with Chatbots was the result of some very very poor 'ui
translation' from Asian apps. The product designers and managers of the
western world looked at 'mega chat apps' like WeChat and Line that have all
these built in apps and interfaces and tried to replicate that. Instead
somehow they thought they were textual chat interfaces (buy plane tickets in
natural language) when in reality they all had their own GUI with buttons and
things to press.

Then all the businesses and agencies and consultants that thought they could
cash in on this opportunity saw it and started pushing it even harder.

There was never any real user problem that this was solving - just businesses
trying to cash in.

~~~
darzu
> 'Next big things' are never the next big thing

Counterpoints: web, mobile, cloud

~~~
Bucephalus355
Countercounterpoint:

cloning, the semantic web, and fog computing

~~~
larkeith
That's not really a counterargument when the original claim was "never" and
parent provided examples of times it did occur.

------
olavgg
Disclaimer, I work for a chatbot startup that is doing really well in the
Nordics. In two years we have grown from 3 employees to almost 100. Chatbots
are a real big thing, our business is stronger than ever, end-users and our
customers are engaged in this! We solve real business problems, we integrate
the chatbot with existing business systems. With this is mind, chatbots are
not perfect, but most end-users are forgiving and accept this.

Chatbots are not a fad, its a real thing, and you will only see more of them
in the coming years.

~~~
darzu
Out of genuine curiosity, what real business problems do chatbots solve? The
only ones I encounter are "customer support" bots, but I'm wondering if there
are other uses that businesses and customers find value in.

~~~
olavgg
Good question! Some things a chatbot excels at:

Finding information quickly: no menus, no clicking around, no more searching.

Customer facing chatbots are one alternative, but many of our clients also
have internal chatbots for either HR stuff, or for finding internal
information. One good example we see is onboarding new employees who benefit
from a chatbot as they ask a lot of questions. Also they are not afraid of
asking too many questions as they no longer fear that they are nagging nor
asking "dumb questions".

Automating processes: for example filling out the insurance form. Or filling
out tax returns. Placing an order, getting status of an order. There are also
a lot of HR tasks that gets automated. How many days of vacation there is
left, business travel, arranging meetings, company benefits and so on.

Think about it this way, a chatbot is a very advanced full text search engine
that excels at filtering out most of the noise. That is also why they have
another name, virtual assistants.

------
haylem
Actually, they may not be the "next big thing", but they're still a pretty
huge deal. Especially for IT and ecommerce support. The support sector is
estimated to a value of a few trillions of USD / year in the coming years,
because of the progressive shift of large cohorts of customers to the cloud.

The point is not to have chat-bots handle all cases, but if they can handle
80% of cases, which are generally trivial, then it'll good enough.

Of course I hate talking to a bot just like anyone else, and being cornered
into a dead-end discussion with one, or to be in an infinite loop, or in a
situation where the bot has no answer and does not offer another path to
resolution. But, from a business perspective, it's a rather sound approach to
have people go through a bot first rather than have every single complaint
clog an inbox. It doesn't scale so well.

~~~
pidg
HR support within organisations, too. I'm aware of some large organistaions
currently investing in chatbots right now to help people find out how many
vacation days they have left, find policies relating to their job etc.

Though this issue might equally be resolved by intranet search engines no
longer being painfully bad (e.g. ones powered by Microsoft Graph).

~~~
megaman22
Why does that need to be a chatbot, though?

That seems like it should be something that could be a trivial CRUD website,
with far less complexity.

------
pjc50
I seem to remember these were the objections that were made at the time.

The basic tech dates back to SHRDLU and ELIZA. In some ways this is similar to
the partially-self-driving-car problem: if it's a mechanical interface where
the human is in control it's fine, and if it's a hypothetical human-equivalent
AI it's fine, but in the middle people forget to adapt to the limitations of
the system. And the limitations are very severe as soon as you go outside the
lines.

~~~
MarkMMullin
AsI recall, Terry Winograd later claimed SHRDLU was the beginning of the end
of the strong AI trajectory, at least at that time. I believe he, or someone
close, said the central weakness of the system was that when it failed, it did
not have any understanding that it had failed, much less why. Seems this is
the current SOTA in chatbots now, given the somewhat snarky examples in the
article.

------
jonathankoren
There are/were two main problems with chatbots.

1) There’s a huge consolidation around Siri, Alexa, and Google. No one wants
to download an app, and you’re never going to win against wake words.

2) Doing the NLU and intent modeling is really hard to get right. All too
often, someone comes along, thinks all they have to do skis throw together
some regexps or toss the neural net du jour over some text and it will all
just work. It won’t. It doesn’t. It’s just really really embarrassing.

Intelligent back off is a thing. Understanding when you don’t understand
something is a thing. Conversation management is a thing. UX matters.

