[cirgue]

We do not yet have chatbots. What we do have are publicly-facing undocumented nondeterministic command line interfaces which expect the user to guess the right commands. This interface further insults the user by pretending to be a person.

[smnrchrds]

I thought chatbots were the worst form of customer service, but then I had to deal with WES. The only option they provided for customer service was a question form. I clearly laid out the three questions I had and submitted the form. Three days later, they sent a reply that didn't answer any of my questions. It seemed to be copied off of the first help page that came up if you searched the keywords of my first question. Their response was from a noreply@ address. So effectively, they took a useless chatbot, added a half-week delay, removed any possibility of interaction with it, and presented it as their only support option. I hate that company with every fiber of my being.

[olavgg]

I know that many on HN really dislike chatbots because they don't understand their super special case. As a chatbot maker, with several different chatbots that are live, I can tell you that I've seen the data. Which concludes that chat bots do work, and our clients agree. Chatbots will be everywhere the coming years.

Some of our clients have over 5000 intents, which cover quite a lot of the business, still it is important to let the chatbot be humble and connect the user to a human when it is too difficult to help.

[hchasestevens]

Could you expand a bit on the niche you see them filling? I think some of the negative perception of chatbots recently owes a lot to exactly what the OP said - gross overapplication in areas with very marginal benefit, if any, to user experience (e.g. why do I want to interact with your service though an opaque natural language interface versus less ambiguous search controls/interface?).

[megaman22]

Chatbots are coming off the peak of inflated expectations, down into the trough of disillusionment.

I suspect many people have never even used search tools that were powerful and allowed for highly targeted searching.

Dealing with chatbots, I always feel like I'm in a badly done Infocom text adventure, trying to play guess the verb to solve an obtuse puzzle. I've done a little work with some of these NLP services, and it's staggering how similar matching utterances to intents is to adding a custom verb to the Inform 6 parser, on the implementation side.

[olavgg]

I wouldn't say niche, there are hundreds of use cases. I believe we have just scratched the surface of possibilities yet. I think you could say, in every situation you would ask a human a question you could also ask a chatbot.

For me searching is garbage, because I get 10+ search results returned in often a random order based on key words. A FAQ with 5000 topics is enormous, and a typical search interface is a bad user experience for finding the answer for your question.

A chatbot, which is properly implemented and that cover the exact intent you are asking will return one answer, with maybe a few follow-up questions. Fast precise and natural, this is what people want.

[forgottenpass]

because they don't understand their super special case

Perhaps you could you expand on the use case for mimicking a human personality, rather than presenting an interface that's obviously a piece of software that uses human-like language to the best of it's ability?

[tikwidd]

Got any pointers on getting into your line of business (e.g. as a business consultant)? What are the big problems you deal with in this space? I really see chatbots as disruptive for customer service, especially for power users, if implemented in the right way.

[olavgg]

The big challenge is creating good data. We constantly analyze chat conversations. Sometimes our chatbot answer wrong because of a corner case that we didn't think about. It could be lack of training data, context mismatch or that follow-up intents are missing. The technology works, but the data structure needs improvement all the time. We have people that work with this and we call them "AI-Trainers".

[bschwindHN]

Can you give some examples of the "data" and some concrete examples of chatbots "working"? What is this super special case you're talking about?

[GFischer]

Well, one BIG difference with command line interfaces is that there's logic behind ("NLP") that guesses what the user wanted to do and matches it with the correct command (matching an input with an intent).

Heck, that's basically most of the value the bot frameworks I've tested provide (speech to text, some UI creation and a bit of domain framework being the rest).

And it's not a small amount of value, we currently have an SMS-based menu system, and people complain that autocorrect changes what they wanted to type in, that it doesn't recognize typos, etc. Only programmers and power users are comfortable with the rigidity of a command line.

I'd say that a well-designed chatbot IS better than a command-line interface because it combines the power of command line (combining commands) with not having to learn and master the commands (and being lenient towards typos and missing parameters and stuff like that).

I'm not a fan of chatbots (even though I work with them) but I do think there's a valid use case when public needs non-frequent interactions with a system (ie help desk or customer support or nonfrequent purchases), and they definitely always need a way to access a real person.

[rightos]

I've never seen one of these (well, minus the really stupid AIM and Skype spam bots), where do you find them? Are they on the sites that constantly nag you to click through to live support on every page? The few of those that I have used all seemed to be real humans.

[Steer]

https://shopbot.ebay.com/

(you need to log in to try it out)

[rightos]

> (you need to log in to try it out)

I was expecting you meant login to eBay... nope, you need a facebook account to muck with that.

[adrianN]

Some companies replace their HR websites with chatbot interfaces.

[stuartlangridge]

Yup. Shilling my own work here, https://kryogenix.org/code/the-ux-of-text-fusion/ is a talk which explicitly calls that out -- we can do better than this, and whoever works out how to deliver chat interfaces where you can't imagine the underlying nodejs commands will have people love their stuff. (And the answer certainly isn't "pretend to be a human", either, as you know; be a bot, be known to be a bot, and have people relate to you anyway. But now I'm just reiterating the talk.)

[vectorEQ]

agree with this cirgue. they shouldn't pretent it's bots or humans, just be honest and say some script is auto replying to sift out some nonsense and quick wins.

[joshdance]

What would make a true 'chatbot'?