I think the article overreaches in conflating the problems with chatbots -- which typically don't do the kind of things M promised -- with the cost/scope overrun of M. But I think it's too simplistic to say that Facebook should have just optimized their chatbots. The Facebook service has a much broader and diverse userbase and functionality -- think of the criticism that FB gets for seemingly taking over every aspect of our lives (everything from messaging friends, photo management, video broadcasting, news publishing, gaming, financial transactions).
What purpose would an optimized, limited-scope chatbot for Facebook even look like? Though come to think of it, I can think of a few usecases if Facebook wasn't out to dominate everything about real life. For example:
- When traveling to a new city: "Do I know anyone who lives here or is currently visiting?"
- When wanting to read about or discuss news topics, but only from my current network: "Are any of my friends talking about the election?"
- When bored: "What games are my friends playing?" (I'm thinking back to the time when FB was a games platform for things like Words with Friends)
All of these may be findable through a combination of searches, but I'm not a power user, and I bet most people aren't. I think if I go to the "New York, NY" location page, there's a section that lists friend connections, but a bot that processed a natural language query would be so much smoother.
And what about queries like: "What are my friends doing this weekend?". Searching that exact question brings up nothing of relevance. When I do a search for "weekend", the top results are for things like "Vampire Weekend". I have to scroll down to find a section for "Posts from Friends", and that only contains posts (even from months ago) that contain the literal word, "weekend".
I don't really know how to improve those results, without hurting some other kind of expected functionality. But a chatbot that purports to deal with everyday human questions might be the right interface for everyday quality-of-life questions
I don't disagree; my suggestion was tongue-in-cheek. There is no value in optimizing an application that is so flawed that it shouldn't exist to begin with.
Those flaws derive from a wildly optimistic use case for the technology, though. A much cleaner use case would have been a bot intended for Facebook Help (instead of, or to complement, a KB -- assuming people still need that).
More ambitious maybe, but perhaps not impossible, would be a bot that looks for signs of suicidal tendencies in posts or comments and engages the user in therapeutic conversation. (?)
What purpose would an optimized, limited-scope chatbot for Facebook even look like? Though come to think of it, I can think of a few usecases if Facebook wasn't out to dominate everything about real life. For example:
- When traveling to a new city: "Do I know anyone who lives here or is currently visiting?"
- When wanting to read about or discuss news topics, but only from my current network: "Are any of my friends talking about the election?"
- When bored: "What games are my friends playing?" (I'm thinking back to the time when FB was a games platform for things like Words with Friends)
All of these may be findable through a combination of searches, but I'm not a power user, and I bet most people aren't. I think if I go to the "New York, NY" location page, there's a section that lists friend connections, but a bot that processed a natural language query would be so much smoother.
And what about queries like: "What are my friends doing this weekend?". Searching that exact question brings up nothing of relevance. When I do a search for "weekend", the top results are for things like "Vampire Weekend". I have to scroll down to find a section for "Posts from Friends", and that only contains posts (even from months ago) that contain the literal word, "weekend".
I don't really know how to improve those results, without hurting some other kind of expected functionality. But a chatbot that purports to deal with everyday human questions might be the right interface for everyday quality-of-life questions