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Apps SDK

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Re: Apps SDK

#191

Post by fragmede »

artursapek wrote: post #124
fidotron wrote: post #50

This conception makes sense iff you believe in ChatGPT as the universal user interface of the future. If anything the agentic wave is showing that the chat interfaces are better off hidden behind stricter user interface paradigms.

Once it's efficient enough, you will be able to just vocally talk to your computer to do all of this. Text chat is just the simplest form of a natural language interface, which is obviously the future of computing.

The ChatGPT phone app has had voice conversation mode for a while now. it's more interactive than a podcast while driving. There are apps (Wispr, non-affiliated) to make talking to your computer easier. The future is definitely a hybrid of them. sometimes I want to talk, other times I want to type.

Re: Apps SDK

#192

Post by Forgeties79 »

ryandrake wrote: post #167
peab wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agree. Thing is, for those who paid attention to the last chatBot hype cycle, we already knew this. Look at how Google Assistant was portrayed back in 2016. People thought you'd be buying starbucks via the chat. Turns out the starbucks app has a better UX

Yea, I don't want to sit there at my computer, which can handle lots of different input methods, like keyboard, mouse, clicking, dragging, or my phone which can handle gestures, pinching, swiping... and try to articulate what I need it to do in English language conversation. This is actually a step backwards in human-computer interaction. To use an extreme example: imagine instead of a knob on my stereo for volume, I…

“volume up to 35”

>changes bass to +4 because the unit doesn't do half increments

“No volume up to 35, do not touch the EQ”

>adjusts volume to 4 because the unit doesn’t do half increments

> I reach over, grab my remote, and do it myself

We have a grandparent that really depends on their Alexa and let me tell you repeatedly going “hey Alexa, volume down. Hey Alexa, volume down. Hey Alexa, volume down,” gets really old lol we just walk over and start using the touch interface

Re: Apps SDK

#193

Post by rushingcreek »

9dev wrote: post #127
rushingcreek wrote: post #6

I think this is very interesting, but it is reminiscent of what we built with Phind 2 where the answer could include dynamic, pre-built widgets. The problem with this approach is precisely that these apps/widgets have hard-coded input and output schema. They can work quite well when the user asks something within the widget's capabilities, but the brittleness of this approach starts showing quickly in real-world use.…

Ah, that’s interesting. I’m considering building something similar for our product, and my solution to the schema constraints you mentioned thus far is breaking my widgets into blocks as universal as possible, as to still be useful. All of this is just ideas yet mind you, but my thinking was—maybe I can get the model to pick from a range of composable widgets depending on the task that are interoperable? For a concre…

Yes! We have a blog post here on how we designed these models and widgets: https://www.phind.com/blog/phind-2-model-creation.

Now that models have gotten much more capable, I'd suggest to give the executing model as much freedom with setting (and even determining) the schema as possible.

Re: Apps SDK

#194

Post by anal_reactor »

freehorse wrote: post #183
anal_reactor wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the tailored browsing methods already in place are the results of years of careful design and battle testing Have you ever worked in a corporation? Do you really think that Windows 8 UI was the fruit of years of careful design? What about Workday? > but it is bizarre that so many businesses seem to be discarding battle tested UXes for chatbots Not really. If the chatbot is smart enough then chatbot is the more natu…

In an alarm, there is only one parameter to set. In more complex tasks, chat is a bad ui because it does not scale well and it does not offer good ways to arrange information. Eg if I want to buy something and I have a bunch of constraints, I would rather use a search-based UI where i can fast tweak these constraints and decide. Chathpt being smart or not here is irrelevant, it would just be bad ui for the task.

You're thinking in wrong categories. Suppose you want to buy a table. You could say "I'm looking for a €400 100x200cm table, black" and these are your search criteria. But that's not what you actually want. What you actually want is a table that fits your use case and looks nice and doesn't cost much, and "€400 100x200cm table, black" is a discrete approximation of your initial fuzzy search. A chatbot could talk to you about what you want, and suggest a relevant product.

Imagine going to a shop and browsing all the aisles vs talking to the store employee. Chatbot is like the latter, but for a webshop.

Not to mention that most webshops have their categories completely disorganized, making "search by constraints" impossible.

Re: Apps SDK

#195

Post by robotresearcher »

anal_reactor wrote: post #151
munk-a wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have yet to see a chat agent deployed that is more popular than tailored browsing methods. The most charitable way to explain this is that the tailored browsing methods already in place are the results of years of careful design and battle testing and that the chat agent is providing most of the value that a tailored browsing method would but without any of the investment required to bring a traditional UX to fruit…

> the tailored browsing methods already in place are the results of years of careful design and battle testing Have you ever worked in a corporation? Do you really think that Windows 8 UI was the fruit of years of careful design? What about Workday? > but it is bizarre that so many businesses seem to be discarding battle tested UXes for chatbots Not really. If the chatbot is smart enough then chatbot is the more natu…

> I've seen people who prefer to say "hey siri set alarm clock for 10 AM" rather than use the UI.