Also, trying to fake chatbots with people, and then saying “We’ll just train
up a model and get rid of those folks” was never going to work, because you’d
always have to have people, because you set your bar at hard AI then. Sure,
that’s a decent strategy of you already have a call center that you’re trying
to cut costs on, but for a startup, that’s just hubris.

------
geekjock
I'm the creator of a Slack bot (Pull Reminders). I ended up building a web UI
to configure the bot rather than using slash commands. The main reason for
this was that Slack's platform is still evolving and I thought it'd be
difficult to build an intuitive experience/interface within Slack. I've seen
other Slack apps do a pretty good job at this though. Check out Eventbot or
GitHub's official Slack app.

It's been fun figuring out how to tackle UX problems like onboarding and
engagement with Slack as the primary channel (versus email). I think chat is
replacing email for many teams and so there's a big opportunity to rethink
traditional workflows with a "chat first" user experience.

------
cphoover
Recently built a chat/comms. system for my last company. I think key to this
user experience is automatically routing to a human when AI systems cannot
determine intent. Most cloud products in this space now provide some way to
determine a confidence measure. IE the default should be human interaction,
unless an intent is certain and a simple remedial action can be taken. This
kind of workflow does have the ability to increase efficiency, and improve
customer experience if done correctly, but it can easily go wrong.

For example, with my bank, automated telephone banking is often much more
efficient and quicker, than talking to a human CSR/Banker, for moving money
around in my accounts.

------
kyleperik
> On the input side, it’s easier and faster to click than it is to type.

I disagree with this. It may be easier, but it is in no way faster. For those
who don't use computers very often I can see it being slower. But for people
who use computers on a daily basis, for mice to still be a commonly used input
device is disappointing. With constant context switches, moving an object
across the desk with you wrist, while keeping your fingers in the same place
to click, and carefully putting the cursor just in the right place isn't
nearly as fast as the same interface using typing. Or comfortable for that
matter.

I'm not saying I disagree with the article as a whole.

 _EDIT: typo_

~~~
mbowcutt
The GUI makes a computer easy to use, while the CLI makes a specific job quick
to execute.

~~~
kyleperik
I think that a combination of GUI with a keyboard can be great too. I think
CLIs have stuck around for so long for their consistency. You type something
and press return. The web on the other end of a spectrum is full of surprises
and therefore requires something to be able to handle it's unpredictability.

Who knows what is really going to happen if I press Tab here? Will it really
bring me to the next field or some random link in the other side of the page?

I wouldn't doubt that once the web finally settled down from this hype, people
will find ways to get the full potential out of both GUI and the keyboard in a
consistent way.

The web is the only reason I need a mouse during work anymore.

~~~
rahimnathwani
"I think that a combination of GUI with a keyboard can be great too."

Yup. Spreadsheets proved this many years ago.

------
ankurdhama
Hype is nothing but unrealistic optimism and thats what the current world of
tech is filled with. People see staged demo and the media start throwing wild
speculations. I never ever get excited by any demo and thats what I suggest to
people but I guess the whole stupid idea of "be optimistic" is so rampant in
current culture that people just blindly start following anything.

------
jbuild
I think we set the goals way to high. It seems like everyone expected
"chatbots" to be in their final form right away. Currently, the best
"chatbots" aren't really chatbots, but act of as sort of human backed, virtual
assistant in a narrow but widening domain. For example, real estate. Most real
estate companies have an insides sales agents that does lead qualification,
sets appointments, etc. There's a company in the space doing this now and
judging from their website, they are doing alright.

[https://structurely.com](https://structurely.com)

I don't see one mention of "chatbot" on their page, it's always virtual
assistant. Even just checking out their marketing material it looks pretty
compelling.
[https://research.structurely.com/customers](https://research.structurely.com/customers)

~~~
njoens
Im the CEO @ Structurely.

We made a deliberate decision not to call ourselves a chatbot, as the stigma
around them is poor and didn't want to get lumped into that category.

We decided that an A.I. assistant is more aligned with our product - which is
backed by humans - but a very vast majority of our conversations are handled
entirely by A.I. only.

Every conversation here was 100% A.I.
[https://research.structurely.com/customers](https://research.structurely.com/customers)

Good chatbot companies have to deliberately not call themselves chatbots. X.ai
is another good example who calls their "chatbots" A.I. assistants on purpose.

