
Predictions from early stage bot investors - shaunroncken
http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/16/7-predictions-from-early-stage-bot-investors/
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fps
"bots" lack any standardized discovery interface, which eventually causes
frustration for users. Two popular bots - Siri and Google Now, won't tell you
everything they can do, and give such useless answers to most requests that
people use them as a gimmick once or twice, maybe memorize a handful of key
phrases, but otherwise won't use them.

They're also typically not extensible - I haven't come across bots that allow
you to string multiple bots together to accomplish complex tasks. It's all the
bad parts of a CLI with none of the good parts. No one wants to memorize a bot
specific query language along with it's capabilities for something they
interact with very infrequently.

Instead of sinking money and effort into natural language processing, services
should be building responsive, discoverable websites with all the capabilities
of a customer service agent. Work on better on-site search, and expose
available actions to Google.

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kozikow
I am on the other side than you - I am betting on the NLP in my current
interface.

The biggest reason for me is logging. I can see what are yet-unfulfilled needs
of my customers and prioritise building new features. In responsive website
you hardcore your assumptions about needs of your customers. What's more, you
can fall-back to real customer support.

One of reasons why bots exploded recently are advances in NLP including deep
learning, other new methods, cheaper hardware, etc.

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TeMPOraL
NLP and logging failed queries doesn't excuse the current lack of any
customization and interop. This is the same thing as with IoT all over again -
everyone wants to take over the entire market for themselves, and thus
everyone forgoes the only feature that can make it actually useful - free
interoperability.

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kozikow
Some interop-ability exists at this point:

    
    
      - Bot A: Visit this URL to fulfil an order.
      - Ar the URL you are faced with a GUI with a separate bot B.
    

E.g. if you are fulfilling a payment, nothing prohibits Strip from creating
their own bot.

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thr0waway1239
This quote from Joshua Kauffman is a little odd:

“Any time a human needs a relationship and a person isn’t there is an
opportunity for a chatbot to fill itself in. I think that when humans are on
this planet in some years time, with a lot more technology, we’re going to
find that our ultimate purpose is to be having conversations with each other,
in addition to creativity and other things. So there’s a lot of conversation
that can happen with chatbots and intelligent assistants.”

So humans figure out their ultimate purpose is to talk a lot more with each
other? But there isn't going to be enough supply of man hours of conversation
- so they just opt for the next best choice - which is talking with chatbots?

Can someone locate the actual video of this event, if it is online? Many of
the quotes from this article are all really far-out.

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wcummings
Bots are phone menus updated for 2016. It will reduce support costs.
Exciting... I guess...

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Animats
From the article: _" Any time a human needs a relationship and a person isn’t
there is an opportunity for a chatbot to fill itself in."_ Hm. Need to think
about that one.

Chatbots currently assume a master-slave relationship, where the chatbot
controls the dialogue. The human has to adapt to the chatbot, although there's
some illusion that the chatbot understands the human.

Right now, a pharmacy is sending me a text telling me I can refill a
prescription by replying "REFILL". But I can't reply "Which prescription?" The
autoresponder is too dumb to handle that.

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increment_i
I think there's a huge potential for developers on chat platforms due to the
fact that the app is already installed, and the user is already "logged in",
and the UI paradigm is more or less standardized across OSes.

I worry though that this opportunity will be squandered by the big social
platforms by botching the bot discovery mechanisms, much like the app stores
did.

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pmontra
A problem is that there are so many chat apps and it's hard to support all of
them. There are some cross platform development tools (and online services)
but some chats have different ways of interaction. It reminds me of the cross
platform GUI toolkits of the 90s. They worked pretty well but they were never
the same of the native UI so nobody was happy.

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Mathnerd314
Did anyone else think the article was going to be about using bots to direct
investment decisions?

