[thanatropism]

Siri is not essential. Every time it fails to deliver a feature of my phone, I can thumb my way to it in seconds. So it's actually fun whenever it works.

Also: because it's not essential, one gets to adjust to its failures. There's a broad range of queries for which I know Siri will just say "this is what I found online for..."; I tend to just open the browser and use Google's autocomplete instead.

So... I have a problem when the chatbot is trying to perform an essential service, like getting a technician to come to my home because cable internet is not working. Imagine medical triage done by chatbots, jesus christ.

An MTV chatbot that tries to do interactive music recommendation? This could work. Spotify's algo is already very good, but you can't refine "yeah, I wanted something more like X, but a little like Y. And not X exactly" -- just "give me more like X including lots of X".

And nobody gets hurt by a bad song recommendation.

[michaelbuckbee]

That's my feeling of Siri usage as well, that it's not reliable enough to just sort of take for granted.

But, what's really interesting to me is that Alexa has surpassed that level (at least in my household). So that for routine things, it's not a novelty to use it, but an actual improvement.

This is still obviously for non-essential services like music, games, weather, etc. but it's also reliable enough to handle things like turning on/off lights in awkward spots.

[rhino369]

Alexa isn't really a chat bot. You issue commands to her. She does an amazing job at it. Seriously, the voice recognition is truly great. But you are still issuing a command.

You've just learned the language she speaks.