[HN Gopher] No one wants to talk to a chatbot
___________________________________________________________________
No one wants to talk to a chatbot
Author : cratermoon
Score : 278 points
Date : 2023-07-27 20:26 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lucas-mcgregor.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lucas-mcgregor.medium.com)
| alaskamiller wrote:
| This is the part of inflection where corporate personhood and GAI
| makes it so that no one will talk to your chatbot.
| cloudking wrote:
| The only thing I ever ask chatbots is "speak to a human"
| golergka wrote:
| They don't want to talk to chatbots, but they want to talk to a
| human. So as long as chatbot can pass a Turing test in a specific
| context, they're getting exactly what they want.
| i_like_apis wrote:
| It really depends. If the chat is high quality and actually doing
| something helpful, then I want to talk to it. The adoption rate
| and usage stats of ChatGPT disagree with the tile.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| My default setting when confronted with a chatbot is to be as
| belligerent and unhelpful as possible so that it directs me to an
| actual human being.
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| I don't use this expression often, but I think it fits in this
| context. This article is pure grade A poppycock.
|
| Are there any metrics to back this up? This bullshit has been
| spewed since 2014: chat/voice as a service-to-service protocol
| and has yet to actually materialize.
|
| I agree that people don't like to talk to chatbots in general
| (cue the intentionally ambiguous click-baity title) but they
| won't have any problems talking to Alexa vs ChatGPT or other
| custom system if they're forced to. They will dislike or like all
| of them equally. Source? Trust me, bro. Just like the author of
| the article.
|
| Let's not forget that the Alexa org has been losing billions per
| quarter and revenue never materialized from people ordering shit
| from Amazon. So... people also don't want to talk to that Chatbot
| and that chatbot may actually join its extinct brethren.
| i_love_cookies wrote:
| [dead]
| siva7 wrote:
| No one i know of misses Alexa or Siri as the entrypoint for 3rd
| party chatbots. Most people simply use ChatGPT without even
| thinking about Alexa or Siri anymore. So the whole premise of the
| article is pretty empty and hidden until the last paragraph..
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I don't care what powers your service as long as it works.
|
| Chatbots are now finally starting to work (when powered by LLMs).
|
| If I can explain what I'm looking for and the chatbot can
| understand... that's easier than any UI out there.
| zerocrates wrote:
| Maybe people use these chatbots for different things but for me
| they're only ever as useful as what they let you do.
|
| LLM technology letting them carry on a more realistic
| conversation with me, all that stuff, I don't really care
| about. All that matters is what it's empowered to do, where it
| can hook into the real system underneath. I don't really have
| much sense that this will be expanded vs. the kinds of systems
| we have now.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| A lot of these chatbots are jumping out at you and trying to
| sell you stuff like sales people. I have a problem talking to
| them even if they work.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| These are the chatbots that don't work. They're simple
| scripts that can not handle new information, and fail to
| recognize requests that fall out of a very narrow path of
| wording.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Even if they are advanced I do not want to have to explain
| what I want in natural language.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Natural language worked pretty well for this comment!
| it's one of the most basic forms of communication and
| we're going to see a lot more of it.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Chatbots are now finally starting to work_
|
| Because if you mash HUMAN in all caps they actually forward you
| to support?
| asdff wrote:
| At least with some websites, you can eventually get through. I
| managed to get through the one at adobe by complaining
| incessantly about it and asking for a human for probably 20
| minutes, and was routed to an actual human who solved my problem
| of not finding the download link for an old version of some of
| their software by giving me a direct download link to this
| version in about 30 seconds. If the process had merely started
| with the customer service representative rather than the bot, I'd
| be raving about the experience of solving my problem in moments.
|
| I'm starting to think I should write my own bot who can do the 20
| minutes of back and forth with the customer service bot. Then
| ping me when its time to actually pay attention.
| trutic wrote:
| Hi! We've thought the same and started creating an AI Assistant
| that is a step further from a chatbot. Check out www.prometh.ai
| PS Still in early stages
| [deleted]
| alexb_ wrote:
| No One Wants to Talk to Your AI Assistant
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 1987 called. They want their naive idealistic AI personal
| assistant concept demo back.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGYFEI6uLy0
| rubyron wrote:
| Prometh? Trying to process that product name. Is it promise
| with a lisp, or are you in favor of meth?
