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.
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.
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.
Glass wasn't hype by any means, it just didn't take hold in the consumer market (which, who's to say Google didn't predicate that). It's been in use by massive enterprises for years now, from Boeing to GE to large healthcare organizations.
I wouldn't dismiss Facebook for the simple fact that it plays to something deeply human: to connect with other people.
But while it does that, it also plays to something even more deeply human: to watch other people from afar, and to replace complex, anxiety-ridden face-to-face interactions with easier, gentler text-based communication.
Google Glass and all the other hyped techs never struck at anything deeply human. VR is nice and all as a tech, but it's not something we've always done.
We should also keep in mind that chatbots are clearly a thing that people want; we're just using capitalism to test whether society, technology, etc. are "there" yet, so it's not entirely irrational for investment to flow into this area. (We might debate the scale of the investments, or we can just let the market determine that for us.)
I think there's a lot of hate in this thread for the bot concept. Yeah, most of these text-based bots are bad and useless. Expecting to chat with a computer over text and get meaningful results is a big request, and without the best of the best NLP researchers, you're not going to get anywhere.
However, I do think there's some truth to this article - the rise of digital assistants in Google Home, Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, is, in a sense, the rise of the chat bot. You can text them and they'll do things. You can talk to them and they'll do things. You can even get them to schedule a haircut for you[0], as Google recently demonstrated. I think these bots are semantically identical to what we think of chat bots as doing. If you would've told me 3 or 4 years ago, that people would willingly let a "bot" into their home that listens to everything they say and talks back, I would've been skeptical, to say the least. Now, even my hippie roommate has one of these things. I still don't get it, but to claim that "bots are dead, long live humans" misses the mark about how fast speech to computer/computer to speech tech is evolving. Watch the video and be... amazed:
So yeah, the idiot VCs missed the mark - this isn't going to be a consumer revolution, led by a few scrappy start ups, one-man teams, and dreamers. It's a revolution in data collection, human-computer interaction, and AI that's already been taking place behind the scenes at Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon for years, and will continue to as long as they hold the tech world's best AI talent.
It reminds me in the early days of "smart phones" people would say where is the Linux phone OS we keep hearing about. They just didn't understand that Android was Linux based.
The Voice Assistance is a vocal chatbot. People were thinking it was going to be text.
No one missed anything except the actual product everyone was talking about. I feel like this happens all the time. We get caught into one strict interpenetration and miss the HUGE thing staring at our face, or ears in this instance.
Indeed. The bot interface is being produced by the giants because they are the only ones with the budget for it. Just like google was the only firm with the budget to make self driving cars actually work, and will likely dominate that field for years to come as a result.
There will be room for startups to put the glue between the bots be everything else, but the core tech for the conversational interface is not going to come from startups.
> the rise of digital assistants in Google Home, Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, is, in a sense, the rise of the chat bot
Actually, I'm still quite bullish on this. Advocates always talk about how 'VUI' (Voice User Interfaces) will be the next big thing but from what I've observed most people - actual users, not financially invested in their success - still remain quite bullish on them, or they only use them to set timers.
I don't believe Amazon, Google, or Apple have ever actually released sales figures for their assistants. I believe its because the numbers would look so insignificant compared to everything else.
The expectation for chatbots to completely solve and answer user questions and take over support is as flawed as the expectation that self-driving technologies in cars allow people to watch Youtube videos and not pay attention to the road or have a hand on the wheel.
The successful bots are ones that don't attempt to understand and respond to every single question perfectly, but instead act as a supplemental tool / guide and offering concrete decision points and actions for the user to take. For example, instead of asking "How can we reach you?" and letting the user enter free text and figuring out if the user entered a phone number or email or some random text that just short circuits the bot, show two buttons "Via email", "Via phone" and clicking each one would then ask for an email, or phone number.
The successful bots also know when to failover to a human being and failing over fast. I've hardly ever had a good experience dealing with sites that employ chat bots and it's not great to be frustrated by a bot when I'm already an angry customer who hasn't received my order.
The one case where chatbots were better than people was at a company I used to work for. We kept getting customers contacting us via facebook to ask the same questions over and over again. "How much does `x` cost?" "When are you open?" "Where is your location?" "Do you have `y`?"
I had to have an internet-connected phone on me at all times because people would send messages at any hour and response time was a factor in our discoverability on facebook.
Of course all of these questions were answered on our website (AND ON OUR FACEBOOK PAGE) but simply responding with a URL resulted in attrition. So I found myself running through the same script several times, all day, all night, every day, every night.
The best solution would have been to set up some kind of text parser which would allow people to navigate the website through facebook messenger (oversimplifying) and then alert a human if it couldn't parse the input. We could even have hooked it into the comment feed because facebook was really bad at notifying us of comments. Taking it a step further, the Mero Mero's dream of offering facebook marketing to other companies as a service would actually be reasonable, because it wouldn't just be me sending out hundreds of copypastas 24-hours a day, forever. But I was never able to put a system together because of other time-consuming duties the company needed me to perform.
Maybe the optimistic timelines are flawed but I think its at least reasonable to believe we'll get there someday, in regards to both intelligent chatbot + self-driving tech
I think the problem is framing, or essentially what is a “chat bot”.
20 years ago “artificial intelligence” where taboo words for anyone hoping any funding. It would be called ‘expert system’ or ‘automated agent’ or whatever else that didn’t make people show you the door.
I think what you put as “chat bots” is having the same issue. The concept has been deployed at super large scale and people interact with bots everyday, it’s just not marketed as such.
Currently my phone company, my ISP, my health insurance company, the last airline customer support I had to deal with, they all process a crazy amount of interactions, and all the basic steps were clearly handled by a bot until I got escalated to a human. They are all real world huge scale applications, I don’t know by what other metrics they would be deemed as “failures”, and I don’t think they plateaued, I expect it’s still growing.
I was working at Radio Shack in 1995-1996 and mobile phones were definitely starting to grow in popularity. By then, you already had subsidized “free” phones and mobile plans were around $35 a month.
There is a mythical internal document at Amazon that describes the Alexa vision. They want basically the Star Trek computer, and they are making good progress toward that vision. And the investment they are making to achieve that goal is hard to overstate.
