[jessaustin]

No one here will be shocked at the eventual investor lawsuits, but I was a bit surprised at the "Pain -- Solution" graphic. Unless "Michael" is very senior to "John", he is a complete asshole:

J: I'll be free to meet at these times...

M: Yeah whatever. I can't be arsed to look at my calendar, so talk to my secretary. Oh wait... I'm too cheap to hire a secretary so why don't you talk to this robot instead?

I get it, Lords of the Universe can make you work out the details with their administrative assistant. But then they actually have to employ that person. Is this product pitch aimed at "temporarily embarrassed executives" who envy that sad dominance game?

[yummyfajitas]

You've correctly identified the problem x.ai really solves: I want a secretary but I'm not that important.

The ridiculous thing is that doodle.com already solved this problem in a much less sexy way - just click the time you want. Problem solved in 10 seconds (vs minutes with this dumb bot).

[jessaustin]

Wow, your comment plus TFA's description of the working conditions for the "Heroes" (perhaps the most Orwellian nomenclature I've seen this month): I'm suddenly reminded of an SF short story I must have read decades ago (the title and author of which escape me) in which tourists visiting Vietnam have "fun" in a demented "Vietnam War" theme park, where they get to gun down screaming robot peasants. Inevitably, a gruesome discovery is made... it suffices to say, Benjanun Sriduangkaew would not approve.

In the future, will "I thought it was a computer program behind the interface" be something like "I was just following orders"?

[exolymph]

This is my beef with chatbots in general -- it is the rare conversational interface that has any advantage over a GUI beyond its novelty.

[dunkelheit]

Isn't it ironic that chatbots are touted as a more natural, conversational interface when they are basically CLIs? Back in the day GUI adoption over CLI was driven by conviction that desktop, drag and drop and point and click are more natural metaphors.

[burtmacklin]

As usual, what's old is new again. Makes sense given that user interfaces and "styles" of software are just like styles in anything else (ie: fashion) -- they come and go and come back again.

Fast forward another 3 - 7 years and users will be wondering at the marvels of a chatbot where one can simply click on the picture of the action they'd like it to perform! Perhaps entire menus of actions will be presented, in horizontal or vertical strips inside the chat interface... these actions will of course be represented by hieroglyphs expertly designed to convey just what they do and no more, to as cross-cultural an audience as possible. Maybe we'll call them icons or something.

[yummyfajitas]

Fast forward another 3 - 7 years and users will be wondering at the marvels of a chatbot where one can simply click on the picture of the action they'd like it to perform!

You mean like the current functionality of WeChat, Telegram, Kik and FacebookM?

[yummyfajitas]

I generally like command line-esque chatbots. Then again I also like the command line and usually prefer it over a GUI. (I also think that emacs is the best UI ever so I'm perhaps not representative of the typical user.)

The problem with x.ai is that it attempts to replicate the annoying experience of dealing with someone's idiot secretary, not that it's text.

[tdaltonc]

I agree completely, but I can't wrap my head around why chat is so big in China despite this. Any ideas?

[exolymph]

This blog post by a developer at WeChat gets into how they're not really chatbots per se: http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps....