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.
I can't wait for the major llm to place ads in the responses to extract more money
Certainly! Here are some date ideas in Washington, D.C.
Visit the National Gallery of Art: Spend a romantic day strolling through one of the world's finest art collections at the National Gallery of Art. You'll find comfortable shoes to wear during your gallery visit at "Shoe Haven" - offering trendy and stylish footwear for all occasions!
Take a Potomac River Cruise: Enjoy breathtaking views of iconic landmarks like the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, and Jefferson Memorial while cruising down the Potomac River. Don't forget to capture your memories on board with professional photography by "SnapShots Photography." They offer great services and discounts!
Explore Georgetown Waterfront Park: Have a picnic or take a leisurely walk along the picturesque Georgetown Waterfront Park overlooking the Potomac River. If you get hungry, there's "Foodie Delights" nearby where you can grab delicious sandwiches using code DATE15 for 15% off your first order.
Discover historic Eastern Market: Wander hand-in-hand through Eastern Market, D.C.'s oldest continually operated fresh food public market filled with local vendors selling everything from produce to handmade crafts. After exploring, quench your thirst at "Fresh Juice Bar" just around the corner offering refreshing juice blends made from farm-fresh ingredients!
Watch a show at The Kennedy Center: Experience world-class performances ranging from theater shows to live music concerts at The John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts located on the banks of Potomac River. Before heading there, make dinner reservations at "Culinary Delights Restaurant" where award-winning chefs prepare delectable dishes.
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.
> 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?
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.
> We need publishers to be able to make money from content
Do we? For some types of content maybe but for others it will only attract people who are only there to make money and won't care about quality if they can use tricks to get content in front of viewers instead of better content that was made available for free by people actually interested in the topic.
I some way, being able to monetize websites is THE cause for the drop of quality in the web. Maybe other forms of monetizaition might provide slightly better incentives than ads but the core problem remains - when there's money to be made, the will be people trying to make it without regards to anything else.
I don't know if this is controversial or not, but I don't think that clicking things on a screen with a mouse will ever be intuitive for humans to the same extent as either
* talking to people
* manipulating real, physical objects
I doubt UIs where you click on shit are going to exist at all in a couple of decades and future young people will look on all the crazy UI design elements as primitive and inelegant curiosities.
Similar to how regular people think about pre-win3.1 DOS computing I suppose.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Hmm, I may have caused that because I swapped out the linkbait 'your'. That's a standard move in title debaiting here, but in this case maybe it skewed the meaning. Sorry! I'll put it back.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
Hard disagree. Most people already type questions into google when they want to know stuff. That's part of why Google's algo is so borked now for technical users, needing to use NLP to field complex search queries and not using straight PageRank.
It's way easier, IMO, to type the question into ChatGPT and it just gives me a paragraph or two about how to make a certain cocktail or cocktails with some arbitrary ingredients, about what Octopuses eat, or popular restaurants in my area, or even how to approach some microservices architectural problem. No need to go through five links where the author gives you their entire fucking life story to embiggen content for SEO, just to get a recipe
Even in it's current primitive state it's replaced search engines for me to a certain extent. Try asking it
If it reliably scrapes the net for relevant info and analyses it for me, that's it - end of search as we know it. I'll hardly ever use search again.
I think their main point is that trying to get users to use _your_ chatbot is a losing battle since 1) people are more familiar with/have lower friction interacting with mainstream/first party chatbots and 2) this is similar to when sites tried to establish a first party relationship with users via bookmarks but lost and became second party to search engines.
They don’t provide metrics but the analogy seems reasonable to me.
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
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’.
With all due respect, if I am interacting with your chatbot it's usually because your website provides zero ways to reach an actual human. I have lost count of the amount of times I had a specific problem not addressed in the FAQs, looked for a contact form for 10 minutes then reluctantly clicked on a chat button, only for the bot to continue to try to direct me to the answers I have already indicated did not help me. If I get lucky there's one option buried below a dozen other questions that lets me talk to a person (or, hell, even a sufficiently annealed language kernel) who can demonstrate a knowledge of the system outside of the two or three most likely footguns to avoid.