| [deleted]
| totallywrong wrote:
| The fastest way to lose my business is forcing me contact you by
| WhatsApp (already bad enough), and then hitting me with a bot
| asking for a bunch of info, numbered options, etc. Block and
| delete follows.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Far prefer chatbot to IVR menu.
| 1shooner wrote:
| >They will log into their smart phone and expect all the other
| apps and skills to integrate with their personal clouds,
| arbitrated by their trusted personal virtual assistant.
|
| I don't know anyone that trusts Siri, Alexa, or (Hey) Google. Or
| ChatGPT, for that matter.
| sheeshkebab wrote:
| No one wants to talk to a chatbot.
| voyagerfan5761 wrote:
| What's funny is I have yet to encounter anyone IRL who talks to
| Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant often enough to notice.
|
| Maybe building chatbots as a layer beneath the existing virtual
| assistant platforms would be a viable user experience, and I'm
| sure there are people who would use them--but how many? I'd be
| interested in statistics on how many smartphone users actually
| use the voice assistant for more than a couple simple questions
| once or twice a month.
| standardly wrote:
| I'll talk to it when it's as good as GPT-4 and isn't censored.
| Animats wrote:
| > _" If you have a chatbot, it is for Sir or Alexa to use, not
| people."_
|
| This raises a group of interesting questions:
|
| - Should computers talk to each other in natural languages? In
| voice? Is that going to work, or just create inter-machine
| misunderstandings?
|
| - Whose agent is it anyway? It would be useful to have a personal
| agent that works for you, not for someone who's trying to sell
| you something. We may see that as an expensive paid product, but
| the free ones work for the man, not for you.
|
| - It's worth getting a basic understanding of the law of
| principal and agent. Who works for whom? What is the authority of
| an agent? Who takes on risk, the principal or the agent? Who pays
| when an agent exceeds their authority? The legal system had to
| get this figured out centuries ago, and the failure cases are
| well-explored.
| __loam wrote:
| > just create inter-machine misunderstandings
|
| This obviously.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Looking past a lot of unnecessary verbiage, I think he's saying
| that everything that you might want a chatbot on your website to
| handle should instead be integrated with ChatGPT (or its
| replacement) in the future. And that you should just have your
| web app, doing its thing, and not bolt on an isolated version of
| a chatbot that is only used for interacting with your specific
| site. The assumption is that people _will_ want to talk to
| chatbots, just not _your_ chatbot: they want a one-stop shop with
| _every_ chatbot in the same app.
|
| I see the point, not sure I agree totally.
|
| I'm not someone who ever wants to talk to a chatbot, but
| sometimes I am forced to. I suppose that it is better in such
| cases to have a single place I go for that. On the other hand, if
| my confusion begins on your website, I would hope that your
| website would help me resolve it: if I have to go from
| yourwebapp.com, to a third party application, then type "how do I
| do X on yourwebapp.com?" that seems convoluted. Perhaps a
| browser-level integration, or at least replacing the proprietary
| chatbot with a doorway to that single, unified chatbot.
|
| Hmm, I dunno. Sounds like whoever runs such a chatbot would have
| their hands around the throat of the web, doesn't it?
| Havoc wrote:
| >They will expect these other chat enabled systems to speak to
| and through their personal virtual assistant.
|
| I'd say consumers are going to lose that battle.
|
| A bit like nobody wants to be subscribed to half a dozen video
| streaming services yet here we are.
| [deleted]
| pflenker wrote:
| Why, of course they want to, and they do. Not _you_, perhaps, but
| it's like billboard ads: the thousands of eyeballs ignoring them
| are being outweighed by the few who react and drive revenue.
| varispeed wrote:
| > the thousands of eyeballs ignoring them
|
| That reminds me of a billboard in my town, like enormous LED
| panel displaying adverts... that someone put behind a huge
| tree. So in the summer you can only mostly see the corners of
| the billboard. I wonder if their customers know nobody sees
| their ads.
|
| I wish I could high five that tree.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| The main pet peeve about chatbots is that now they're on almost
| every page, popping up with "I am here to help, what would you
| like to buy today" and the more atrocious ones that are
| implemented instead of a call center to reduce the number of
| human operators to the minimum possible.