------
tartuffe78
When every tech journalism outfit is saying "<X> is the future." you can be
sure it won't be.

~~~
gitgud
Kind of like when your taxi driver is giving you stock market advice.

The most obviously useful technology, usually is only obvious in hindsight.

------
dragondar
To my mind chatbots are the great way to improve your marketing strategy. For
example, our company provides different AI data analysis API’s for businesses,
such as multilingual summarization, news aggregation, sentiment analysis, data
extraction and etc.

We are using chatbot
[https://www.summarizebot.com](https://www.summarizebot.com) as a part of our
marketing strategy. And this works. Potential clients in Slack and Facebook
are using our chatbot and after getting interested in our SaaS solutions. The
conversion rate in Slack is quit good since a lot of businesses are using it.
The strategy is being successful since out potential leads are able to see and
use our main technologies in the bot. Chatbot for us is like smart demo of our
existing technologies and features.

------
osrec
Having a chat with someone can be enlightening because the conversation can be
engaging, can grow organically and the ensuing organic path can lead to
insight.

Chatbots, to me, just don't feel very organic - it's very much a
request/response paradigm, often with a limited set of useful responses
(perhaps I have just encountered the basic ones). If that's all we're getting,
I'd much rather just hit buttons on a screen, than type an entire question in
the hope that the bot understands it (when it doesn't, it's just an annoying
guessing game).

Plus, as other comments have mentioned, it's very hard to see what the bot is
actually capable of. With a good screen based UI, the capabilities are much
more obvious. If it's not fit for your purpose, you can just quickly move on.

------
muzani
I think for the most part, chatbots are just stupid. They're like the
untrained outsourced call center employee, except that the untrained call
center employee at least has 20 years of experience interacting with humans in
a non laboratory environment.

It's in the uncanny valley where it seems almost human like but a major turn
off because it doesn't act like one.

It's probably just better to have the bots act like robots instead of
"chatting".

------
krmmalik
I'm one that's not easily swayed by hype usually.

I haven't jumped on the crypto bandwagon even, but I was working on a project
midway through last year. It was a concept that would help people over come
anxiety and depression so they could self-actualise and live a better life.

The thing with many people -- from out experience -- was that they don't
necessarily always want to speak to a professional but they do want to share
what they're feeling with someone they can trust. That's often a friend, but
unfortunately friends aren't always in the best place to advise and sometimes
inadvertently can make the situation worse. So we decided to build a bot that
was anonymous enough to create enough abstraction but friendly enough to help.
The content was driven by experts in the field.

Anyway. The whole concept just kept failing. We could barely get people past
the first stage of questions. We tried so many different platforms, we did so
many user studies and we kept trying to iterate but it just kept failing and
all this time I did wonder in the back of my head if an app would have been a
better idea. Now I know it would have probably at least been a better idea
than a bot.

------
0x445442
IMHO the thing to get excited about is the potential for a somewhat ubiquitous
UI to get my stuff done; not the NPL. Hopefully NPL will continue to improve
and be leveraged more in the UI. But right now, the prospect of ditching the
seemingly infinite number of GUIs I have to deal with between the web and
mobile apps for tasks/bots in the messaging platform of my choice is what's
peeked my interest.

~~~
wmeredith
I agree completely.

Side note: It's "piqued" my interest... [http://www.dictionary.com/e/pique-
peak-peek/](http://www.dictionary.com/e/pique-peak-peek/)

------
cirgue
Chatbots solve the same problem as a search interface, but in a way that is
lower bandwidth, less intuitive, and mildly personally insulting (the attitude
from the company using the chatbot seems to be 'our users totally will not
mind wasting time trying to interact with a really shitty set of canned
responses'). The bigger question for me is 'why did anyone think this was a
good idea?'

------
matte_black
Chatbots are an infantilization. Just give me a list of commands I can type
straight in and quit with the fake human bit.

Chatbots are basically command lines with some guidance for non expert users.
Convenient when you don’t want to build a bunch of custom GUI for new features
but often gives a worse user experience when the commands are dreadfully
buried in long winded conversations.

------
billybolton
Chatbots are the next big thing. The reason they didn't take over is because
NLP and AI sucks (and "sucks" is putting it very lightly). Current AI is stuck
in a rut, and they don't even realize it. True innovation in AI will come, and
surprise everyone, and like all innovations before, it will come from cutting
edge scientific research.

------
imagetic
I'm unable to recall a single instance in my life where an automated system
was more useful than talking to a human or having great documentation.

From phone directory systems to automated help-desk responses, I've spent more
time in recent years trying to get around an automated hurdle to talk to a
human than waiting on a forum response in 2004 or sitting on hold back in the
days of 1-800 help numbers.

Chatbots were a predictable failure.

Maybe I'm just older now. Settled in my ways so to speak. But I've dedicated
my professional life my tradecraft of media production and publishing. At some
point the technology tools stopped focusing on improving life or solving the
problem.

\- The first VR movement was WAY too premature. \- 3D TV's were DOA. \- 4k+ /
High resolution is a drastically misused/misunderstood medium and technology.
\- The current VR movement just simply doesn't have a platform that can
support the level of processing and bandwidth needed to be worthwhile. \-
Apple has lost it's way. \- I don't even know what Google actually does now,
but I cared more when the search engine was amazing. \- There's too much
media, not enough curation. \- Blogs and personal websites were the golden age
of great information \- RIP copy editors \- Social Media is a game of smoke
and mirrors \- WHO IS CLICKING ON ALL THESE ADS?!? Nobody I know, yet the big
players are making billions? Are the ads worthless? Are we going to wake up
one day to see the internet crashing and burning the same way cable television
is? Don't get me started on newspapers. \- AR is back? Why?!? \- I'd love for
RSS to make a comeback, if there was anything left to subscribe to. \- AI
seems to be the future but I've yet to be impressed. The things that are
promising are far out of reach from everyday users that it just seems far far
away at this point. \- Fortnight seems to have hit the nail on the head.

------
niftich
With the chatbot hype, there was a healthy number of skeptics throughout:
people who wondered about the technical realities of delivering satisfying UX,
ones who worried about unanswered questions about business models, and ones
who figured out that this future would be most beneficial to gatekeeper-
platforms who'd then act as discovery facilitators for users to select from
among competing bots, rather than for botmakers themselves.

It's no accident that Amazon and Google are currently leading in the consumer
voice assistant market: they had large, pre-existing base of users and enough
intrinsic first-party functionality to bootstrap their assistants into
rudimentary usefulness, but then they built platforms where third-parties
could compete for users the same way it happened for apps. In the app boom,
aside from a few runaway hits, the only ones who reliably got rich were the
platform-owners.

------
CM30
Probably people realised that in many cases, a chatbot simply wasn't a good
choice of interface for the product/service they were building. Yes, they can
work well in some cases, like with help desk type support, sales, general
gimmickry on chat rooms and forums, etc.

But in a lot of cases, a traditional UI (whether visual or command line
focused) is simply far more usable than a bot, and people/companies realised
that. As much as it may sound old fashioned, talking to everyone is not
necessarily better than using a keyboard/mouse/controller/whatever, and having
a bot that has to figure out what you want with far less sophistication than
an actual person makes it even worse.

The technology isn't there yet for chatbots to be as useful as they need to
be, and in many cases, bots and chat interfaces and what not simply aren't a
good solution for the problem at hand either.

------
pmart123
Chatbots are a feature, not a product. I'm not a customer, but I would say
Lemonade seems to have successfully used a chat-style bot as the main feature
to onboard new customers. To me, I see context-driven "Google" searches such
as WolframAlpha as more valuable than holding a text-style conversation with a
bot.

------
cocktailpeanuts
Chatbots were the "next big thing" just like how "Blockchain but not Bitcoin"
is supposed to be the next big thing.

It's just bunch of people who look at existing phenomenon that's working
(people use chat a lot on the phone), and then trying to turn it into
something completely different (if people chat a lot, that probably means
people want to buy stuff over chat a lot!), powered by dumb money (stupid VCs
in case of "chatbots", and stupid ICO crowds in case of "blockchains")

The reason these things don't work is because the people who build these
things don't truly understand why something is working, because the original
product they tried to replicate was not easy to understand.

Same reason why it's so hard for dumb electronic companies to copy Apple. They
think they know, but all they're copying is the superficial stuff, and they
never work.

------
zby
A part of the job of a call centre operator is negotiation with the client -
this is hard to do with a bot. Even more so that this is kind of hidden spec,
because companies don't want to admit that the role of the call centre is to
make it hard to get something from the company while pretending to enabling
it.

------
ankit219
Chatbots can only work if they learn to communicate in the millennial language
using emojis and acronyms - basically more urban dictionary than dictionary.
The older generation, preferred talking to people over searching, or typing a
message even if the talking meant they were on hold for 20 mins. Alexa solved
for those with a voice based interface, as did google, and people realized
that talking to a bot is better than typing. With the voice to text conversion
equaling human capabilities, chatbots went down simply to be replaced by a
newer and more easy to use technology. Only difference being that they did not
get the time to be ubiquitous or become the next big thing as predicted. The
evolution of the service, and CX was ultimately slower than what was expected
and hence they are replaced/not popular anymore.

------
mnm1
Do you really have to ask? This AI merry-go-round has been spinning for
decades now. I can't imagine people don't know the drill by now. We've all
been riding this around, some of us our entire lives. The people who thought
this was going to be the next big thing were just the latest fools to be
fooled by this merry-go-round into thinking that AI is once again, just barely
out of reach and reachable within a few years. As usual, they are proven wrong
again and again because AI is so far from being useful for such tasks like
having a conversation with humans. The bottom line is AI isn't there yet and
probably won't be the next time the hype rolls around. Or the time after that.
Or the time after that ... I should just write a loop here that likely won't
break in our lifetimes or possibly anyone's.

------
korovyevski
Chatbots basically killed a startup I was working with a couple years ago. We
had really nice apps, with a realistic exit strategy. Then came "The Pivot",
and we were all working on chatbots. Didn't take long for me to leave that
company, who went out of business not long after.

~~~
freddie_mercury
Sounds like the company was dead anyway and you are mistaking causation.
Companies that are "alive" don't pivot. Companies that are dying people to
avoid death. That the company had to pivot suggests the owners decided the
exit strategy wasn't actually realistic.

