[deegles]

I develop Alexa skills and I agree with the article. Another point that is missing is that the technology hasn't "closed the loop". We have great ASR and NLU available, but responses still need to be built by hand or templated. This is the major reason bots feel so unnatural. I think there's a lot of opportunity for robust Natural Language Generation solutions to help build voice apps and chat bots that can operate more flexibly.

Also, there's a need for a more declarative, high level programming language to describe how you can interact with a bot. Defining them as trees or graphs isn't flexible enough. I've had promising results from experimenting with concepts from Ceptre (https://github.com/chrisamaphone/interactive-lp). Fortunately there are a lot of startups experimenting in this space, I think we'll see the most effective practices replicated quickly.

[mannykannot]

In my experience, the major reason bots feel unnatural is that they quickly reveal their lack of actual understanding of anything, with the mean time to Turing-test failure being not much longer than the preliminaries (such as getting your account #.)

Actually, maybe 'unnatural' is not the quite right word, as I have had some human customer service that is no better in this regard (or perhaps they were actually some of the better chatbots?)

[splatcollision]

Agree on the need for a declarative high level language. Something akin to Markdown, but for chatbot flows.