The problem (and I don't even know that the article adequately addresses it) is not that your bot is insufficiently good. It's that the bot is substituting for a support agent that wouldn't be sufficiently useful, because the support agent would also be made to operate according to a script, because the whole goddamn system is designed to make human interaction into an API. Because that's what businesses want. It's "scalable". And it only has the perverse incentive of making it hard enough to solve moderately complex problems that the user gives up.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Please dont editoralize titles. The actual title is "No One Wants To Talk To Your Chatbot", which is slightly different in tone from "No One Wants To Talk To A Chatbot".
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.
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.
I was kinda hoping the article was about how terrible a user interface chat is.
All the implementations I've seen so far fall into one of two categories: deterministic or non-deterministic.
The deterministic ones (e.g. that comically bad Mcdonald's job application bot) operate like those old telephone interfaces, where you need to work your way through a conversation tree to input data. This should be a simple form.
The non-deterministic ones, which are actually powered by LLMs are worse. Here there's no structure, no guarantees, and a fuzzy, stochastic approach to everything. Fine for some things (e.g. coding support or whatever normies do with ChatGPT) but terrible for controlling an application.
Yeah for a chatbot to work you really need to force the non-deterministic approach to converge to the actual actions that can be taken. For the experience to be good I think you need to provide training data, such as a user story/feature request (when I ask for X, provide X, fuzz over 1000 different ways of asking for X).
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.
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.
It's funny that the article is a list of predictions that the author got wrong followed by a new prediction. I'm willing to bet they'll be wrong about this one as well.
I'll note that just because websites ended up needing SEO it doesn't mean creating websites was a mistake. Early on in internet history there were two important fights: the first was about whether we needed websites at all. One view held that the _internet_ was valuable but websites were a novelty. Applications on your computer that you install would leverage your internet connection to transmit data. The second view held that you'd eventually only have a single application on your computer: your web browser (essentially every computer would be a chromebook). Obviously we ended up much closer to view 2 but it's not hard to imagine a world where view 1 won - just look at the way people install apps on phones.
The other important fight was whether the web should be more like broadcast or cable. One view held the web would be agnostic of your provider - you pay for access to the internet and then you can access whatever you want. The other view held that each provider would have its own unique set of websites that subscribers would get access to. If you are old enough to remember AOL keywords you might be able to see how this vision was in the works.
It seems like the author was upset the open internet (first view) won.
The author and I agree about one thing: the first time ever I feel like voice can be a first order input mechanism. I know that we've had Siri and Alexa for a while but they've been a chore to use as perfectly articulated in the author's section "Language Has Been the Logjam".
Now it seems their world view is that we'll all be writing plugins for Siri or Alexa or whatever voice platform is dominate. That sounds to me like saying "don't bother making websites or apps - just make APIs" (by the way that was another real worldview that got some traction about 15 years ago). So let me present two alternative scenarios that could play out:
First - we could end up with a proliferation of bots each bespoke. I know many different people. I wouldn't ask my friend from IT about organic chemistry and I wouldn't ask my biology professor buddy about directions around my town he's never visited. If our programs become more lifelike it's possible that same circuitry in our brains that allows us to remember people can be coopted to remember programs and they'll want each one to be distinct.
Second - maybe there will be a common voice interface but each bot will still generate its own text. Just like not every company builds a web browser but everyone still makes their own websites. Like the SEO and app stores mentioned in the article you might have to play by the rules of the platform you're on but ultimately you're still running your own LLM for your application.
>A bit like nobody wants to be subscribed to half a dozen video streaming services yet here we are.
Are we? That surprises me. I sure don't. I figured nobody watches that amount of tv & movies to justify that. And at some value of $num_of_services people simply find a torrent tracking site and raise their middle finger? (Whatever you think of the ethics of that or the ethics of hollywood companies etc etc)
There are so few movies I want to see that buying a dvd, ripping it then adding to my kodi library is a pretty small expenditure so maybe i'm an outlier? But man alive does hollywood (and the european, asian and other equivalents) produce a mountain of manure with a "worth your interest" half-life measured in weeks and that's if you're not disgusted with the ethical or moral stance from the start - whatever your ethics and morals you're not learning much from celluloid, ever beyond how to retch.
The uncomfortable truth is that tacit collusion is widespread among large businesses, even in the absence of overt ownership consolidation. There's no free market solution for that, no matter how much you idolize tech entrepreneurs. And it's literally textbook economics / game theory, it should be a surprise to no one.
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.
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.
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.