~~~
rspeer
> Companies that are "alive" don't pivot.

They can pivot into being a company that is alive, though. Remember that Slack
was a pivot from an online game.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I did not know that, any good rendition of that story available online?

~~~
rspeer
I found this: [https://mastersofscale.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/11/13-the...](https://mastersofscale.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/11/13-the-big-pivot-with-slacks-stewart-butterfield-.pdf)

You can also see a piece of the game on Slack's 404 page!
[http://slack.com/404](http://slack.com/404)

------
pweissbrod
I for one would LOVE to try a spoken UI for an email client. My thinking has
always been that compromising sacrificing plain english with a more
strict/limited set of mnemonic keywords would introduce a learning curve but
with a bigger payoff in reducing confusion.

Also emails delivered from this sort of interface need some means of
indication that they were a spoken format, not typed such that the reader
properly understands the context.

To me, a verbal UI seems attainable by lowering the bar of what we expect from
the AI. Lower the need for AI to interpret your requests from general english
to limited keywords. Allow for an adjustable vocabulary for spoken word
recognition to accomodate a smaller dictionary with less mistypings. Make it
clear the produced content is dictated and not hand-written quality

------
dangrover
I called this like 2 years ago. I am still waiting for better apps.

[http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-
apps....](http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps.html)

------
thewhitestguy
I think everyone has called their bank or cable company at least once or twice
and found themselves lost in a Kafkaesque loop of not being able to get done
what they needed and have subconsciously written 'bots' off as incapable of
helping them perform a task, and/or an executive excuse to put tens of
thousands of call center employees out of work. Just because it's on a website
and the dialpad is replaced with words doesn't mean it's different.

Whether or not anyone wants to admit it, the whole "talking to robots"
thing... I mean, the world is already empty and lonely enough without adding
another layer of "inexorability" to the processes we engage in, in order to
accomplish pretty basic tasks.

------
intrasight
The discussions here (at least what I've read so far) have been about customer
service bots. That's not where chatbots are going to be fun and interesting.
Fun and interesting is the "expert in your ear" that we'll soon have.

------
whoisstan
I agree with the article in general when it comes to NLP, AI and the dull hype
machine. But in certain domains well understood usage patterns in
conversational interfaces have advantages over custom UI's. Conversational
interfaces with micro UX elements, maps buttons images selectors ..., rather
then text input. They advantage is a universal timeline. Be it booking a table
in restaurant, ordering a car, searching for an article, all conversational
interface allow you to go back in time in a uniform well understood way. By
scrolling back. Also your interaction history is searchable. No need to
introduce a new UX element for that.

------
throwawayqdhd
Chatbots were the next big thing before VR was the next big thing before 3D
printing was the next big thing before...

You get the point.

Crypto is the next big thing right now and like all these "big things", it's
going to fall flat on its face as well

------
Myrmornis
Chatbots represent an extremely and unnecessarily pessimistic view of
humanity. We are interfacing with a machine, that has a certain API. Now, we
have two choices:

(1) Assume humans are too stupid to be able to adapt their communication and
learn something about what that API is capable of and what commands it
understands.

(2) Credit humans with the ability to do it; perhaps even evolve their
communication abilities a little to go along with this brave new world
populated by AIs.

No intelligent human wants to talk to an API in natural language when they
have some idea of the capabilities of that API and the commands it
understands.

------
orb_yt
There's a lot of discussion here about hype, but I think many are overlooking
exactly why expectations were so high.

Downloads of new mobile applications have been decreasing in growth steadily
for years now[0]. Instead, user's spend more time inside their existing
applications, particularly messenger applications. Take a look at just a few
of their user bases:

    
    
      - Facebook Messenger - 1.2B+ [1]
      - Whatsapp - 1B+ [2]
      - Kik - 300m  [3]
    

Considering that writing a single bot that was capable to connecting to all of
these platforms was trivial, it gave the developer access to a new and very
significant user base.

Add to this the fact that Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Slack and others, with
a combined market cap in the trillions, were simultaneously contributing to
the support of chatbots in one way or another.

It's a classic rendition of the Hype Cycle[4]. We're probably somewhere in the
_" Trough of Disillusionment"_, but give it a few years and we'll get to the
_" Plateau of Productivity"_, and chatbots will probably make their way to a
more useful purpose.

[0]: [https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/29/forget-apps-now-the-
bots-t...](https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/29/forget-apps-now-the-bots-take-
over/) [1]:
[https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/12/messenger/](https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/12/messenger/)
[2]: [https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/1/10889534/whats-
app-1-billi...](https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/1/10889534/whats-
app-1-billion-users-facebook-mark-zuckerberg) [3]:
[https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/11/kik-already-has-
over-6000-...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/11/kik-already-has-
over-6000-bots-reaching-300-million-registered-users/)
[4]:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle#/media/File:Gartner...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle#/media/File:Gartner_Hype_Cycle.svg)

------
sriku
With most advanced interfaces or tech, people adapt their interactions to the
tool as well. If the tool is capable of evolution, then there is perhaps an
equilibrium point where people can be productive with the tool in an
idiosyncratic way. This doesn't seem to be considered by people proposing AI
agents. "Enactive cognition" \- where cognition is compared to the way a cell
and its environment mutually define the boundary between each other - is
perhaps the model to pay attention to here.

------
mellamoyo
My city went to one to pay for water, trash pickup, etc. It's a horrible
experience to use. It takes longer and is less efficient than just logging
into a modern website and paying.

------
tw1010
Perhaps even more worrying then that nothing came out of it: now all that
money has flowed into the hands of short-term opportunistic thinkers who might
amplify or incentivize even more hype driven companies in the next iteration
of this mechanism. Sure, by no means are all of them bad apples (some just
jumped on the bandwagon but will long term perhaps become the next Elon Musk),
but I think a strong argument could be made that there are enough people of
that ilk in the cohort to be worried.

