[viksit]

Agree. Those are too broad.

I'm thinking "get me a dinner reservation next sunday with patio seating for 5 in the east village at an upscale tapas place".

As I mentioned elsewhere on this page, my thesis around conversational interfaces isn't that they start off broad and use more Q/A to refine your query. That's slow, and people are visual.

Rather, their power lies in the user being able to express a complex query in one go - which is equivalent to tapping 10-15 filters and scrolling through results - ideally combining data from sources that aren't limited to one service.

You can now execute related actions to your result set through the same interface, without needing to shift to a single purpose app that would allow you to take the action, but for most purposes, won't keep your context.

[unabst]

I think AI researchers and engineers tend to get too carried away with decision making, when the more valuable service is about communication of refined knowledge, which if I'm not mistaken is exactly your point. The problem has nothing to do with "how can a machine guess the right answer" but instead is all about "how can a machine refine all the options based on the intentions expressed thus far".

Anecdotally, if we'd ask a real person "where is a good place to eat" the chance we'd go there without more information is slim. And if we don't even trust people, trusting Siri will be a while.

What we're really doing with these questions is making our hunger known, and starting a conversation. We actually don't care that much about other people's thoughts, and we may not even have anything in mind yet as far as where to eat. We do care about how people feel if they are someone we care about, but the thinking part we love to do ourselves.

So to offer a service that "thinks" is rather misguided, and may even constitute a disservice. We already rejected the talking paperclip in 1996 [0]. It's failure wasn't it's intelligence, but in the value proposition itself. To have a paperclip presume to know better and to tell you what to do was not tempting. It's failure was it's existence.

Is it a glitch in the Matrix or is their pitch for Cortana identical?

> What is Cortana? Cortana is your clever new personal assistant.[1]

--

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant [1] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/getstarted-wha...

[waterlesscloud]

If I ask someone I know what's a good place to eat, the odds are actually quite high that I'll give it a try. I wouldn't have asked otherwise.

The issue here is one of trust, which is built on an individualized relationship over time. When I ask someone I know for a recommendation, I'm doing so because I already have a sense of their judgment. That's more the key here- build a history of reliable judgment. That's the goal.

[unabst]

> history of reliable judgment

Right. This is certainly one path and the path most seem to be on, and exactly the one that needs to be challenged. The key intuition here being that a judgement, which is a decision, is not an answer to a logical problem. A decision entails a will, and when our personal will is overridden by an animated paperclip, we close said program. Decision != Answer.

People don't necessarily want decisions made for them, but rather, they want assistance in making their own, or better yet, reasons to justify the decisions they've already tentatively made. "Reliable judgement" is the complete opposite of "a resource of intelligence". Certainly all of these assistants feature a little bit of both, but I keep sensing the urge towards the former. Worse yet, a decision is often treated as an abstraction that somehow justifies hiding everything that went into that decision, even though there is immense value in actually being told why. People have entire conversations over why to eat at some place as part of the process of sharing the decision to go there.

Even when used only as a resource, if only these robots wouldn't keep trying to read our minds or insist on telling us what to do. Maybe a handful of people will accept a robot's choice, but everyone loves more information.

Maybe we shouldn't be looking for some secret sauce that enables robots to make better generalized and rational decisions than humans. Maybe we should be building robots capable of assisting humans at better making their own personal and irrational decisions instead?

(edited for grammar)

[dragonwriter]

> Is it a glitch in the Matrix or is their pitch for Cortana identical?

No, its not a glitch that Siri, Google Now, Cortana, and now M have essentially the same pitch -- they are direct competitors intended to attach people to their respective platforms.

[shard]

I think unabst is asking why the pitch for Cortana is similar to Microsoft Office's paperclip, which was a much ridiculed failure.

[shostack]

Thanks for helping me get to the meat of what I was trying to communicate.

It really is all about the interface and the efficiency. I have to wonder though at what point is adding all those filters more involved than checking a couple boxes and glancing at a map or some photos. I'm sure a lot of that depends on context (I can't do those things if I'm driving, but I can use voice recognition).

The other thing I'm unclear about is how such a recommendation engine can best present information about tradeoffs. In theory, each of my filters has a weighting, and that weight might be dynamic based on several other factors. Maybe I really want chinese, but the best match is further away or I know there will be lots of traffic, so I might be willing to compromise on thai, but only if they have that one dish I like. And a lot of it is seeing the options in the moment and making a snap decision. Really curious about the approaches to solve that type of problem.

[viksit]

> I have to wonder though at what point is adding all those filters more involved than checking a couple boxes and glancing at a map or some photos

_When the filters are across datasets and services that are hosted on different platforms, and there's no way one UI that allows you to access them._

Table timings are on OpenTable/Yelp, reviews are on Google/Yelp, traffic is on Google, rides are on Uber and Lyft, menus are on the web, there are recommendations you trust amongst your friends and blogs, and pictures on instagram - and you're on a messaging platform trying to coordinate with 4 other people.

At that point, whatever service helps you to narrow to 4 choices based on all of this data is a Godsend. It's about making decision taking easier.

> how such a recommendation engine can best present information about tradeoffs

That tradeoffs are still yours to dictate - you simply look at the results of your complex query and then use conversation/UI to refine. Faster than using 8 services to do this. Repeatedly.

[pbreit]

"get me a dinner reservation next sunday with patio seating for 5 in the east village at an upscale tapas place"

Nope. I don't think anyone would ever leave it up to M (or whatever) to select the restaurant.

[viksit]

Agreed. But you could get 4 options to choose from.

[Shish2k]

I would; though for me going out to eat with friends is more about the "going out with friends" - where we end up is a fairly minor detail

[pbreit]

For me, it's entirely "going out with friends". But that doesn't mean I'm going to leave restaurant selection to a bot. For many, people, selecting a restaurant is fun. And I bet you and your friends don't just go to some random place.