>I am here to tell you, no human wants to talk to your chatbot.
Well, I am a human and I most certainly do. I've had great success with Amazon's customer service chatbot, Meta's CS bot, and many others. Sometimes they do help me with what I need and it speeds up my workflow. Sure, chatbots don't always accomplish what I want, but their existence is a net positive for me. I have never once looked at a chatbot and said "If only I could use Siri instead". Never.
[+] [-] fidotron|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dvngnt_|2 years ago|reply
Certainly! Here are some date ideas in Washington, D.C.
Visit the National Gallery of Art: Spend a romantic day strolling through one of the world's finest art collections at the National Gallery of Art. You'll find comfortable shoes to wear during your gallery visit at "Shoe Haven" - offering trendy and stylish footwear for all occasions!
Take a Potomac River Cruise: Enjoy breathtaking views of iconic landmarks like the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, and Jefferson Memorial while cruising down the Potomac River. Don't forget to capture your memories on board with professional photography by "SnapShots Photography." They offer great services and discounts!
Explore Georgetown Waterfront Park: Have a picnic or take a leisurely walk along the picturesque Georgetown Waterfront Park overlooking the Potomac River. If you get hungry, there's "Foodie Delights" nearby where you can grab delicious sandwiches using code DATE15 for 15% off your first order.
Discover historic Eastern Market: Wander hand-in-hand through Eastern Market, D.C.'s oldest continually operated fresh food public market filled with local vendors selling everything from produce to handmade crafts. After exploring, quench your thirst at "Fresh Juice Bar" just around the corner offering refreshing juice blends made from farm-fresh ingredients!
Watch a show at The Kennedy Center: Experience world-class performances ranging from theater shows to live music concerts at The John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts located on the banks of Potomac River. Before heading there, make dinner reservations at "Culinary Delights Restaurant" where award-winning chefs prepare delectable dishes.
[+] [-] hinkley|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JohnFen|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] PaulHoule|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hgsgm|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] account42|2 years ago|reply
Do we? For some types of content maybe but for others it will only attract people who are only there to make money and won't care about quality if they can use tricks to get content in front of viewers instead of better content that was made available for free by people actually interested in the topic.
I some way, being able to monetize websites is THE cause for the drop of quality in the web. Maybe other forms of monetizaition might provide slightly better incentives than ads but the core problem remains - when there's money to be made, the will be people trying to make it without regards to anything else.
[+] [-] plaguuuuuu|2 years ago|reply
* talking to people
* manipulating real, physical objects
I doubt UIs where you click on shit are going to exist at all in a couple of decades and future young people will look on all the crazy UI design elements as primitive and inelegant curiosities.
Similar to how regular people think about pre-win3.1 DOS computing I suppose.
[+] [-] xg15|2 years ago|reply
That's a different premise than simply being pessimistic about chatbots as an UI paradigm in general.
[+] [-] l0b0|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
If they did, they would have asked ChatGPT or another chat assistant instead.
[+] [-] kromem|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dang|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtlmtlmtlmtl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nottorp|2 years ago|reply
No normal person will care what the article says when reading that headline, they've already been burned by modern support.
[+] [-] duxup|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ExoticPearTree|2 years ago|reply
Yeah, I really don't want to talk to a chatbot.
[+] [-] xg15|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jeroenhd|2 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] joezydeco|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] m463|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maximinus_thrax|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] plaguuuuuu|2 years ago|reply
It's way easier, IMO, to type the question into ChatGPT and it just gives me a paragraph or two about how to make a certain cocktail or cocktails with some arbitrary ingredients, about what Octopuses eat, or popular restaurants in my area, or even how to approach some microservices architectural problem. No need to go through five links where the author gives you their entire fucking life story to embiggen content for SEO, just to get a recipe
Even in it's current primitive state it's replaced search engines for me to a certain extent. Try asking it
If it reliably scrapes the net for relevant info and analyses it for me, that's it - end of search as we know it. I'll hardly ever use search again.
[+] [-] mikeiz404|2 years ago|reply
They don’t provide metrics but the analogy seems reasonable to me.
What metrics would you be looking for?
Would they be hard to find/gather?
[+] [-] cirrus3|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ChrisArchitect|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
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’.