|
| Yeah, I really don't want to talk to a chatbot.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| > the more atrocious ones that are implemented instead of a
| call center to reduce the number of human operators to the
| minimum possible
|
| This is what's driving me crazy. The stupid "I want to sell you
| our crap" chatbots are easy to block (uBlock rules exist for
| most of them, as they are often existing products integrated
| into websites) but the chatbots people are forced to engage
| with are the ones that exist to replace callcenter workers.
|
| First companies reduced the influence and power of callcenter
| workers to make them useless for customers. Now they're saving
| a buck dumping human operators and letting the powerless
| chatbots tell the users "sorry but I can't change your
| situation, have a nice day".
|
| With advances in voice synthesis, I expect chatbots to replace
| phone operators any day now, probably with a prompt like "you
| are a company X helpdesk operator. Try to upsell to any
| customer as much as you can, and try to make them feel pleased
| even if you can't help them solve their problems".
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Now they 're saving a buck dumping human operators and
| letting the powerless chatbots tell the users "sorry but I
| can't change your situation, have a nice day"_
|
| I saw a television ad a few days ago where the entire point
| of the ad was for the company to show off that it has real,
| live customer service people answering the phones in Arizona.
|
| "I'm Brittany, and I'm a real human being, here to help you!"
|
| It was the one tiny glimmer of hope that the market may sort
| this out. But it won't.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Call centers themselves are implemented as a way to reduce the
| number of human operators to the minimum possible. Used to work
| on dashboard software that monitors them (almost 20 years ago),
| and it's a metric of organizational _success_ when you get a
| caller off the line without letting them talk to a human. All
| the hoop jumping and maze-like options etc are explicitly for
| this purpose.
|
| Even back then there was talk about when chatbots would be good
| enough to remove as many humans as possible from the process.
| And considering how low paid some contact center workers are,
| it's pretty sad.
| tolciho wrote:
| > All the hoop jumping and maze-like options etc are
| explicitly for this purpose.
|
| So, market pressures have implemented "The Castle" by Kafka.
| Progress!
| m463 wrote:
| I hate amazon chat. My time is worth zero.
| joezydeco wrote:
| They don't just pop up - they pop up _the moment the page
| loads_ , getting in your way.
|
| A little bit tuning, say, to keep the popup from happening
| until the browser has been idle for N seconds, would go a long
| long way to reducing this frustration.
| xg15 wrote:
| Before LLMs I actually tried those chats a few times. If the
| bot had actually tried to solve my issue (or at least collect
| some basic data, then open a support ticket) I wouldn't have
| minded it.
|
| However what actually happened was that it started the chat
| with some (pre-scripted) smalltalk, giving the impression I
| could just write my inquiry in freeform - then completely
| ignored my text and just asked me a series of scripted
| questions and directed me to a help page (which I already knew)
| in the end.
|
| I think LLMs _could_ really be an improvement here, because
| there is at least the possibility they could give you some
| answers that are actually tailored to your problem.
|
| Of course it might just as well be that we'll now get a very
| charming and deeply empathetic response that exactly sums up
| the gist of your problem and then ... redirects you to the
| generic help page.
| orwin wrote:
| When I worked in an internal team at a bank, we chose to make
| a bot to replace the FAQ when the number of daily tickets
| where the response that could be summed up as 'rtfm' hit 30.
|
| It might have been frustrating for the users, but at least we
| avoided basic questions and our tickets at least we're filled
| correctly.
|
| I hacked a bypass for the secops who worked a lot with us and
| at least knew how to fill tickets.
| nottorp wrote:
| Yeah, the problem is your management then removed any
| option to talk to a human and left the chatbot do all
| support.
| deepspace wrote:
| Yes, and since _everybody_ did that, everyone managed to
| sour their entire user base on the idea of chatbots.
| adverbly wrote:
| If I get stuck talking to a chatbot I know I've already lost half
| the battle. A lot of the times when I call in for support, I need
| decisions and actions to be made.
|
| For safety reasons, I do not expect many companies to allow for
| fully automated chat bot interactions. So I'm stuck trying to get
| through to an actual person who can actually do something.
| Olshansky wrote:
| [dead]
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Spare me the paragraphs of 'how did we get here' history and get
| to the point that's already in your title.
|
| Based on what many site operators see anecdotally, people
| actually do want to talk to the chatbot because they just want
| answers to their questions and hand holding. How it's
| implemented/effectiveness is variable -- they will talk to it for
| a bit if they perceive they are being helped in some way.