Yes, it will take a few years. But consider that there are now tens of millions of Alexa pucks out there. The bot may suck today, but it’s getting better quickly, and consumers are receptive and ready to reward the tech giants when they finally succeed.
Amazon are the best people at this as they have the technical ability, vision, and willingness to invest in long term projects.
AWS was not great in its first 5 years. Its capabilities 5 years ago were pretty good but nothing compared to today.
Google is bad at long term development, especially with Ruth Porat at CFO. Microsoft is mixed - for every Xbox and Hololens there's a Courier.
One thing missed in chatbots is that X dot AI is a chat bot that works pretty well. There are others that are similarly domain limited where the current interaction model is an email thread or a text conversation. These tend to be doing well.
I’d rather talk to a chatbot than send an email or shudder make a phone call. I’ve found my interactions with them to be good and they always hand me off to a real person if it gets too complicated. It seems to save me a lot of time when I use them usually.
I agree. I fully support chatbots for getting you to the right person or handling simple issues. There seem to be a lot fewer accidental hangups when using a chatbot.
But wait, 66% of tweets are reportedly generated by bots.[0] Maybe they aren't chatbots, in a strict sense, but it does seem like most Twitter "conversations" involve bots. There are lots of bots on Facebook too.[1] Automating typical social media behavior is laughably trivial.
Yep. I remember tons of marketing/advertising people going around enthusiastically talking about how chatbots are "the next big thing." No professional UX people or engineers were really pushing the tech that I knew.
What I have understood from my little experience is usually the "next big things"
- Always seem way to big in the start
- There is good exponential acceptance initially
- But then there is always slow acceptance rate
I think its more about chat then chatbots. Chat has already become the next big thing between customer to customer interaction. What chatbots are trying to do is enabling brands to start interacting with their customer on chat. Human-based support was always there but to able to interact with customers using chat during his/her complete lifecycle was not possible using human agents. But chatbot can solve that. We are moving back to chat because it is one of the two natural media of communication (voice/chat & gesture) to humans. The hype about chatbots was bad, resulting in everyone trying their own version of chatbots and fail. But for those who used it in its actual capabilities, it has done wonders. For some top financial brands of India, it has increased no. of people interacting with a brand to about 400% resulting in ~200% increase in marketing leads and lead quality by ~150%. This is actually the NEXT BIG THING for the marketing department. Also, chat apps are more evolved then SMS/phone apps which give user/customer more control over communication, resulting in happy customers.
Chatbots are not solving any problem as they are not a solution. Instead, they should be used as a tool to solve any other problem, just like AI/Crypto.
I began my career building IVR systems in the early 2000s (Nuance, etc). In college I worked at my university's speech recognition lab. I remember an uneasy feeling while building and testing my first speech application. I thought: "This is a statistical algorithm with nothing else behind it. It's just a good guesser over a very limited domain of 'knowledge'."
At the time the tech industry was hailing speech recognition as the next big thing. There was a lot of investment in speech: BeVocal, TellMe, Nuance, SpeechWorks, AT&T, L&H, etc. Replace your call center workers with automated systems, use voiceprints to secure sensitive transactions, etc. Amazing AI would effect cost savings and make your business efficient! Sound familiar?
Very few users actually liked these systems over the previous versions that just used the phone keypad. Poor recognition accuracy really pisses users off. And most of the time the recognition errors aren't the user's fault. Ever try to recognize speech on a cellular channel using an acoustic model trained on a landline channel? Crap! This was certainly a problem during the early 2000s because of the emerging mobile phone market.
The UIs (or VUIs as they were called) were awful since they mostly replicated the touchtone versions but added "you can say 'accounts' to...". They continue to be awful because, while speech recognition had gotten a lot of funding (DARPA, etc) in the past, the UI aspects were pretty much ignored and underfunded. People interact very differently when speech is used as the medium. The interaction automatically becomes social. Social interactions with machines are decently well studied (Cliff Nass for one), but the very nuanced aspects are difficult to bake into an IVR system, especially under pressure to deliver on a deadline. The experience feels unnatural very quickly and users either run for the door or starts mashing the keypad.
Ultimately the web killed off industry interest in IVR systems. Want to know your account balance? Log in to a web site and it's right there. No need to dial in your account number, verification and run a gauntlet through a phone menu.
Fast-forward to today and chatbots are the new IVR systems, but without the speech-to-text portion. The speech-to-text portion is the easiest part by far in those types of systems. There's still the need for a parser (shallow or otherwise), a way to pair up queries with responses/actions, the ability to track a dialogue and its context, and most importantly, a "natural" feel to the interaction.
Chatting/texting and speaking are serial in nature; very slow and inefficient. A well-indexed FAQ or an intuitive, well-designed GUI is more useful than a chatbot. The former helps in shortening search time and the later helps at streamlining transactions. Information search and transacting comprise the majority of actions that users perform when they visit a site/system/application. When you talk to a human agent for these two types of actions, guess what they're using to assist you? The same interface you'd use if you served yourself. They just know it better.
As an aside, the only noticeable/innovative use of chatbots I've seen in the past 10 years is on porn sites. I really took notice of the messages in the chat window when it started nagging me for ignore it. I wouldn't be surprised this round of chatbots were inspired by that.
I think that did happen. Banks and utility companies started to offer chat-like interfaces (without a human responder) for services and help. The number of end-users could probably have been graphed as a steeply rising curve for a while. It just didn't justify the breathless expectations of the companies trying to sell chat interfaces at the time.
Yeah, this is the "trough of disillusionment" phase on the Gartner hype cycle. If anyone is looking at the exponential improvements in speech and text comprehension over the past years and unable to see that it will only get better from here, then it's not hard to imagine a future, where in 10 years chat bots are just as good as humans for any rote request.
> I’m pretty sure there was never a high growth phase where users were actually interacting with the chatbots.
There was somewhere around 2003-2005, when a couple good ones started showing up on AIM. Since that was the IM of choice at the time, there was zero friction to actually interacting with one.
Anyone predicting it as a "next big thing" after around 2007 totally missed the actual hype and was trying to build on something users had already dismissed as not actually the future.