~~~
jabgrabdthrow
If the chatbot revolution didn’t happen then did those people make a return?
Or are you saying it’s the employees getting paid (who also piled onto the
dad) who are now the ones with capital?

~~~
tw1010
The chatbot revolution didn't happen but there were plenty of companies sold,
with founders who've now gone on to become investors (of the, I claim,
possibly hype-jumping kind).

~~~
le-mark
Were they not all hype jumping before, as you say?

------
5DFractalTetris
I have someone to chat to and they're aren't a bot, and maybe they have like a
lifetime of experiences from a nation I will never really know and cannot
really imagine. It's cool and I have utmost respect for it. I've worked with
humans from places where food is considered sacred and given away for free,
places where the Volkswagen is almost the only auto to be found, and humans
who have survived genocides. They are worth a premium, sirs!!

------
deegles
The two biggest flaws with building chatbots are a) the lack of good tools to
express chat flows at a higher level (no, modeling it as a graph isn't good
enough) and b) no Natural Language Generation that's good enough to trust in
production.

The first one leads to subpar bots that can't respond to most things, the
second means humans have to fill the 'long-tail' of potential responses by
hand, which is impossible.

~~~
tootie
I think the biggest flaw is chat is just a black hole of a UI. Until the
machine is a full AI, you have to be able to put boundaries and parameters on
expected inputs. Otherwise, it's like putting a casual user in front of a
Linux terminal and asking them to use a website via curl. Unless you give them
very visible paths to interaction, you're done. The fact is, we have had that
kind of thing for ages and it's called IVR.

~~~
jonathankoren
One of the best insights we had at Ozlo was putting prompt bubbles on our UI.
They served two main purposes. First they showed what type of questions you
could ask; and second, they showed how to ask a question.

They provided guard rails so to speak. If you don’t really strong hints about
what you can do — and at least recognize intents you can’t handle — you’re
screwed. There is always some asshole who sees “Hi, I can tell you about
restaurants and entertainment. What are you looking to do?”, and answers
“What’s the atomic weight of boron in nanofirkins?”

------
scottlocklin
I think the only way you could think this was "the next big thing" is if you
never did M-x doctor in an emacs buffer.

LSTMs do reasonable cocktail talk if you want someone to answer your emails
for you as an agent, and expert systems shells are actually useful for
navigating legal documents and insurance forms (with a ton of human
intervention). Otherwise, it ain't really a problem that needs solving.

------
clevergadget
The people that I know that heavily use chatbots are teens on discord and they
use them a lot. They are more versatile than the old bots on irc, use them to
play games, stream audio, images, access wikipedia... one bot we use actively
translates between different languages across different channels. And they are
popular! I think this is a case where the media sees possibility but adoption
takes time.

~~~
ealhad
Sure, but those are usually not chatbots _per se_ , but rather simple
commands. The Wikipedia bot, for example, only performs a search on the
website (and is less useful than the actual search when it does not directly
find a page).

~~~
clevergadget
Oh, I guess since I was interacting with a bot in a chat I got confused. So in
this case I guess it's just kids continuing their time honored tradition of
mirc style bots...

------
techsin101
Just like many other here, I feel very smart now :D.

My friend was all neck deep into hype. Yet never could explain how would he
train the chatbot to learn all the facts about the business(es). And in end
all chatbot could do is act like decision tree with some NLP to extent it
could understand few variations.

Which is great but very few limited business use cases, and poor use case for
support unless you want your users to hate you.

------
k_vi
I actively use chatbots on Telegram, but not so much on messenger. Telegram
bots are predictable compared to messenger which relies heavily on NLP.