| Chatbots and general site chat interfaces didn't spread
| everywhere without at least some data
| u_boredom wrote:
| The paragraphs upon paragraphs of history made me click out of
| that article. There's no relevance to the point being made.
|
| In regards to ChatBot usage, in my limited interaction with
| support bots, they are usually quite useless. Each time I use
| one, it's a game of 'get to the actual support agent'.
| breckenedge wrote:
| I think the point was that novel chatbots will still be
| created, but they need to be talking to your existing assistant
| (Siri/Alexa) rather than you going directly to them?
| __loam wrote:
| His point seems to be that assistants like Siri and Alexa
| will be the entrypoint for LLM type interactions, which is
| sort of non-sensical considering most people are using
| chatGPT right now. I think this could have been an
| interesting article about how interacting with chat bots
| still kind of sucks but instead we got some unsubstantiated
| view that assistants that a lot of people have already
| written off are going to take over the space.
| Spivak wrote:
| That's the same, people go to a place where chat
| interaction is the primary interface to talk to their
| preferred chatbot. That can be ChatGPT. But no one goes to
| allstate.com to talk to their chatbot.
| whitepaint wrote:
| Many have written them off because they kinda suck a lot
| now. But they will be much much better, won't they? 5 years
| lets say? What kind of LLMs will we have then? If it's
| reliable, why not just have one interface?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Particularly true for those stupid chat windows that pop up on
| the lower left corner of many web sites to harass you.
| potatoman22 wrote:
| I found maybe the first chatbot I found helpful today. LlamaIndex
| has a chat bot built into its documentation. Helped me answer
| some quick questions and gave me a mostly working code snippet
| for my use case.
| criddell wrote:
| A documentation bot is a great idea. I'd like a man-bot in
| Linux.
|
| I'd like to be able to type "hey tux, restart networking".
| Don't make me dig through /etc and figure out what kind of
| system this is. Tell me what it's going to do and if I say
| "yes", do it.
| fidotron wrote:
| I can't help but wonder how much of the Chat** hype is driven by
| a frustration with the state of modern user experiences. The
| dream it seems to tap into is "You don't need to deal with the
| arbitrary whims of 5 different groups of web designers, just talk
| to one thing and get a single response." When faced with the
| state of the modern web chatbots actually are preferable, sorry.
|
| A great problematic side effect of the web being so ad-driven is
| it leads to confusing the user interface, which can host ads,
| with the information. We need publishers to be able to make money
| from content without ads, and to be able to make money from
| providing it in raw form via APIs to third parties. It's that or
| the chatbot intermediaries are going to take over.
| jacob019 wrote:
| make money from content without ads... you make it sound simple
| mulmen wrote:
| I _pay_ for Paramount Plus and they _still_ show me ads. They
| can't help themselves!
| lkramer wrote:
| Isn't it just cable all over? In the beginning cable sold
| itself as TV without ads, then came the ads. It seems to be
| exactly what's happening with streaming now.
| Spoom wrote:
| I cancelled Paramount Plus when I heard about the content
| deletions. I paid for ad-free and they started showing me
| unskippable preroll ads for their own shows before
| anything. They absolutely _do not care_ about their
| customers.
| all2 wrote:
| Money. It's all about the money and what people will put up
| with.
| avereveard wrote:
| Dane with dazn, they started serving me ads before starting
| any stream last month so I'm going to cancel the
| subscription at the first opportunity I have to get into
| the cable company shop (because of course you cannot do
| that via web)
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| I can't wait for the major llm to place ads in the responses to
| extract more money
|
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| cratermoon wrote:
| This is a certainty. The chatbot will be constantly
| upselling. "Would you like fries with that?" or "Extra cheese
| on your pizza is only 50 cents, add it?", only more
| sophisticated. And like some ordering systems today, you
| won't be able to bypass it. The "yes, please add more things
| to my cart" answer will be the default and easy answer,
| declining the offer will take more effort.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| ... I think of how annoying the kiosks at McDonalds have
| gotten.
| pid-1 wrote:
| Bard already does that. It shows products from Google
| Shopping when giving recommendations.
| artificial wrote:
| "Welcome to Uber, I love you."