I remember being so unimpressed after Facebook's hype because their "bots" were no smarter than SmarterChild was back on AOL in the early 2000's. (Which was at least innovative for its time.)
I at least thought that there would be some Alexa/Siri-level AI going on, but most chat bots are about as intelligent as texting commands to an SMS short-code number.
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.
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.
'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.
For many of these systems, you actually are talking to a human. The person listens to what you say then directs your call as (hopefully) appropriate. They don't have a mic, so clarifying questions are limited to buttons they can push on a glorified soundboard -- in your case it sounds like there were several departments that handle different aspects of billing and they were trying to sort out where to route your call.
The guy you were talking to eventually just routed you to someone with the same job but who has a mic, because you weren't giving him anything to go on and all he'd have been able to do is push the button again to ask you the exact same question (and having a person do it who can at least vary the inflection of the question is less infuriating than seemingly being stuck in a chatbot's infinite loop).
--
Source: have a friend who used to have this job. He has thankfully moved on to something less soul sucking than being a human literally pretending to be a robot.
A colleague of mine worked on the automated call center systems in the early 80s. The fastest way to get to a human is to cuss it out. This has worked for almost every system I’ve worked with so far (not sure if they’re using the same underlying software or if this behavior has been ported over). I only opt for this trick when I have no idea where to go given the menu read out to me because I like to think that support menu systems are designed to make it easier to navigate an organization’s own bureaucracy primarily, not necessarily to help me with my issues.
> "more and more are requiring you to interface with the system in some way, even if disabled or impaired."
In a sort of sick and very selfish way, I find myself somehow glad that blind and deaf people exist and are protected by accessibility legislation. I've often found accessibility features, particularly those in software, to be exceptionally useful even though my vision and hearing are fine.
Reminds me of a tech talk I went to last year, where the speaker/developer was trying to get on the Alexa hype train by building a "virtual doctor" application of some sort. He was very excited about the possibility of reducing physicians' administrative overhead, but my thought the whole time was, "seems like one of those terrible phone navigation systems..."
By and large, voice user interfaces still fail to abide by Grice's Maxims[1]. In your example, that's the maxim of manner:
> when one tries to be as clear, as brief, and as orderly as one can in what one says, and where one avoids obscurity and ambiguity
In a sense, this is not unlike an unskilled and nervous attendant who, faced with a request that they don't understand, starts to chatter more and more in hopes of eliciting the information they really need.
There's also a rise of interfaces where talking to a human is not an option, and it's actually very challenging to break out of the default set of options. AirBNB is an example of this. This might be OK for the majority of calls, but when you need something outside of the normal set of problems, good luck. They're almost trying to not document the problems that they haven't already documented.
I've noticed a sharp increase over the last year or two maybe in the number of companies that will bypass the awful classifier and connect you to a human immediately if you yell the word "fuck" into the phone because the machine thinks it's got an angry customer on the line. IME it weirdly has to be the word "fuck" and it has to be loud. I don't pretend to know all the ins-and-outs of IVR systems, but it seems like maybe one of the bigger service providers these companies use have this one weird trick programmed into them?
Note that a lot of the time, the point of those interfaces isn't to direct your call, so much as it is to collect information ahead-of-time, and transcribe it with voice-recognition, so that when you do begin speaking to a representative, they already have your question in front of them on the screen.
For me, these AI solutions always feel like I'm talking to a very stupid person who has no idea what's doing but has a booklet in possession that may or may not have the information that I'm looking for. Just give me that booklet and I will figure it out,geeez... What a frustration to deal with these smart machines.
With Siri or Google Assistant, you soon figure out few things that this very low intelligence person can do(like telling the weather or setting an alarm) and stick with it.
This is also why I'm excited about iOS12 with all these Siri shortcuts, instead of pretending that we are talking to a smart being let's have a concrete list of things that can do.
On the other hand I do believe that these voice interfaces have some potential, just the technology is not there yet.
Some are actively designed to make you give up on the call, at least that is what it seems like to me.
How many times have you called and the prompts go:
Press 1 to talk with sales
Press 2 to talk with marketing
....
Press 9 to talk to tech support, the only reason anybody dialed this number
Then:
Speak your 18 digit account number, being sure to pause between each digit to make sure the computer records it correctly.
Then:
Speak your phone number
Then:
Speak your 24 digit hexadecimal product code
Finally you get through to a person and 100% of the time they ask you for all of that information again so they can type it in (and get it wrong).
And even when you get a person on the line they make you go back and do all of the stuff you already tried before finally transferring you to someone with half a clue.
Walgreens prescription refill has a good voice input system. It doesn't pretend to be intelligent. But you can read a long prescription number to it, speaking rapidly, and it gets it right. It's better than humans for that.
I suspect most of the time the agents hate the systems like you describe as much as the callers. They are actually trying to make things work better and faster by asking for this info, so when you have to repeat it it's a failure rather than a deliberate design decision...
And I don't even want to blame the interfaces entirely. To me the real problem is people building and deploying things when there is a giant gap between hype and reality.
The Web was legitimately the next big thing. And after that, mobile. Both of them have changed our lives in deep and lasting ways. But we as an industry are absurdly hungry for the next, next big thing.
How many dumb-ass voice and bot and AI and blockchain projects are there out there now? That basically don't work, but have been shipped anyhow? How many millions of dollars have been wasted? And really I should say billions. Theranos alone burned through $1.2 billion of hype. And there was the wave of "Uber for X" companies, busily failing to replicate the business model of a company whose success still isn't a given.
I should be clear that I'm not opposed to trying new stuff. I'm all for it! But I think if we explore technological possibilities with less flagrant waste, we'll learn more. And be able to explore more.
There are a lot of smart and motivated people putting effort into voice interfaces. It's the past (we've been speaking for over a hundred thousand years) and it is the future. It will take some time, but I'm pretty confident that computers interacting with our auditory cortex will replace small slabs of glass that we look at and touch for many tasks.
There's an issue of trust, as well. When I call a support number, and I get a robotic voice that assures me I can speak to it as if it were a person in plain language, I simply don't believe it.
It's just not true, either. So I end up trying to figure out how to structure my query so the robot on the other end will understand what I want, instead of just saying what I want.