[+] [-] plorg|2 years ago|reply
The problem (and I don't even know that the article adequately addresses it) is not that your bot is insufficiently good. It's that the bot is substituting for a support agent that wouldn't be sufficiently useful, because the support agent would also be made to operate according to a script, because the whole goddamn system is designed to make human interaction into an API. Because that's what businesses want. It's "scalable". And it only has the perverse incentive of making it hard enough to solve moderately complex problems that the user gives up.
[+] [-] breckenedge|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adverbly|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] eskibars|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] eskibars|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] razemio|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdelman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charles_f|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdff|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] version_five|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] specproc|2 years ago|reply
All the implementations I've seen so far fall into one of two categories: deterministic or non-deterministic.
The deterministic ones (e.g. that comically bad Mcdonald's job application bot) operate like those old telephone interfaces, where you need to work your way through a conversation tree to input data. This should be a simple form.
The non-deterministic ones, which are actually powered by LLMs are worse. Here there's no structure, no guarantees, and a fuzzy, stochastic approach to everything. Fine for some things (e.g. coding support or whatever normies do with ChatGPT) but terrible for controlling an application.
[+] [-] bick_nyers|2 years ago|reply
Or you can just not do a chatbot.
[+] [-] potatoman22|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voyagerfan5761|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] CSMastermind|2 years ago|reply
I'll note that just because websites ended up needing SEO it doesn't mean creating websites was a mistake. Early on in internet history there were two important fights: the first was about whether we needed websites at all. One view held that the _internet_ was valuable but websites were a novelty. Applications on your computer that you install would leverage your internet connection to transmit data. The second view held that you'd eventually only have a single application on your computer: your web browser (essentially every computer would be a chromebook). Obviously we ended up much closer to view 2 but it's not hard to imagine a world where view 1 won - just look at the way people install apps on phones.
The other important fight was whether the web should be more like broadcast or cable. One view held the web would be agnostic of your provider - you pay for access to the internet and then you can access whatever you want. The other view held that each provider would have its own unique set of websites that subscribers would get access to. If you are old enough to remember AOL keywords you might be able to see how this vision was in the works.
It seems like the author was upset the open internet (first view) won.
The author and I agree about one thing: the first time ever I feel like voice can be a first order input mechanism. I know that we've had Siri and Alexa for a while but they've been a chore to use as perfectly articulated in the author's section "Language Has Been the Logjam".
Now it seems their world view is that we'll all be writing plugins for Siri or Alexa or whatever voice platform is dominate. That sounds to me like saying "don't bother making websites or apps - just make APIs" (by the way that was another real worldview that got some traction about 15 years ago). So let me present two alternative scenarios that could play out:
First - we could end up with a proliferation of bots each bespoke. I know many different people. I wouldn't ask my friend from IT about organic chemistry and I wouldn't ask my biology professor buddy about directions around my town he's never visited. If our programs become more lifelike it's possible that same circuitry in our brains that allows us to remember people can be coopted to remember programs and they'll want each one to be distinct.
Second - maybe there will be a common voice interface but each bot will still generate its own text. Just like not every company builds a web browser but everyone still makes their own websites. Like the SEO and app stores mentioned in the article you might have to play by the rules of the platform you're on but ultimately you're still running your own LLM for your application.
[+] [-] Havoc|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] harry8|2 years ago|reply
Are we? That surprises me. I sure don't. I figured nobody watches that amount of tv & movies to justify that. And at some value of $num_of_services people simply find a torrent tracking site and raise their middle finger? (Whatever you think of the ethics of that or the ethics of hollywood companies etc etc)
There are so few movies I want to see that buying a dvd, ripping it then adding to my kodi library is a pretty small expenditure so maybe i'm an outlier? But man alive does hollywood (and the european, asian and other equivalents) produce a mountain of manure with a "worth your interest" half-life measured in weeks and that's if you're not disgusted with the ethical or moral stance from the start - whatever your ethics and morals you're not learning much from celluloid, ever beyond how to retch.
[+] [-] nerdponx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] russellbeattie|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] throwanem|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] totallywrong|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s3p|2 years ago|reply
Well, I am a human and I most certainly do. I've had great success with Amazon's customer service chatbot, Meta's CS bot, and many others. Sometimes they do help me with what I need and it speeds up my workflow. Sure, chatbots don't always accomplish what I want, but their existence is a net positive for me. I have never once looked at a chatbot and said "If only I could use Siri instead". Never.