| gumby wrote:
| You know this is coming with Uber: you book an Uber to a
| fancy restaurant and get Macdonald's ads in the app, and then
| the driver's app picks a route that drives past Macdonald's
| and tells them to offer you a $5 off coupon on any order in
| the next 10 minutes.
| portmanteur wrote:
| Who chooses to stop at McDonald's instead of a fancy
| restaurant, just to save $5?
| mudlus wrote:
| Doesn't matter, we're all talking about McDonalds now.
| cratermoon wrote:
| I suspect a more sophisticated chatbot will upsell the
| restaurant's offerings. "Would you like a bottle of
| champagne chilled and waiting for you? The Mushroom
| Bruschetta with Brie, Sage and Truffle Oil appetizer is
| the special of the day" that sort of thing.
| jwie wrote:
| It's a segmentation issue. The ad buy was for "people
| going to restaurants" but it might have been "people
| going to {type} restaurants."
|
| Thought it's probably not that simple. A naive ad buy
| might not care to target, or targeting is too expensive
| and you're ok wasting some impressions because it might
| be all-in cheaper, or {brand} has the media budget to pay
| to be in front of your eyeballs all the time.
| nomat wrote:
| Yes it is a bit backwards. The McDonalds stop afterwards
| makes more sense.
| vuln wrote:
| That's the rub right?
|
| If they are taking an Uber to of the fancy restaurant and
| passing a McDonald's chances are highly likely they will
| take a very similar route on the way home. They will
| still want to stop at McDonald's for a $4 Large fry or an
| ice cream cone but no coupon this time. The line is now
| longer which increases the ride time and the drivers
| perceived profit.
| NegativeK wrote:
| I assume that contrast is to point out how completely off
| the mark ads often are.
| jrflowers wrote:
| Sometimes you just want nuggets
| imbnwa wrote:
| >The dream it seems to tap into is "You don't need to deal with
| the arbitrary whims of 5 different groups of web designers,
| just talk to one thing and get a single response."
|
| Except that's the business' perspective, because it means
| paying less people, rather than consumers, who generally wanna
| talk to and haggle with humans, which requires a business to
| pay more people.
| ilyt wrote:
| > A great problematic side effect of the web being so ad-driven
| is it leads to confusing the user interface, which can host
| ads, with the information.
|
| Whoa there, let's start small first and maybe make buttons that
| look like buttons and links that look like links first... small
| steps.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > The dream it seems to tap into is "You don't need to deal
| with the arbitrary whims of 5 different groups of web
| designers, just talk to one thing and get a single response."
|
| This calls to mind the old joke: "a person with one watch
| always knows what time it is, a person with two watches is
| never sure."
|
| But the thing is, a person with one watch can't be sure the
| time they have is correct. For more complicated things, don't
| you want multiple answers? How do you know the one answer you
| got is the best one?
| mszcz wrote:
| Ha! I asked Bard a couple of nights ago about some TV series
| (circa 2021) trivia - "does xxx die in season xxx of show
| xxx?". The answer looked suspicious so I clicked "view
| alternative answers" or something. I only read the beginnings
| which were "yes, ...", "no, ..." and "yes, ...". Really
| satisfied my curiosity right there...
| Aperocky wrote:
| > How do you know the one answer you got is the best one?
|
| That's the best part, you don't.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| For a while i thought this talk aged poorly
|
| https://www.slideshare.net/paulahoule/chatbots-in-2017-ithac...
|
| then the tech caught up with the hype. Or maybe the hype caught
| up with the hype.
|
| Note one motivation for chatbots is to eliminate the problem
| where any update in a mobile app requires waiting for the app
| store whereas a thin chat client never needs to be updated but
| instead you can roll out new features entirely with back end
| changes.
| hinkley wrote:
| Ad blindness has fucked me so many times on web UIs.
|
| There have been a couple of particularly vivid incidents where
| the company put some sort of interaction on a page and
| positioned it and shaped it like an ad. So I bitched about how
| that button wasn't on that page and it was literally front and
| center (specifically, slightly right of center with text
| wrapped around it), but positioned like an ad so I didn't see
| it.
| hgsgm wrote:
| My bank replaced* its functional UI by a chatbot. Guess what
| the chat it does?. Spam me with ads.
|
| Actually, the UI exists, but the only way to get to it is via
| the chatbot.