In the end, I just repeat "human" and mash the 0 button over and over until I get a real person to talk to.
It's not unlike a programming language that attempts to resemble written English. Sure it looks like English at first, but really there is a rigid API there that you must adhere to, and that breaks any resemblance to natural language; at which point you wonder, why make it look like English in the first place?
They hide key functions behind a 3D Touch, but there's absolutely no discover-ability. So you're either left trying to 3D Touch everything to see what works, or actively researching 3D Touch tricks.
As phone gestures become more popular, they'll have the same issue.
This is a huge problem with phone interfaces in general. There's a big push to make them "clean" by removing obvious widgets and basically hoping the user guesses correctly that they need a horizontal half screen swipe to bring up the search bar or tap and hold on an item to bring up options. You're basically just jabbing at the thing until it does what you want. Eventually people figure out various developer's favorite tricks and try them first and it isn't quite so bad, but for new users smartphone interfaces can be quite daunting.
Seriously, watch someone on a new iPhone and it's just painful.
Oh, I created this contact for fun, now how do I delete it. Tap it? Nope. Tap and hold? Nope. Double tap? Nope. Is there a menu somewhere? Nope. Maybe I slide it over? Nope, that brings me back to the previous page. Maybe I pinch? Nope. Guess I'll pull up the help, oh there isn't any. Off to Google then. Oh, I have to slide it over from the middle, not from the edge.
What's really sad is that this has come around multiple times. I remember hearing about intelligent agents coming anytime to MSN Messenger or whatever it was called at the time back in the early to mid 2000s. And people have had this delusion since ELIZA that natural language interfaces are just on the cusp. A good demo is very convincing, but reality creeps in as soon as you use these things for more than a few rote interactions. The only real innovation of the latest generation of natural language interfaces is their ability to somewhat reliably understand the actual words you use. But even that is highly context dependent and limited to straightforward constructions. And it's all built on just having huge massive datasets against which to compare what's being said. But "natural" language doesn't depend on having past analogues. "Natural" language is constantly finding new ways to say things. And I've not seen any evidence we're any closer to that now than we were in 1966.
I find voice interfaces absolutely infuriating to use! I invariably have to put on an American or English accent in order to get them to understand anything I say, and even then it takes several attempts.
In other words: they were never a thing. They were a media-driven and fad-investor-driven hype wave. They never should have been a thing. Good riddance.
Very interesting point, I never thought about why I hate voice interfaces like that so much.
The tipping point for me was when the AT&T small business line I used to use changed to a voice interface and included fake keyboard taping sounds after each interaction. That just felt so damn insulting.
Lately I just say ridiculous shit with these interfaces to see what happens.
A few days ago I was using one for Delta that couldn't tell the difference between "Yeah" and "Yes". Sigh.
Chatbots proposed to solve a problem that current technology is bad at: understanding natural language. Very few experts claimed that algorithms could master the combinatorics of natural language beyond a few very narrow domains. On top of the technical risk, the voice and chat UX does not give a lot of visibility to users, as this post points out. What happened was: algorithmic advances in other areas lead to analogous reasoning by non-experts whose self-promotion aligned with the media's need for something new, big and understandable. And then it failed.
The irony, of course, is that research is making strides in NLU, it's just too late for the last wave of chatbots. Here are two recent papers from DeepMind:
I don't want to talk to it like a human. The main advantage is that you can just say "temperature outside" or "turn light off". And I expect short answers too, not the Google/Amazon boring long sentence shit.
These chat and voice interfaces are basically the public's version of a command line interface. It has the same flaws and virtues. The main difference is marketing.
Of the bots that are marketed to be more human with lots of machine learning. From my experience, they feel no more better than the original ELIZA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA) despite the leap in tech.
I think voice is greatly underrated but that it will be the next generations (our kids) will use them without feeling weirded out.
When I look how my kids interact with Google home it's becomes fairly obvious to me that to them this is completely natural. Google Home is almost like a pet to them not just a tool.
We are finally at a stage where voice recognition starts to become powerful enough to understand nuances now the next question is what to connect them to. One thing that I really like is that it allow us to retrieve information without having to look at a screen. It feels like having a 5th person at the table.
At First Principle, we built a little a voice app that allows you to ask Google Analytics or Salesforce for data (and potentially whatever you want to connect with) for meetings so we can ask instead of having to look up. It becomes a natural part of the conversation and everyone have access to the data.
That's where I think it will first make an impact. In meetings with relevant data.
It's a funny coincidence. I've just gotten off a phone with a bank officer about a simple question "Is my card there yet?". It took 29 minutes, including a few minutes at the beginning talking to a bot before getting to a human. I'm being unfair and emotional, but right now I'm not sure if humans are really better.
I was trying to get in contact with my bank to allow a large transaction through that they were blocking. Was impossible to talk to a real human, super frustrating. I finally decided to say I wanted to "open a new account"; was immediately connected to a human that helped me from there.
Depends. As the article states, the hybrid approach is becoming more common. This gives users the ability to use various applications from facebook messenger, and the UI capabilities of messenger is pretty much good enough to achieve anything.
Oh and this comes along with a modern website that can execute all those use cases too.
But then you throw in the natural language, enabling users to write complex queries in English. That and great funded teams focussing on niches.
My experiences with bots are becoming outstandingly good.
Humans are bad interfaces too. That’s why we have computers. People only like humans because they are also human. Nobody will miss the long lines at McD, but they might miss the smile. If a robot smiles at me, I won’t be happy, I’ll be scared.
Oddly, my problem with Google is that it's too flexible. Most of the time, it understands me, and that's great. But when Alexa doesn't understand, there's usually an error. When Google doesn't, it seems to call people, cancel navigation, and do all sorts of loony things I didn't ask for.
80% success and 20% no action might be usable for an assistant, but adding in 5% random behavior makes it drastically worse than useless.
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.
> 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
It seems like a lot of times when people talk about chatbots, they really mean these phone trees in text form, in which case I would agree with your sentiment.
However, be cautious in conflating chatbots with CLIs. I would say a CLI is not (always) an intuitive interface, but for a lot of problems, they are quite efficient.
The CLI style chatbots tend to be much better since they are basically CLIs in an easily accessible location (e.g. in an app on your phone).
