
I was an undercover bot for 2 months - srom
https://medium.com/chat-bots/bots-hype-or-glory-656f4d614efb
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petewailes
I can't help feeling there's a "walking before you run" thing here.
Unsurprisingly, no, you couldn't make something to do this yet. Because we
haven't yet built anything that passes the Turing test.

But the fact that we can't yet do that doesn't mean that bots are going to be
useless. That'd be like looking at the first ocean-going freight vessels and
saying "well, it can't move 300,000 tonnes of freight, so it's useless), or
the Wright Flyer and saying that because it can't cross the Atlantic, it's a
bit rubbish. (I'm aware this is close to straw manning, but bare with me...)

Sure, early proofs of concept are often both limited in scope and fairly dire.
But that doesn't mean there's no potential utility in them and what they do. I
suspect bots are similar. Initial, narrow use-case versions will be very
useful at providing value in specific circumstances, and eventually they'll
become more general in nature. But decrying them at this stage seems a bit
like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

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mkohlmyr
I realize this is not related to the actual article, but having looked at
their website ([http://www.workgroup.im/](http://www.workgroup.im/)) this
really struck me.

Does anyone else find it a little bit gross when companies take stock
photographs, give them a name and write stories about how they use the
product? It's clearly meant to work as a social proof and to look almost like
an endorsement from a peer.

It's just another warmer, fuzzier dark pattern in my opinion.

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sciurus
It's especially jarring because their photo of "James Gold" is actually my
coworker [http://andymatthews.net/](http://andymatthews.net/)

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krallja
Are you sure your coworker isn't actually a stock photo?

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daxfohl
Seems like we haven't progressed much beyond Clippy, the old MS Office "bot"
from 1997. So perhaps we shouldn't be holding our breath. (Though AlphaGo just
came out of nowhere so....)

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sheeshkebab
I guess something that wechat does is more appropriate for the time being to
use in business products... If at all.

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

~~~
coldcode
I found it interesting that many of the text UIs wind up with a list of
numbers to type for each command. This is the exact UI everyone built when I
started programming in the early 80's.

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AYBABTME
I have a hard time giving credit to the examples they raise, since they say
users were aware that humans were present behind the 'bot', which would
explain to me why they used emojis / gifs and images to talk with the 'bots'.

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s4chin
Can a bot be made which understands emotions, sarcasm, etc.? Can something be
made which does more than just parse commands and gives out predefined
replies? If so, how far away are we from this?

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pavel_lishin
You're asking whether we can create artificial intelligence.

~~~
mfoy_
General artificial intelligence with a knack for natural language, that is...

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josefresco
Would have loved to see some data on what requests were easily handled by the
_bot_ and/or what questions could truly be answered by a fully automated bot.

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sciurus
I don't think they had a actual bot at all.

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josefresco
Right, so what I want is a list, or even anecdotes of requests made that
_could_ have been handled by a bot. All we saw were the opposite examples, of
queries not able to be processed by a true bot.

