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The new breed of chatbot talks more like a human, but that is not always good

nytimes.com

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Re: The new breed of chatbot talks more like a human, but that is not always good

#21

Post by leetcrew »

vladbarash wrote: post #18
gm-conspiracy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think that current gen. of UI (touchscreens flat-design) has become such a degraded experience that these alternatives become more appealing.

Could you please elaborate on the degraded experience?

idk OP's position, but the lack of tactile feedback is probably the biggest flaw of touchscreen UIs. it's really nice to be able to give input to a device without actually looking at it.

it's a mild to moderate inconvenience on a phone, since you are looking at the screen most of the time you are using it and swype style keyboards remove most of the pain of typing on a virtual keyboard. it does make for a compromised music player, though, unless you can remap the hardware buttons to control media playback.

on the other hand, i find the touch UI trend in cars absolutely horrible. it's bad enough that you have to take your eyes off the road to read the center screen, but actually pressing a virtual button requires even more concentration to track where your finger is wrt the button and stabilize it against the motion of the vehicle.

Re: The new breed of chatbot talks more like a human, but that is not always good

#22

Post by kurthr »

cooper12 wrote: post #17
oculusthrift wrote: post #2

Someone needs to tell the author that Microsoft isn’t headquartered in Silicon Valley.

It's case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy . Silicon Valley is no longer just a physical place, but also represents the tech industry itself in popular imagination. Also, while the article is centered on Microsoft, I think the title is meant to be general, as shown by this passage: > The project represents a much wider effort to build a new breed of computing system that is truly conversational. At companies…

I was going to just brush this off as silly, but then thought of all the NewYork things that you see around (NY Bagels, NY Fashion, etc) and realize they suffer at least as much... so I can almost forgive the NYT.

Re: The new breed of chatbot talks more like a human, but that is not always good

#23

Post by nradov »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #13
AznHisoka wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can’t these things be shown through the UI?

if done correctly it could just be a much faster way to get to something, versus digging through layers of menus, or trying to guess the right search terms.

A chatbot couldn't possibly be faster unless the website design is really horrible. Checking order status is a common use case for most online retailers and usually just 2 clicks away from the home page.

Re: The new breed of chatbot talks more like a human, but that is not always good

#25

Post by paulie_a »

bitL wrote: post #9
paulie_a wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is junk technology for consumers/anyone that has to interact with them

Paradoxically it's the future of customer support and what we are observing is an early stage. A few tweaks and semantic advances in deep learning here and there, and a regular person would be happy to interact with them for stuff like getting more info about their order, specs and availability of the product etc.

Paradoxically nothing, it will always be a tremendously awful experience vs a competent and friendly CSR. I will choose a bad CSR over something not real.
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