To me it was a way for engineers to make interfaces without having to worry about any are design. An engineer-turned-marketing-person would call it "CLI 2.0". The problem was the non-designers still don't know UX at all and natural language is hard so you end up with a sub par, poorly design interface that doesn't understand you.
I keep seeing references to design/UX, and IMO they are way off the mark. The problem is far more fundamental than that. If the only problem were design/UX, then proper chatbots would've taken off by now.
Understanding natural language is much more than just a design problem. It's a grand challenge and core subfield of Computer Science. It's the original Turing Test.
It's interesting to think about. In some ways GUIs are more primitive than text interfaces. The scathing
characterization of GUI as "caveman's point and grunt interface" isn't entirely wrong. But at the same time, chat bots are spoken word. Text is a later invention, which was created for a reason. It has much higher information density, allows you to look at multiple tings at the same time and skip irrelevant detail, etc.
My pet theory is that there are a bunch of investors somewhere salivating at the thought of dominating a market for selling products to baby-boomers who are becoming impaired with age.
The biggest manifestation of this is the self-driving car hype for when grandpa can't legally/safely drive himself, however voice-assistants also fit that mold: Something to sell to grandpa when they don't want to learn/buy a new thing and his eyesight is bad and arthritis makes typing hurt.
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.
Also annoying is never knowing how deep the menu tree is. I have to write down (or hold my fingers out) what the best option/number at the time, because its likely to change as the resolution of options refines.
I usually go with loud noises or swearing. That gets me through to a real person. To make up for it, I always say "please" and "thank you" to Siri when im at home.
> ...no better features than a menu system, but you had to guess what the menus were.
This is also true for CLI interfaces. It illustrates the popularity of GUIs - much to the dismay of CLI enthusiasts everywhere.
Edit: Yes, a -help or "help" command can be used to list the menu. But then this command has to be known beforehand. What if a clever designer decides to use -assist or "assistance" instead?
And I think most of us are in the same camp there. Usually, when I am calling a business, it's because of some kind of unusual or complicated inquiry or special situation because I generally don't want to call if I can do or get what I need by logging in online to the company's site to manage my account or do whatever I need there as that's often the fastest. But the online account management only does so much so when a weird edge case regarding doing business with the company arises, I will call, and in those situations the AI/voice prompts never handle the situation I am calling about such that I need a human agent/rep every single time. I wouldn't be calling for something simple!
I do think that eventually these technologies will supersede trivial human transactions like customer service calls. The problem is that no one seems to understand the sheer difficulty of the problem. You have to create a machine that can realistically speak to a person, with all the nuance that entails. We're far further from that than AI marketers would lead us to believe.
I'd take issue that it needs to realistically speak like a person.
In a sense, the Google search bar is a type of chatbot, but we don't converse with it in grammatical English. It doesn't present as a human, so there's no uncanny valley effect. What gets typed into Google is a sort of lingua franca that we've all collectively learned through 20+ years of increasingly capable search engines. What we need is that level of lingua franca, but for a full, state-change-driving conversation, instead of just a one-step search.
It's not the machines that need to learn, it's us.
Probably, a good AI could get me to the proper representative or solve my problem a lot faster than a tree menu... But I don't think we're really close to doing that.
As someone for whom English is not the native language it's the worst. It's incredibly humiliating when the stupid machine can't understand what I am saying - and 100% of the ones I encountered fail to understand my surname and I have to repeat it 5 times like an idiot before it finally gives up and just tries something else as an authentication method.
The issue is that an AI is limited to what the user interface programmed by the company behind it provides. The issue is not the AI algorithms and understanding but rather extremely substandard automation behind it.
Of course one can say that this is not an exclusively AI issue. Call centers, especially offshore ones, have the same problem.
We can translate spoken words to text strings pretty reliably. AFAIK, we can do this locally without much processing power, but I may be mistaken. From the point that spoken words become strings, chatbots and voicebots are effectively the same.
Those strings are piped through a Switch statement of static responses, or fall out into the Default response. This was the situation in 2013 when I created a speech bot in Powershell, and it sounds like the state of the art here hasn't progressed far.
What's needed is logic to dynamically build the Switch statements, or otherwise better parse human entry and build responses. There has been much work on a few different fronts, but I'm not aware of any which were wildly successful.
The dirty secret is that there are thousands of humans listening in on these phone bot conversations. They have the power to press a button to override the endless loop.
Amazing what they are spending to keep up illusions.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
The key here, I believe, is that CLIs are still vastly more productive for purposes on which you're familiar with the pertinent commands; GUIs are generally better for discovery of new functionality and one-off tasks.
Chatbots and NL interfaces in general are thus far a failure because they neither improve on these purposes nor provide a third, unique benefit. I could see them being useful for consolidation of services (instead of comparing eight puzza places' sites, go to one third-party pizza chatbot), but there's a very, very long way to go.
Yeah, right now the home/echo/siri/etc seem completely worthless to me for all but the simplest tasks, but the idea is for the use cases to keep increasing.
Tools do get better and better. Automation and AI will continue to improve. It's more a question of why chatbots haven't gotten there yet and what needs to be done differently.
Sure, my main thought is that it's an awkward interface for doing things that require choices specifically - it's slow for chatbots / voicebots to present available choices.
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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.
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.
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.
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But while it does that, it also plays to something even more deeply human: to watch other people from afar, and to replace complex, anxiety-ridden face-to-face interactions with easier, gentler text-based communication.
Google Glass and all the other hyped techs never struck at anything deeply human. VR is nice and all as a tech, but it's not something we've always done.
We should also keep in mind that chatbots are clearly a thing that people want; we're just using capitalism to test whether society, technology, etc. are "there" yet, so it's not entirely irrational for investment to flow into this area. (We might debate the scale of the investments, or we can just let the market determine that for us.)