------
jmull
Well, any and every promising new thing gets overhyped.

(because the press, and experts -- whether real or just self-claimed -- and
enthusiasts have plenty of incentives to hype new things and few reasons not
to)

But that's independent of whether or not the new thing actually has merit.

Even when the new thing really _is_ the next big thing, the hype almost
invariably runs far ahead of schedule.

Personally, I think the jury is still out on chatbots.

------
DannyB2
Like self driving cars freeing humans from the tedium of driving while they
could be doing productive things; applying AI to chatbots could free humans
from ever having to chat online. Ever.

Imagine how humans could do more useful and productive things. More time for
study and contemplation. AI powered chatbots could relieve us from the burden
of ever having to chat online.

------
funwie
Airplane is not a bird Ship not a fish Car not a horse .... Computer is not a
smarter human AI will never have human intelligence Chatbots will never be
humans ... These and many other inventions are useful. They extend human
capabilities. But will never be humans, unless we create a human (as opposed
to giving birth).

------
curo
Chat bot was terrible UX to begin with, because while you're at the screen,
why not have a visual interface to show you all your options?

Voice interfaces hold the promise of releasing us from the tyranny of screen
time. I imagine walking the dog and replying to emails with my headphones.
Might seem silly now, but would love that. NLP/NLG just isn't there.

------
kesor
Slack stopped promoting their "thing" as much as last year, which is why you
don't hear much about chatbots anymore.

------
bennetthi
I'm surprised how most chatbots focus on a 1:1 interaction with the user and
the bot. I find chatbots most productive and novel when you allow the one bot
to interact with a group of users. For example, deploy bots, where each user
can have the bot deploy as well as they can see the chat history to get
context on what has been deployed.

------
dyeje
It was painfully obvious to anybody who's used conversational UI in their
daily life that this was not going to happen.

------
jabagawee
To me, chatbots were nice because:

\- I could navigate them much faster than I could navigate a phone tree.

\- They were very accessible in the sense that I wouldn't have to install a
custom app but instead use a platform that I am very likely to be on already.
As a developer, this also allowed me to set up an unlock-my-door app for my
friends much easier.

------
docmars
They're awkward, and they often don't do what you expected or hoped.

I think millennials especially are used to getting things done themselves
since they're so accustomed to UIs that walk them through getting tasks done.
There's a sense of finer control in user interfaces that chatbots have a hard
time solving for.

------
xg15
I wonder if, if someone released a study showing that using rainbow colours in
your marketing emails increases your perceived humanness by 40%, we'd see a
phase where all marketing emails come in bright rainbow colours and I could
create a simple filter rule to get rid of them.

------
goombastic
I think the big issue really for me personally has been that I know that these
interfaces are clunky/inaccurate and I don't want to be talking out loud and
giving out info in public spaces etc.

If there is an option to type, I got for it the first thing. Anything else
feels gimmicky.

------
notadoc
There just aren't compelling use cases yet, though eventually the technology
will improve and they'll resurface. This happens frequently in tech.

On a similar note, I suspect in another few years we'll be reading an article
titled:

> "AR was the next big thing: what happened?"

------
lazyjones
It quickly became obvious that they were the most annoying and pointless UI
feature since Clippy.

------
LyalinDotCom
Chatbots were always a technology looking for a problem to solve and lets face
it those of us reading HN knows exactly how that always turns out. There will
be lots of chat bots in our future and already are but there is nothing "big"
about it.

------
white-flame
Any time a HN discussion gets as big as this, it's because he content is
controversial and people are arguing.

I don't think I've seen this many replies in unison. It's an amazing testament
to how poorly these systems work at all levels.

------
tjpaudio
This is crazy, people actually believed chatbots were going to catch on? My
employer developed chat bots, but only so we could grab the associated PR from
a few press releases to ride the hype. We knew no one was going to use them.

------
eurticket
For the longest time chat bots were a nuance, if you didn't need it it was
there and if you did need it, it was there and it would take all day. Those
unnecessary pauses to make it seem more human is such a waste of time.

------
selljamhere
In perfect timing, Bank of America released Erica, "your virtual financial
assistant."

[https://promo.bankofamerica.com/erica/](https://promo.bankofamerica.com/erica/)

------
debt
The AI winter is upon us and its first casualty is the chat bot.

After all, if AI is as ubiquitous and threatening as many are claiming, then
why has the literal least complex implementation of it, a chat bot, failed
completely?

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marban
First thing I do when I encounter a chatbot is to type 'Live Agent'

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listentojohan
Thank god. Too often, they just work as a hindrance to get the help you need.

~~~
castlecrasher2
>Sorry, I didn't understand that.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
It's a common scenario: you want to solve a problem by reading online help or
contacting customer support and a window pops up "Hi it's Brian, can I help
you?" Of course you know it's not Brian, it answers by spiting out some pieces
of badly-prepared script, can't answer any specific question, and sooner or
later you realize it's worse than useless as it only took your time you could
use to actually solve the problem.

