[potatolicious]

It can be, but with a bunch of caveats that I'm not sure people are fully aware of. There's a fair bit of over-enthusiasm about chat interfaces and IMO not a lot of realization of its limitations.

The usefulness of chat interfaces is proportional to how complex the task is and how poorly the user understands the scope and structure of the task.

To use a contrived example, if you have no idea what's left in your fridge, saying "Computer, restock all my essential groceries" is easier than going into the fridge, figuring out what you need, and ordering it via a traditional interface.

Or think of a customer service hotline, where the caller has no idea what options are even available to them, nor do they understand the hellish tree-structure of the touchtone menus. In these instances natural language interaction can remove the need to understand the structure of the task and get them directly to the thing they need. Many customer service lines are already doing this in a simplistic keyworded way, and they can be better.

On the other hand we're seeing a lot of people try to apply chat/natural language interfaces to tasks that are both simple and well understood by their users, and I think these will be doomed to fail. Ultimately voice/text is harder and more annoying for the user than punching buttons, the tradeoff being that they can be valuable when the task is complex/opaque. Most of these applications don't hit a positive tradeoff for the user - and end up being a complicated/annoyingly unstructured mode of interaction nobody wants to use more than once to show off to their friends.

Simple/well understood things like "call an Uber" I think will be pretty DOA if you try to shoehorn a chatbot into the middle - users will prefer the actual UI over it any day of the week.

[geon]

- Computer, restock all my essential groceries.

- Sorry, I didn't quite get that.

- I want you to restock.

- Sorry, I don't know how to "Youtube Rostock". Do you want me to google that?

- Well, it's... Uh...

- I don't know what you mean by "Whale that's a".

[davemel37]

> Simple/well understood things like "call an Uber" I think will be pretty DOA if you try to shoehorn a chatbot into the middle - users will prefer the actual UI over it any day of the week.

I completely disagree when it comes to texting (voice is dif.). I have no interest in waiting for my uber app to load, get me a quote and than order me a ride... I would much rather use a chatbot to look up quick and easy things.

If it's a one off piece of information that I can ask in 1-2 queries/interactions with a bot...I would much rather that over opening an app. Especially, if I can look something up quickly without leaving the current UI i'm using.

I also think you are ignoring all the many use cases that are made possible that were never before possible (i.e. the ability for chatbots to augment humans to achieve access at scale), and the many business models that can shave off 20-30% of their labor costs with well executed chat bots.

I also think it's important to think about the bots calling other bots use case, which might become even more important. Just because you can't envision a human preferring a bot over an app with simple/well understood things...doesn't mean there wont be many use cases where a current bot you are using talks to other bots on your behalf, so the UI choice is never made by you. Finally, and most importantly, if chat bots start replacing parts of discovery, search and research, it will become crucially important to make sure your brands are found and used by bots and people over your competitors brands and bots.

Think of doing SEO in 2002. If you got it right, you banked tens of millions with minimal effort.

I can't predict the future, but viewing chat bots as a UI alternative limits its actual scope.