[ericrav]

M is dead because it failed to be automated, but the headline extends that to all chatbots. some of the hype around chatbots was their potential for a uniform user interface and less need to download new apps. has there been any evidence that chat as an interface has failed?

[danso]

I've always been bearish about the appeal of chatbots but I did see how they could seem to be a useful interface for many users, especially on support-type sites. They basically seemed to function as a friendlier-version of site search. Yes, ultimately they are an unnecessary middleman facade -- in the same that writing a Google search as a formal question -- e.g. "Where are the best pizza places near me?" -- is unnecessary when you could simply query "best pizza"

But perhaps the perception that your question was being interpreted in an intelligent human way caused users to think differently and rephrase their questions in a way that made it easier to find the most relevant help/support links? I remember how interesting Ask Jeeves seemed to be -- though to be fair, Google wasn't much of a presence in 1997.

[EGreg]

The killer app for chatbots is voice.

That's about it.

[ryanianian]

If they get good enough, I can totally imagine them being keyboard-driven too. I'd love to be able to just type a quick "email" saying "order paper towels" when I'm at work and not have to shout into my phone in a quiet office.

(To be sure, the tech for a lot of this already exists they're just not exposing a text-based version.)

I wouldn't want to be quite as verbose for a text-based version, but oftentimes it really is easier to type more versus less if you're confident the recipient will read and parse the intent of the whole phrase.

[djhworld]

The only interesting stuff I've seen is in China with the way WeChat seems to do everything.

All of this is gleaned from fawning articles in the western tech press though, I'm not sure what it's actually like from the average Chinese citizen.

[x3haloed]

Chatbots are, at present, fancy command-line interfaces. I believe that they have great potential, but I don't think they will transcend the CLI until they are conversational and able to understand language at the level of IBM's Watson. At present, each chatbot has a list of keywords with aliases that activate commands with parameters, and they are unable to act unless they recognize a keyword. They need to be able to infer beyond keywords, and they need to be able to hold the context of a conversation in memory.

[Domenic_S]

> any evidence that chat as an interface has failed?

I love chat as an interface to deployments! Hubot is a great framework/bot for hooking into your own environment. Typing deploy prod master in a Slack channel is great. Why is that better than ssh'ing into a jump box and typing cap deploy prod? It's multi-user! Everyone else can see what's going on.

[crooked-v]

It may be less "chat" and more "typing". Consider that at the same time, Amazon Echo devices have become wildly popular.

[33degrees]

Amazon Echo devices were wildly popular as gifts: remains to be seen if that will translate in enduring popularity.