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However, I do think there's some truth to this article - the rise of digital assistants in Google Home, Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, is, in a sense, the rise of the chat bot. You can text them and they'll do things. You can talk to them and they'll do things. You can even get them to schedule a haircut for you[0], as Google recently demonstrated. I think these bots are semantically identical to what we think of chat bots as doing. If you would've told me 3 or 4 years ago, that people would willingly let a "bot" into their home that listens to everything they say and talks back, I would've been skeptical, to say the least. Now, even my hippie roommate has one of these things. I still don't get it, but to claim that "bots are dead, long live humans" misses the mark about how fast speech to computer/computer to speech tech is evolving. Watch the video and be... amazed:
[0]https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/8/17332070/google-assistant-...
So yeah, the idiot VCs missed the mark - this isn't going to be a consumer revolution, led by a few scrappy start ups, one-man teams, and dreamers. It's a revolution in data collection, human-computer interaction, and AI that's already been taking place behind the scenes at Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon for years, and will continue to as long as they hold the tech world's best AI talent.
Which is to say, they're not getting a whole lot of usage of features you might consider to be chatbot functionality.
The Voice Assistance is a vocal chatbot. People were thinking it was going to be text.
No one missed anything except the actual product everyone was talking about. I feel like this happens all the time. We get caught into one strict interpenetration and miss the HUGE thing staring at our face, or ears in this instance.
There will be room for startups to put the glue between the bots be everything else, but the core tech for the conversational interface is not going to come from startups.
Actually, I'm still quite bullish on this. Advocates always talk about how 'VUI' (Voice User Interfaces) will be the next big thing but from what I've observed most people - actual users, not financially invested in their success - still remain quite bullish on them, or they only use them to set timers.
I don't believe Amazon, Google, or Apple have ever actually released sales figures for their assistants. I believe its because the numbers would look so insignificant compared to everything else.
The successful bots are ones that don't attempt to understand and respond to every single question perfectly, but instead act as a supplemental tool / guide and offering concrete decision points and actions for the user to take. For example, instead of asking "How can we reach you?" and letting the user enter free text and figuring out if the user entered a phone number or email or some random text that just short circuits the bot, show two buttons "Via email", "Via phone" and clicking each one would then ask for an email, or phone number.
The successful bots also know when to failover to a human being and failing over fast. I've hardly ever had a good experience dealing with sites that employ chat bots and it's not great to be frustrated by a bot when I'm already an angry customer who hasn't received my order.
I had to have an internet-connected phone on me at all times because people would send messages at any hour and response time was a factor in our discoverability on facebook.
Of course all of these questions were answered on our website (AND ON OUR FACEBOOK PAGE) but simply responding with a URL resulted in attrition. So I found myself running through the same script several times, all day, all night, every day, every night.
The best solution would have been to set up some kind of text parser which would allow people to navigate the website through facebook messenger (oversimplifying) and then alert a human if it couldn't parse the input. We could even have hooked it into the comment feed because facebook was really bad at notifying us of comments. Taking it a step further, the Mero Mero's dream of offering facebook marketing to other companies as a service would actually be reasonable, because it wouldn't just be me sending out hundreds of copypastas 24-hours a day, forever. But I was never able to put a system together because of other time-consuming duties the company needed me to perform.
20 years ago “artificial intelligence” where taboo words for anyone hoping any funding. It would be called ‘expert system’ or ‘automated agent’ or whatever else that didn’t make people show you the door.
I think what you put as “chat bots” is having the same issue. The concept has been deployed at super large scale and people interact with bots everyday, it’s just not marketed as such.
Currently my phone company, my ISP, my health insurance company, the last airline customer support I had to deal with, they all process a crazy amount of interactions, and all the basic steps were clearly handled by a bot until I got escalated to a human. They are all real world huge scale applications, I don’t know by what other metrics they would be deemed as “failures”, and I don’t think they plateaued, I expect it’s still growing.
Usability? Sure, someone keeps paying for them, but they're not the people who get stuck interacting with them...
Has it? Are these experiences people enjoy and would like to see more of?
There's no data before a breakthrough. We should be wary of hypes but at the same time we shouldn't diminish pioneers.
I was working at Radio Shack in 1995-1996 and mobile phones were definitely starting to grow in popularity. By then, you already had subsidized “free” phones and mobile plans were around $35 a month.
Yes, it will take a few years. But consider that there are now tens of millions of Alexa pucks out there. The bot may suck today, but it’s getting better quickly, and consumers are receptive and ready to reward the tech giants when they finally succeed.
AWS was not great in its first 5 years. Its capabilities 5 years ago were pretty good but nothing compared to today.
Google is bad at long term development, especially with Ruth Porat at CFO. Microsoft is mixed - for every Xbox and Hololens there's a Courier.
One thing missed in chatbots is that X dot AI is a chat bot that works pretty well. There are others that are similarly domain limited where the current interaction model is an email thread or a text conversation. These tend to be doing well.
0) https://www.vox.com/technology/2018/4/9/17214720/pew-study-b...
1) https://mashable.com/2017/11/02/facebook-phony-accounts-admi...
I think its more about chat then chatbots. Chat has already become the next big thing between customer to customer interaction. What chatbots are trying to do is enabling brands to start interacting with their customer on chat. Human-based support was always there but to able to interact with customers using chat during his/her complete lifecycle was not possible using human agents. But chatbot can solve that. We are moving back to chat because it is one of the two natural media of communication (voice/chat & gesture) to humans. The hype about chatbots was bad, resulting in everyone trying their own version of chatbots and fail. But for those who used it in its actual capabilities, it has done wonders. For some top financial brands of India, it has increased no. of people interacting with a brand to about 400% resulting in ~200% increase in marketing leads and lead quality by ~150%. This is actually the NEXT BIG THING for the marketing department. Also, chat apps are more evolved then SMS/phone apps which give user/customer more control over communication, resulting in happy customers.
Chatbots are not solving any problem as they are not a solution. Instead, they should be used as a tool to solve any other problem, just like AI/Crypto.
At the time the tech industry was hailing speech recognition as the next big thing. There was a lot of investment in speech: BeVocal, TellMe, Nuance, SpeechWorks, AT&T, L&H, etc. Replace your call center workers with automated systems, use voiceprints to secure sensitive transactions, etc. Amazing AI would effect cost savings and make your business efficient! Sound familiar?
Very few users actually liked these systems over the previous versions that just used the phone keypad. Poor recognition accuracy really pisses users off. And most of the time the recognition errors aren't the user's fault. Ever try to recognize speech on a cellular channel using an acoustic model trained on a landline channel? Crap! This was certainly a problem during the early 2000s because of the emerging mobile phone market.