|
| Chatbots exist to force a linear interaction wehere ads are
| harder to avoid.
| nomat wrote:
| hey yeah chatbots are kind of like the text version of mobile
| UIs.
|
| Amazon, threads, instagram, offerup, facebook. They hide any
| useful navigation options and present you with a list that
| must be navigated in order, therefore ensuring ads placed in
| between the list items will be the only thing on the screen
| for at least 1 attention cycle.
|
| Terrifying to think of a future where your device doesn't
| have any real capability because all the websites and apps
| are just AI driven chatbots/suggestion engines.
|
| this post encapsulates the general feeling.
| https://032c.com/magazine/berlin-review-lan-party
|
| Is this the feeling that every generation gets about the
| future as they age? oh no
| reaperducer wrote:
| Name and shame, so the rest of us know which bank to avoid.
| fishtoaster wrote:
| That's an interesting thesis: that everyone will want to use
| _their own_ chatbot (gpt-powered Siri or Alexa) instead.
|
| I suppose it's possible, but I suspect the author overestimates
| how much of a positive relationship most people have (or will
| have) with voice assistants.
| sharemywin wrote:
| They would probably have to sell personalities and custom
| voices like ringtones used to be sold.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Possibly celebrities (or their estates) could license their
| voices and appearance. Want a chatbot that sounds like
| Princess Leia or Darth Vader?
| Michelangelo11 wrote:
| Yes, but it looks good as a proposed feature in a pitch for VCs,
| and that's what really matters.
| jdelman wrote:
| This is a very shallow glance at how "chatbots" have been used in
| the customer service space, especially in the past 10 years. If
| you look at what the term has been referring to in the last
| decade or so, it's not really the AI assistants like Alexa or
| Siri. The best ones are primarily a customer service tool that
| helps people triage problems on their own and reduce the need for
| a human in the loop. They're not do-it-all human assistant
| replacements. I agree, generally, with the premise that a better
| UI > an OK chatbot. And ultimately, there are a whole host of
| problems that chatbots with complex decision trees or even LLMs
| can't solve, so a chatbot alone isn't really the solution. The
| combination of chatbot + escalation path to human agent does work
| pretty well, though.
| dqv wrote:
| That makes a lot of sense and tracks with the way I wish voice
| assistants would work. Specifically there is structured data that
| I want to search (e.g. what move type does 4x damage to pokemon
| of type1, type2?) using the voice assistant. ChatGPT seems to get
| it right, so I wonder if/when Siri and Alexa will.
|
| I guess someone will sooner or later develop the "ai.xml"
| standard for websites to give their chatbot endpoints to the AI
| assistants. Or maybe it can just be another opensearch kind of
| thing.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| I felt like this before I used - of all things - Bank of
| America's "Erica" chatbot to find an option in their app that was
| eluding me. I asked how to change the option, and it responded
| with a link to the exact screen I was looking for. The reason I
| couldn't find it was because it was called something different
| than I thought. I never would have found it otherwise.
|
| That's when I realized a core use case for these sorts of bots:
| Navigating complex interfaces. As much as UX designers want to
| make UIs "intuitive", there comes a tipping point of complexity
| where a UI can only do so much to guide you. Bots are like that
| kid next door who's "good at computers", or a tech support agent
| on the phone, who can help you do something you just couldn't
| work out on your own because of terminology or misunderstanding.
|
| As much as people are wary of Microsoft's Copilot integration
| into Windows due to the legacy of Clippy and Cortana, I think
| it's going to be a huge success and an archetype of future HCI.
| dingnuts wrote:
| Did anybody actually RTFA?
|
| The article is not arguing that chatbots are unpopular with
| users, as the commentators here seem to be assuming.
|
| TLDR, didn't RTFA: The author is arguing that most LLMs that are
| fine-tuned should operate at a layer of abstraction beneath Siri
| etc, so that end-users can talk to the "AI Assistant" that they
| are used to, and in turn Siri or Google Assistant or whatever
| interface they're used to can query the LLM.
| delphi4711 wrote:
| When I write lengthy emails, I noticed some people only read
| the first paragraph. Some only read the first sentence.
|
| Some people only read the subject of my email :D.
|
| I don't write lengthy emails anymore.
| josephd79 wrote:
| I'll just keep clicking no until i get to speak to a live agent.
