| > questions about something on the menu? > recommendations on where to go for cocktails later that evening? The 'killer app' I see here initially would be highly streamlined chatbots who specialize on providing details exactly like these and little else. City-specific dialog trees along with neighborhood & restaurant-specific ones. Things that are harder to search for on your phone. These might be expensive to develop (one of the keys would be determining all the fields you'd want a restaurant manager/employee to fill out, and which are required vs. optional), but as in so many other cases, with scaling I could see it being popular and profitable. As far as just having someone to talk with, though, I'm afraid chatbots will likely remain less than ideal for a while yet. "Tell me an interesting story about this place" is more of something one or two people could realistically provide several responses on for all future customers. A lot of places already print stuff like that on their menus. Of course, then you need additional humans for vetting the stories... it wouldn't be cheap, but it seems doable. eta: You'd want to vary the voice style used if possible and/or find other ways to make a room of 20+ people interacting with these things not sound annoying as hell too, of course. |