It's quicker that way. Other things, such as zooming in to an image, are quicker with a GUI. Bladerunner makes clear how the voice UI is poor for this compared to a GUI.

Re: Apps SDK

#196

Post by rco8786 »

rushingcreek wrote: post #6

I think this is very interesting, but it is reminiscent of what we built with Phind 2 where the answer could include dynamic, pre-built widgets. The problem with this approach is precisely that these apps/widgets have hard-coded input and output schema. They can work quite well when the user asks something within the widget's capabilities, but the brittleness of this approach starts showing quickly in real-world use.…

That’s solved by MCP though. You can update your MCP’s servers schema dynamically without ever having to touch the app itself but the app will be aware of the new schema.

Re: Apps SDK

#197

Post by throwacct »

notatoad wrote: post #137
fidotron wrote: post #50

This conception makes sense iff you believe in ChatGPT as the universal user interface of the future. If anything the agentic wave is showing that the chat interfaces are better off hidden behind stricter user interface paradigms.

i can't imagine that users will be interested in asking chatGPT to ask zillow things, or ask chatGPT to ask canva to do things. that's a clunky interface. i can see users asking chatGPT to look up house prices, or to generate graphics, but they're not going to ask for zillow or canva specifically. and if the apps are trusting ChatGPT to send them users based on those sort of queries, it's only a matter of time before…

This x1000. Are businesses short sided enough to help create and develop another wallet garden just like "Google" and "Amazon" are right now? Time will tell but I think businesses want to own their sales funnel, not just give the user a way to avoid interacting with them.

Re: Apps SDK

#198

Post by alganet »

anal_reactor wrote: post #151
munk-a wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have yet to see a chat agent deployed that is more popular than tailored browsing methods. The most charitable way to explain this is that the tailored browsing methods already in place are the results of years of careful design and battle testing and that the chat agent is providing most of the value that a tailored browsing method would but without any of the investment required to bring a traditional UX to fruit…

> the tailored browsing methods already in place are the results of years of careful design and battle testing Have you ever worked in a corporation? Do you really think that Windows 8 UI was the fruit of years of careful design? What about Workday? > but it is bizarre that so many businesses seem to be discarding battle tested UXes for chatbots Not really. If the chatbot is smart enough then chatbot is the more natu…

> Of course the problem is that most chatbots aren't smart. But this is a purely technical problem that can be solved within foreseeable future.

Ah yes, it's just a small detail. Don't worry about it.

Re: Apps SDK

#199

Post by chongli »

ryandrake wrote: post #167
peab wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agree. Thing is, for those who paid attention to the last chatBot hype cycle, we already knew this. Look at how Google Assistant was portrayed back in 2016. People thought you'd be buying starbucks via the chat. Turns out the starbucks app has a better UX

Yea, I don't want to sit there at my computer, which can handle lots of different input methods, like keyboard, mouse, clicking, dragging, or my phone which can handle gestures, pinching, swiping... and try to articulate what I need it to do in English language conversation. This is actually a step backwards in human-computer interaction. To use an extreme example: imagine instead of a knob on my stereo for volume, I…

It's funny, because the chat bot designers seem to be continually attempting to recreate the voice computer interface from Star Trek: TNG. Yet if you watch the show carefully, the vast majority of the work done by all the Enterprise crew is done via touchscreens, not voice.

The only reason for the voice interface is to facilitate the production of a TV show. By having the characters speak their requests aloud to the computer as voice commands, the show bypasses all the issues of building visual effects for computer screens and making those visuals easy to interpret for the audience, regardless of their computing background. However, whenever the show wants to demonstrate a character with a high level of computer mastery, the demonstration is almost always via the touchscreen (this is most often seen with Data), not the voice interface.

TNG had issues like this figured out years ago, yet people continue to fall into the same trap because they repeatedly fail to learn the lessons the show had to teach.

Re: Apps SDK

#200

Post by rushingcreek »

rco8786 wrote: post #196
rushingcreek wrote: post #6

I think this is very interesting, but it is reminiscent of what we built with Phind 2 where the answer could include dynamic, pre-built widgets. The problem with this approach is precisely that these apps/widgets have hard-coded input and output schema. They can work quite well when the user asks something within the widget's capabilities, but the brittleness of this approach starts showing quickly in real-world use.…

That’s solved by MCP though. You can update your MCP’s servers schema dynamically without ever having to touch the app itself but the app will be aware of the new schema.

I'm not saying that the schema can't change from time to time, I'm saying that having any fixed schema at request time is not an ideal user experience because it may not be clear what is supported and what is not supported. From first principles, it's much better if the app schema can be created dynamically at request time so we can guarantee that we can fully serve the user's request exactly as they asked it.
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