| fswd wrote:
| Nobody wants to read your spam ridden medium article.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| And judging from the comments, no one did. Thank goodness they
| didn't, because reading it would have wasted their time more
| than what they did, which was leaving comments related to their
| take on the prompt (which is the title of the article)
| version_five wrote:
| Chatbot is fine as a search alternative, and there's stuff I find
| more convenient asking chatgpt than looking up and synthesizing
| myself to figure out the answer.
|
| Chat is the worst possible interface to a fixed menu system,
| which is the only way it gets used in public facing customer
| service.
|
| If a company had an optional "faq chatbot" you could talk to,
| nobody would complain. It's using it to block human interaction
| while pretending to be able to help that infuriates people.
| xg15 wrote:
| The premise of the article is really "No one wants to talk to
| _your_ chatbot, because users will already be primed to the
| chatbot integrated in their smart speaker or phone or whatever
| device they are using - which will be the device vendor 's
| product (i.e. Google's, Apple's, Amazon's etc) and not yours."
|
| That's a different premise than simply being pessimistic about
| chatbots as an UI paradigm in general.
| duxup wrote:
| The title applies to almost everyone's chat bot... except for a
| couple.
| kromem wrote:
| Also, very importantly, it's not saying not to build a chatbot,
| but to recognize that the main consumer of your chatbot
| interface will be a user's primary LLM, not the user
| themselves.
|
| The headline is exactly the kind of thing the largely anti-AI
| attitudes online today will blindly vote up, but the message of
| the article couldn't be further from the appearance of the
| headline.
|
| It's about the nuanced infrastructure of a future where
| chatbots exist in multiple layers, not about a future without
| chatbots.
| l0b0 wrote:
| Absolutely. Most comments here seem to take the title at face
| value.
|
| Based on how low companies are willing to go to in the support
| space, it won't be at all surprising when _all of them_ move to
| some form of ChatGPT-enabled crapbot, specially adjusted to
| maximise whatever metric the company wants at huge financial
| and psychological cost to the user. It 's gotten so bad it's
| hard not to think of employees of such scummy companies as scum
| for supporting and enabling this toxic ad-driven hell.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| My take away is a bit different: if a user lands on your
| site/app, _they don 't want to talk to a chatbot_.
|
| If they did, they would have asked ChatGPT or another chat
| assistant instead. "When they do come
| directly to your site or app, they are not looking for a
| chatbot. They are looking for a UI that works. They know why
| they came to you. They expect your UI to do what it should do."
| dqv wrote:
| >My take away is a bit different: if a user lands on your
| site/app, they don't want to talk to a chatbot.
|
| But part of that is Siri, Google Assistant, et al. often just
| say "here's a website" when you ask a question like "Hey
| Siri, does Walgreens on Blob Street have the FreeStyle Libre
| 3 in stock?"
|
| But in what TFA describes, Siri would do something like
|
| >I need to ask walgreens.com, is it OK to send your question
| to them?
|
| Yeah ok
|
| >Walgreens.com says yes the Blob Street Walgreens has the
| FreeStyle Libre 3 in stock
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| The chatbot as it's used in most cases is not a UI paradigm,
| it's the complete lack of a UI. Just a phone tree cobbled
| together by some basic heuristics. Even a FAQ is a better UI if
| done well.
| didip wrote:
| With LLM, they will.
|
| The AI is finally intelligent enough and knowledgable enough to
| do something. Not only that, the AI finally gained the ability to
| memorize context.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| I think the article is somewhat incorrect. I really dislike all
| these custom chatbots. But it is also fairly easy to measure how
| good they work. And for the sites I work with at least the
| chatbots perform better than other options and they do offload
| work from the support teams.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Definitely not. I don't talk to computers and I don't communicate
| with bots like they're humans.
| whitepaint wrote:
| What if they were more helpful?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| My mind has been changed on this recently after I showed a very
| close friend the Pi app [1]. Almost immediately they were using
| Pi all day everyday as a kind of "rubber ducky" to process
| decisions and just generally brainstorm with - the same way you
| would with a therapist, close friend or colleague.
|
| For example, this person literally has an ongoing chat with Pi to
| "help find enjoyment in daily life" via the voice interface. Not
| only that but basic help with research etc... instead of
| googling. That's amazing and staggering. I mean it's literally
| like the movie Her (without the romantic subtext).