~~~
ealhad
>Sorry, I didn't understand that.

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xtiansimon
This article sets chatbots as endangered, and then works very hard to reset
their context.

I'm don't work within an industry where chatbots were a solution.

From this naive position, what are the exemplary examples of chatbots?

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pX0r
Yet another tech that nobody wants. They are the next worst thing after the
"allow notifications" pop-up that every landing page seems to be infested with
these days.

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rajacombinator
Chatbots, like most tech buzzwords, were always a scam. The only question was
if you (investor/exec/“researcher”) were dumb enough to fall for it.

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l4chong
conversation ui developer here and I know I might be biased. For sure there is
a hype. People seems to think that chatbot/voice assistant will be the new
platform. But really chatbot/voice assistant are meant to augment the current
platforms.

We can already see this with voice assistant integrated to mobile devices and
in the near future VR's and robots.

It will be interesting how it works out once everything gets standardized.

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ourcat
Nobody likes being duped by a non-human when you're looking for help. Rather
like nobody likes to hear a recording down a phone line.

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megamindbrian2
"humans like talking to other humans" lmftfy, should be "humans don't like
talking to computers all that much"

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kumarvvr
They flunked the Turing test.

In a serious vein, they were more of an annoyance than help.

Similar to the Paper Clip from Microsoft. (Sorry, don't remember the name)

~~~
pg_bot
Office Assistant aka Clippit aka Clippy

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

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elvirs
every 2-3 years a certain buzzword gets hot among silicon valley circles to be
on its way to become the next big thing. usually after it mostly dies down in
less than a year another buzzword will be propelled to the top. thats how
silicon valley works, thats how they keep investor money flowing into the
industry.

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sethammons
Chatbots, just like Alexa, OK Google, and Siri, are just terrible. Last night,
"Alexa, show me new releases." Nothing. "Alexa, show me new movies." Nothing.
"Alexa, what's new." "Today's news from NPR....". Damnit. In the time I spent
trying to discover the hidden menu of voice control, I could have manually
gone through known menus including typing with arrow keys.

~~~
anderber
I've found Alexa to be much, much worse than Google Assistant.

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kerng
Depends how you look at it, Siri, Cortana, Alexa,.. all are chatbots and they
all are doing pretty well.

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curioussavage
Hah chatbots. What a joke that trend was... I’m just surprised the hype lasted
as long as it did

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acct1771
Multiple bots were accused of racism, surely one reason for pumping the
brakes.

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averageweather
David Cancel will probably still sell yet another company for 7+ figures eg
[https://www.drift.com/](https://www.drift.com/)

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dboreham
Probably because you need real (strong) AI.

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JoeAltmaier
Aren't they alive and well on Twitter?

~~~
fenwick67
I think what you're referring to are distinct from chatbots. Chatbots are
meant to take input from a user and do a wide variety of tasks like a customer
service representative would do, Twitter bots usually do just one thing.

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slifin
Feels like they moved to blockchain

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jaequery
I hate talking to a bot in general.

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m3kw9
News coming from a bot oriented site

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rehemiau
they just weren't

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alexmorse
no, no they weren't

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megaman22
The typical thing where a seemingly cool technology that is really hard to do
correctly outside of a few toy examples gets overhyped.

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tzahola
Chatbots are the Juicero of user interfaces.

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jacksmith21006
The best one I have seen is going to start beta testing later this summer.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bd1mEm2Fy08](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bd1mEm2Fy08)
Google Duplex Demo from Google IO 2018 - YouTube

------
dwringer
On the other hand, I can think of at least two prominent elected officials
(one at my state's level and one at the national level) who no longer speak in
sentences that I can parse with my own mental model of English. The one from
my state released a statement yesterday that seemed identical to the kind of
thing one would get from a late '90s IRC chatbot that was trained on a big
dataset of energy company press releases.

~~~
tw1010
Care to name them? I'd be curious to read what they've written.

~~~
dwringer
I was trying to keep this as a discussion about the technology and not about
the politicians involved, but it apparently didn't stop most of the thread
from ending up dead anyway, so the statement I had in mind (you can find more
on the source if you're interested) was:

> "Our electric grid system is not stable. If it can be down or you have
> rolling brown outs or black outs and we know that is possible. If you don't
> have base load that means something, some type of energy that will run 24/7,
> rain, shine, no matter what happens is uninterruptible. The only two things
> you have that does that on a uninterruptible basis is coal and nuclear"

This isn't the first time I've wondered at the applications of natural-
language processing software in political [speech]writing. I'm not sure where
best forum is for people to discuss these ideas, but I apologize if this was
too political, regardless, for this site.

