[jkestelyn]

"The technology to make AI-powered assistants truly useful is still far out of reach, and people aren't rushing to close that gap by adapting their behavior."

Exactly; if you build a bot with the intention of relying 100% on NLP, you're asking for trouble. But I fail to see how that fact leads to chatbots being useless when there are plenty of tools available for guiding necessary optimizations that can lead to a much better experience.

When websites were bad we turned to tools like Google Analytics to make website development data driven -- we didn't stop building them.

[alexcabrera]

To be fair, regular people use websites. Regular people do not use chatbots in significant numbers

[netsharc]

A killer app (well, in this consumerism-driven world) would be a TV ad that ends with "Order now! Just tell your voice assistant 'buy me a pair of the pair of Jimmy Choo's Megan Fox wore in her ad!'".

And it would either have your shoe size saved in your profile, or if you're not the right gender, it will prompt "For who is this pair? Your wife has size 38. Your mistress Mandy has size 36."...

[jkestelyn]

I don't disagree but how is that relevant?

[resu_nimda]

Because even when websites were "bad," the web was still a successful platform with wide adoption. Google Analytics came about because the ecosystem was growing and thriving, not to save something that had failed to gain traction.

[jkestelyn]

So analytics are only useful for successful techs with wide adoption? I think many of those techs got that way because of analytics.