|
| [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pi-your-personal-
| ai/id64458159...
| sharemywin wrote:
| This seems like a shill comment.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Not sure what to tell you other than it's legit
| itake wrote:
| I wish the author would share data instead of their opinion. At
| the library, I heard high school students proudly say, "I used
| SnapChat's MyAI to do my homework assignment."
|
| I have access to data in a social app that has users sending
| thousands of messages to the ai.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _I wish the author would share data instead of their
| opinion._
|
| Yeah, anecdotally I'd agree that the author's premise is
| completely empty.
|
| As for the insight that I'll want my chatbot (Siri, Alexa,
| etc.) to talk to other chatbots (ChatGPT, Bard, etc.): Sure, if
| an LLM is the only interface to something, use that. But direct
| access to apps and services via direct integration is also
| (obviously?) necessary and desirable.
| dale_glass wrote:
| No one wants to talk to customer service either. Even with
| humans, I'd much rather not try to explain my problems to a
| person who may not be a native speaker, who may not understand
| well the problem domain, and who may not have much power to do
| anything.
|
| But even talking to an actual pro is most of the time something
| I'd rather avoid -- it's after all best if whatever I need is
| doable without needing extra help.
|
| I think a chat bot is going to be very rarely seen as an actual
| perk by an end user, except in some specific domains like game
| NPCs. It's more likely to be used as a first line of support or
| similar to save costs, as something better than a phone menu
| system.
|
| I can see them also being a perk for users of very large systems
| like AWS, where reading the docs can get overwhelming, and search
| may not work well because you may need to know the specific terms
| you have to search for.
| VeninVidiaVicii wrote:
| I agree, nobody wants to chat with anyone's Chatbot -- they
| typically just want to ask one or two questions. The word "chat"
| seems disparaging.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| If interfaces were gamed to keep the users 'engaged' so can the
| chatbots. At first they may concentrate on what's essential and
| provide some value, everybody will vie for their betterness but
| with time things will enshittificate for the same reasons UI
| became unusable or frustrating.
| sharemywin wrote:
| The only possible way around it is to pay for it.
| eskibars wrote:
| I think there are multiple facets to this argument (both for and
| against). Yeah, a lot of chatbots are so "stupid" or at least so
| obviously non-human that as a user, I have absolutely no desire
| to interact with them. They waste my time and I end up doing the
| same thing as I sometimes need to do with automated phone
| systems: press the virtual equivalent of "0" to try to get
| connected with a real human.
|
| But that is starting to change: _some_ chatbots can now start
| understanding and interacting like humans. As a user, when that
| 's the case, I don't personally care what is powering the thing
| behind the scenes. In fact, I'd generally _prefer_ a bot if it 's
| as good as a _good_ human: the number of times I 've had 45
| minute or longer sessions with some human support agent that: 1)
| Just didn't listen to what I was looking for 2) Had difficulty
| communicating because I started a chat on an evening/weekend and
| got routed to someone who had English as a second language 3)
| Couldn't actually figure out how to solve some problem, so I had
| to start a new conversation of the same substance the next day 4)
| Didn't actually log the notes of my chat for the next agent, so I
| had to repeat myself etc
|
| is just completely off the charts and it's anecdotally gotten
| worse in my experience in the past few years.
| razemio wrote:
| Same experience here. It always depends. 2 month ago I was
| surprised, that a chatbot was able to solve my somewhat complex
| problem in no time, with a text by text guide. It was also able
| to awnser follow up questions.
| eskibars wrote:
| Also, many times I've had to wait 5 minutes for an agent to
| respond _at all_ (presumably because they 're _way_
| oversubscribed) and then had the "chat with an agent" thing
| time out and disconnect me entirely after 10 minutes is _so
| frustrating._. Yeah, I went and grabbed a water /coffee/went
| for a bio break because your agent hasn't responded to my last
| message for 7 minutes. But then you disconnect me after 5
| minutes of "inactivity" and ask me to hop on a new chat with
| the next agent that will not have _any_ history from the
| previous chat? I could do with a lot less of that in my life.
| throwanem wrote:
| No one wants to talk to a chatbot _that 's useless_.
|
| Up to now, "useless" was implicit in "chatbot". From here? I've
| been a skeptic, but after some of the things I've seen and heard
| recently, at this point I'm no longer sure.
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