Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation

It's an odd use case - we have used language for a millionish years or so and it makes sense that that's the easiest way for us to get at information/do things.

But at the same time it's faster for me to read than listen, but it's often slower to type than to speak. It's faster to hit one button in a familiar place to do some predetermined thing, but much slower when the location of that button changes/gets hidden under submenus/I'm not familiar with an app or website.

On Android I constantly use the search function of the settings menu and I feel like this will be the golden UX going forward - a side by side UX + NL interface. So I can ask "how do I add a photo" and from there I get taken to the right place and can continue to add multiple photos in one go following the same pattern.

Though I suppose the nicer alternative is just "add all the photos I took near the waterfall from today".

I recently had the best customer support experience I've ever had, and it was an AI chatbot, helping my in ways I would not expect from a first-line support human.

Recently I opened the chatbot window on the site of a supplier of electric vehicle chargers, and asked some obscure things about how I could access and modify the charger in a non-standard way. I explained I was doing some R&D testing of a novel way of using the chargers, and I would need to temporarily reconfigure the public unit we had already installed in an unusual, non-standard way, rewiring its network to intercept traffic via transparent proxy, make it behave a little differently than it normally does, and that I didn't have the credentials.

I was expecting the first-line person or bot on the chat to be unable to handle my non-standard request. What I was hoping for was this would start the process of getting me to someone who could help. I expected to take a few days or weeks to reach someone appropriate in the company, perhaps a sympathetic technician who could understand what I was trying to do.

To my amazement, in the first response it one-shotted a nearly complete answer to every part of my question, including the detailed and implied parts I'd left out for a later interaction. It figured out what I was doing and what that needed, told me exactly what to do and why, and showed me that it understood every aspect of my request. There were things in this I doubt anyone ever asked about before.

Because the answer so complete I didn't really need more. I asked it some things, e.g. about electrical safety, just to confirm my understanding of the one-shotted answer. In every reply, the chatbot was insightful, informative, helpful and correct, and I didn't need to explain things twice, or wait on hold, or be transferred to anyone else.

I don't know what service they were using, but whoever implemented it, hats off to them for using good technology and providing it with high quality data about the products they are supporting.

Honestly, if AI customer support calls or chats can be made that good consistently, that sounds great.

(That was a stark contrast to my awful expereinces with support at banks, where many humans made mistake after mistake, contradicted each other, and seemed to struggle to understand simple things. Particularly the one where a bank required me to fill out a form with basic company info, then it took 14 hours of phone calls and hold time until I got to the one person who understood straight away that the entries on the form were correct, had to be that way, and they could tick the "it's done" box. My execellent AI bot experience suggests a good one will always understand things like that on the first iteration, as if they are the best-trained and best-informed humans available. But other, worse AI bot experiences suggests the 14 hour calls would become infinitely long, never able to resolve the problem, leading to things like unnecessary account closures and locked funds needing a court to resolve.)