[tobyjsullivan]

Kind of a weird tangent but I had a very interesting experience with one of these customer support chatbots recently. My ISP apparently now requires that all customers communicate with their chatbot as the only point of contact. So, naturally, I was pseudo-outraged because I know chatbots are just a money-saving gimmick that reduces workload by driving away 80% of support requests regardless of whether they actually solve someone's problem. And, being technical, my problem was obviously not going to be in the bank of stock answers or even understood by the bot. (I really wish I could remember the actual question)

Long story short, I proposed the question to the chatbot in all its complexity, assuming it would be handed over to a human agent to read the transcript. The chatbot immediately understood the question and provided the exact response I needed.

That was the day I realized I have a deep-seated prejudice against chatbots that blinded me to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, they actually can help sometimes. And I haven't kept up with their technical advancement to be throwing around judgements on their abilities.

To be clear: I'm not arguing in favour of chatbots; just sharing a story.

[enobrev]

I don't have any evidence this is the case, but my general assumption is that there are humans there as well.

Since people only get a chatbot, they ask simple questions the chatbot can answer, which weeds out a lot of support requests. As soon as the bot is stumped, it forwards directly to the pool of humans - a smaller pool than usual because there are fewer support requests.

The response goes back as though the bot did the thinking, which in some ways, it did - in the same way as if someone asked me a question I couldn't answer, I might google it, and then respond.

If this is the case, it may be slightly dishonest, but as long as people are getting the support they need, I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with it.

[deltarholamda]

>That was the day I realized I have a deep-seated prejudice against chatbots that blinded me to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, they actually can help sometimes.

Nice try, Skynet, but we're on to you.

[tombert]

I had a similar experience with an automated phone bot with my insurance company at one point. I had this very bizarre situation involving billing and a typically-not-covered medication in conjunction with a surgery. I figured that if I went as technically detailed as possible with everything, the bot would be confused and I would be transferred to a person, but the bot completely understood the question and answered it. No humans involved.

[ojilles]

How do you know that "no humans involved"? Was there something that clued you in on the fact that the responses were not from a human being?

[OJFord]

> Long story short, I proposed the question to the chatbot in all its complexity, assuming it would be handed over to a human agent to read the transcript. The chatbot immediately understood the question and provided the exact response I needed.

How do you know it did? I.e. that a human it was passed to didn't just pass your inverted Turing test!

[tobyjsullivan]

In my case, I inferred due to the speed of the response. (It was even formatted fancy). So while it's conceivable that a human could have intervened, they would have had to be reading the conversation in real-time and ready to click a one-button response immediately which seems like it would defeat the purpose.

Perhaps the real question is: if a chatbot is powered by a human instead of AI, but I can't tell because the interface is consistent, is it not a chatbot?

[CRConrad]

> Perhaps the real question is: if a chatbot is powered by a human instead of AI, but I can't tell because the interface is consistent, is it not a chatbot?

The Mechanical Turk[1] was a hoax, not an early mechanical AI, so no. It's a chat interface -- perhaps with some pre-sorting and context-extracting preludes that save the human operator at the other end some time, but still just an interface -- between the human chat operator and you.

___

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk

[acdha]

This is one of the big confounds: a lot of the companies which brag about AI prowess are relying on a bunch of generally not well paid humans to cover the gaps.

[lgeorget]

I share the sentiment, I feel like if you have a long FAQ or list of help articles, a chatbot can actually make a good search engine. Contrarily to conventional search engines, it won't trip over synonyms or formulations not found as-is in the knowledge base.

[rchaud]

Chatbots aren't any more useful than a good search function on the documentation or the community message board.

[fault1]

I guess it depends on what you define as a chatbot. For example, semantic search that understands a natural language query, like google, is that a chat bot or a search function?

[deathanatos]

My last chat bot wanted to look up my account information prior to connecting me to the human representative. I gave it the account number, it looked it up. First question from the human: "What is your account number?" Immense waste of time and money.