The UIs (or VUIs as they were called) were awful since they mostly replicated the touchtone versions but added "you can say 'accounts' to...". They continue to be awful because, while speech recognition had gotten a lot of funding (DARPA, etc) in the past, the UI aspects were pretty much ignored and underfunded. People interact very differently when speech is used as the medium. The interaction automatically becomes social. Social interactions with machines are decently well studied (Cliff Nass for one), but the very nuanced aspects are difficult to bake into an IVR system, especially under pressure to deliver on a deadline. The experience feels unnatural very quickly and users either run for the door or starts mashing the keypad.
Ultimately the web killed off industry interest in IVR systems. Want to know your account balance? Log in to a web site and it's right there. No need to dial in your account number, verification and run a gauntlet through a phone menu.
Fast-forward to today and chatbots are the new IVR systems, but without the speech-to-text portion. The speech-to-text portion is the easiest part by far in those types of systems. There's still the need for a parser (shallow or otherwise), a way to pair up queries with responses/actions, the ability to track a dialogue and its context, and most importantly, a "natural" feel to the interaction.
Chatting/texting and speaking are serial in nature; very slow and inefficient. A well-indexed FAQ or an intuitive, well-designed GUI is more useful than a chatbot. The former helps in shortening search time and the later helps at streamlining transactions. Information search and transacting comprise the majority of actions that users perform when they visit a site/system/application. When you talk to a human agent for these two types of actions, guess what they're using to assist you? The same interface you'd use if you served yourself. They just know it better.
As an aside, the only noticeable/innovative use of chatbots I've seen in the past 10 years is on porn sites. I really took notice of the messages in the chat window when it started nagging me for ignore it. I wouldn't be surprised this round of chatbots were inspired by that.
The little chat bot widgets never took off because they didn't solve NLP anywhere near as well as Amazon or Google did.
If a next gen chat bot can make a dinner reservation over the phone (like Google's demo), it definitely will be the next big thing.
So much of our day is communicating and if we can automate our communication effectively, it opens the doors for even greater productivity.
There was somewhere around 2003-2005, when a couple good ones started showing up on AIM. Since that was the IM of choice at the time, there was zero friction to actually interacting with one.
Anyone predicting it as a "next big thing" after around 2007 totally missed the actual hype and was trying to build on something users had already dismissed as not actually the future.
I at least thought that there would be some Alexa/Siri-level AI going on, but most chat bots are about as intelligent as texting commands to an SMS short-code number.
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These interfaces are almost like a dark pattern because of how bad they are.
"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.
> one two three etc
"Please hold"
"Hello this is agent a, Can I verify your X"
> It's XXXX
"Looks like you have <totally unrelated subject to what you called"
> Yeah but, I called for Y
"Oh ok"
> Y this, Y that, I need Y to do Z
"Let me forward you to an agent that can help you"
"Hello this is Agent Q"
> I need to do Y! damn it I've been on hold and transfering for 20 minutes
"I can help you with Y, but first, I need your account info
> FREAKING A 1234
"Can you verify XYZW?"
> YES GOD DAMN IT YYYY
"Ok sir, I'll need you to FAX it in"
> What, that's technologies from the 1920s
"I'm sorry sir, is there ANYTHING ELSE I can help you out with <condescending voice>"
> PLEASE KILL ME NOW
"Would you like to take a survey?"
a week later, 7pm you get a robo call
"You had a call with Agent X how did that call go"
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.
The guy you were talking to eventually just routed you to someone with the same job but who has a mic, because you weren't giving him anything to go on and all he'd have been able to do is push the button again to ask you the exact same question (and having a person do it who can at least vary the inflection of the question is less infuriating than seemingly being stuck in a chatbot's infinite loop).
--
Source: have a friend who used to have this job. He has thankfully moved on to something less soul sucking than being a human literally pretending to be a robot.
In a sort of sick and very selfish way, I find myself somehow glad that blind and deaf people exist and are protected by accessibility legislation. I've often found accessibility features, particularly those in software, to be exceptionally useful even though my vision and hearing are fine.
> when one tries to be as clear, as brief, and as orderly as one can in what one says, and where one avoids obscurity and ambiguity
In a sense, this is not unlike an unskilled and nervous attendant who, faced with a request that they don't understand, starts to chatter more and more in hopes of eliciting the information they really need.
[1]: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/grice.html
Always having to ask for permission is tiring.
With Siri or Google Assistant, you soon figure out few things that this very low intelligence person can do(like telling the weather or setting an alarm) and stick with it.
This is also why I'm excited about iOS12 with all these Siri shortcuts, instead of pretending that we are talking to a smart being let's have a concrete list of things that can do.
On the other hand I do believe that these voice interfaces have some potential, just the technology is not there yet.
Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17265683
When Siri first hit the Iphone and I was trying to figure out if it was useful for me (no), I named my phone Searle[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Chinese_room_thou...
How many times have you called and the prompts go:
Press 1 to talk with sales Press 2 to talk with marketing .... Press 9 to talk to tech support, the only reason anybody dialed this number
Then: Speak your 18 digit account number, being sure to pause between each digit to make sure the computer records it correctly.
Then: Speak your phone number
Then: Speak your 24 digit hexadecimal product code
Finally you get through to a person and 100% of the time they ask you for all of that information again so they can type it in (and get it wrong).
And even when you get a person on the line they make you go back and do all of the stuff you already tried before finally transferring you to someone with half a clue.
a) The backoffice is really shit, broken, and doesn't even display any info (down, badly designed, etc)
b) Backoffice and/or VPN connection from outsourced call center to ISP is really slow, so they work faster by asking info.
c) CRM/Customer database has no consisten quality information, so agents do not trust it.
I may forget something, but those are the most common ones.
The Web was legitimately the next big thing. And after that, mobile. Both of them have changed our lives in deep and lasting ways. But we as an industry are absurdly hungry for the next, next big thing.
How many dumb-ass voice and bot and AI and blockchain projects are there out there now? That basically don't work, but have been shipped anyhow? How many millions of dollars have been wasted? And really I should say billions. Theranos alone burned through $1.2 billion of hype. And there was the wave of "Uber for X" companies, busily failing to replicate the business model of a company whose success still isn't a given.
I should be clear that I'm not opposed to trying new stuff. I'm all for it! But I think if we explore technological possibilities with less flagrant waste, we'll learn more. And be able to explore more.
It's just not true, either. So I end up trying to figure out how to structure my query so the robot on the other end will understand what I want, instead of just saying what I want.
In the end, I just repeat "human" and mash the 0 button over and over until I get a real person to talk to.
They hide key functions behind a 3D Touch, but there's absolutely no discover-ability. So you're either left trying to 3D Touch everything to see what works, or actively researching 3D Touch tricks.
As phone gestures become more popular, they'll have the same issue.
Seriously, watch someone on a new iPhone and it's just painful.
Oh, I created this contact for fun, now how do I delete it. Tap it? Nope. Tap and hold? Nope. Double tap? Nope. Is there a menu somewhere? Nope. Maybe I slide it over? Nope, that brings me back to the previous page. Maybe I pinch? Nope. Guess I'll pull up the help, oh there isn't any. Off to Google then. Oh, I have to slide it over from the middle, not from the edge.
The tipping point for me was when the AT&T small business line I used to use changed to a voice interface and included fake keyboard taping sounds after each interaction. That just felt so damn insulting.
Lately I just say ridiculous shit with these interfaces to see what happens.
A few days ago I was using one for Delta that couldn't tell the difference between "Yeah" and "Yes". Sigh.
Except that with text adventures I was willing to overlook an obtuse parser if I was enjoying the game. I never call my bank just for the fun of it.
The irony, of course, is that research is making strides in NLU, it's just too late for the last wave of chatbots. Here are two recent papers from DeepMind:
Learning to Follow Language Instructions with Adversarial Reward Induction https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01946
Relational inductive biases, deep learning, and graph networks https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01261
Of the bots that are marketed to be more human with lots of machine learning. From my experience, they feel no more better than the original ELIZA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA) despite the leap in tech.
When I look how my kids interact with Google home it's becomes fairly obvious to me that to them this is completely natural. Google Home is almost like a pet to them not just a tool.
We are finally at a stage where voice recognition starts to become powerful enough to understand nuances now the next question is what to connect them to. One thing that I really like is that it allow us to retrieve information without having to look at a screen. It feels like having a 5th person at the table.
At First Principle, we built a little a voice app that allows you to ask Google Analytics or Salesforce for data (and potentially whatever you want to connect with) for meetings so we can ask instead of having to look up. It becomes a natural part of the conversation and everyone have access to the data.
That's where I think it will first make an impact. In meetings with relevant data.
Oh and this comes along with a modern website that can execute all those use cases too.
But then you throw in the natural language, enabling users to write complex queries in English. That and great funded teams focussing on niches.
My experiences with bots are becoming outstandingly good.
Not perfect but good enough that it provides value.
I now use voice a lot because of the quality with Google tech.
80% success and 20% no action might be usable for an assistant, but adding in 5% random behavior makes it drastically worse than useless.
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.
>get sword
I don't know what "sword" is.
Some of the current interactive fiction (as the genre is now called) would surprise you.
There is only so much input you can give and subsequently evaluate if you show a GUI with 3 buttons.
Now if you restrict the chat or voice input to 3 options than the interface feels unnatural, annoying even.
It seems like a lot of times when people talk about chatbots, they really mean these phone trees in text form, in which case I would agree with your sentiment.
However, be cautious in conflating chatbots with CLIs. I would say a CLI is not (always) an intuitive interface, but for a lot of problems, they are quite efficient.
The CLI style chatbots tend to be much better since they are basically CLIs in an easily accessible location (e.g. in an app on your phone).
Understanding natural language is much more than just a design problem. It's a grand challenge and core subfield of Computer Science. It's the original Turing Test.
The biggest manifestation of this is the self-driving car hype for when grandpa can't legally/safely drive himself, however voice-assistants also fit that mold: Something to sell to grandpa when they don't want to learn/buy a new thing and his eyesight is bad and arthritis makes typing hurt.
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.
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.
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This is also true for CLI interfaces. It illustrates the popularity of GUIs - much to the dismay of CLI enthusiasts everywhere.
Edit: Yes, a -help or "help" command can be used to list the menu. But then this command has to be known beforehand. What if a clever designer decides to use -assist or "assistance" instead?
In a sense, the Google search bar is a type of chatbot, but we don't converse with it in grammatical English. It doesn't present as a human, so there's no uncanny valley effect. What gets typed into Google is a sort of lingua franca that we've all collectively learned through 20+ years of increasingly capable search engines. What we need is that level of lingua franca, but for a full, state-change-driving conversation, instead of just a one-step search.
It's not the machines that need to learn, it's us.
It's not as though the tones are harder to recognise!
Because the boardroom got a huge boner when realizing they can do major cost cutting in the human department.
Spamming the # key repeatedly seems to work pretty well for this too.
Of course one can say that this is not an exclusively AI issue. Call centers, especially offshore ones, have the same problem.
Those strings are piped through a Switch statement of static responses, or fall out into the Default response. This was the situation in 2013 when I created a speech bot in Powershell, and it sounds like the state of the art here hasn't progressed far.
What's needed is logic to dynamically build the Switch statements, or otherwise better parse human entry and build responses. There has been much work on a few different fronts, but I'm not aware of any which were wildly successful.
Amazing what they are spending to keep up illusions.
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...
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.
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.
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
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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.
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.
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.
Chatbots and NL interfaces in general are thus far a failure because they neither improve on these purposes nor provide a third, unique benefit. I could see them being useful for consolidation of services (instead of comparing eight puzza places' sites, go to one third-party pizza chatbot), but there's a very, very long way to go.
Egg timers too.
But stupidly, Siri only lets me have one simultaneous timer.
Yeah, right now the home/echo/siri/etc seem completely worthless to me for all but the simplest tasks, but the idea is for the use cases to keep increasing.
Tools do get better and better. Automation and AI will continue to improve. It's more a question of why chatbots haven't gotten there yet and what needs to be done differently.