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Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns

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Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns

#11

Post by snackbroken »

amelius wrote: post #2

> You want to claim a return in an online shop. Which customer service experience do you prefer? An agent (human/AI/hybrid) via chat or phone vs. a well-designed self-service GUI? I asked approximately 20 colleagues and friends across age groups. 18 mentioned they would choose the visual UI. These friends probably never had to deal with Google support.

In my experience dealing with Google support across ads, workspace and cloud, the self-service GUI has been preferable because the self-service GUI typically provides zero utility.

Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns

#12

Post by mrweasel »

scrollaway wrote: post #7
amelius wrote: post #2

> You want to claim a return in an online shop. Which customer service experience do you prefer? An agent (human/AI/hybrid) via chat or phone vs. a well-designed self-service GUI? I asked approximately 20 colleagues and friends across age groups. 18 mentioned they would choose the visual UI. These friends probably never had to deal with Google support.

A well designed chatbot is better than a well designed UI for this use case. A “well designed chatbot” could absolutely do something as common as claiming a return in an online shop. We gotta compare apples to apples.

The issue, as I see it, is that most of these companies do not have well designed system to begin with. They then attempt to slap on a AI chatbot to deal with their total lack of a coherent systems design.

If these companies had good design, good processes and clearly defined processes, they wouldn't need a chatbot. They could add one to make querying better/easier.

Let's say you go to your ISPs website, because your internet connection is down. Ideally their frontpage would have a direct link to "operational status", but let's be real, it doesn't. You eventually find the status page, it doesn't mention anything about outages. So you call or ask the chatbot, in neither case will you get an answer, because neither the person on the phone, nor the bot has ANY clue that you're internet connection is down. You then switch to a different ISP, who has procedures and systems in place and a link to their status page and they update it before you even think about contacting them. No amount of AI chatbots will fix the problems for the first ISP, because their internal systems suck and can not provide the bot with the required information anyway.

Most interactions with ChatBots and customer service could, and should, be solved with better processes and better systems. We're not even at the point where we can compare the well designed UI to the well designed chatbot, because most businesses can't provide the data and processes for either.

Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns

#13

Post by kelseyfrog »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #10
AJ007 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A well-designed self-service GUI" doesn't exist once the company is optimizing for the opposite of what your are trying to do (cancel subscription, return item, file insurance claim, etc.)

Then use the regulatory pen and make them. Like good grief I know we're insanely politically polarized at the moment but I think every single person in America except for like 200 executives would get behind a law that says "cancelling a subscription must be exactly as easily done as getting one."

The market has already decided. If it was important for people, companies that offered easier cancellation would out-compete with those who don't.

Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns

#14

Post by ToucanLoucan »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #13
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then use the regulatory pen and make them. Like good grief I know we're insanely politically polarized at the moment but I think every single person in America except for like 200 executives would get behind a law that says "cancelling a subscription must be exactly as easily done as getting one."

The market has already decided. If it was important for people, companies that offered easier cancellation would out-compete with those who don't.

Fuck the market. If that is indeed what it decided, it’s wrong. Markets are wrong all the time. I borrow a line from Rick and Morty, the boos of the market mean nothing to me. I've seen what makes it cheer.

There is no reason at all to require a market to give us permission to make a better society.

Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns

#15

Post by inetknght »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #13
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then use the regulatory pen and make them. Like good grief I know we're insanely politically polarized at the moment but I think every single person in America except for like 200 executives would get behind a law that says "cancelling a subscription must be exactly as easily done as getting one."

The market has already decided. If it was important for people, companies that offered easier cancellation would out-compete with those who don't.

> If it was important for people, companies that offered easier cancellation would out-compete with those who don't.

That's not how the free market works. The free market works companies prioritizing profits over people. So what's "important" for people is only visible in the market when it's also profitable.

Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns

#16

Post by grouchy »

A ui is worth 1,000 tokens (at least).

I agree that chat isn't the end interface for AI powered applications.

That said the ability to describe desires in "fuzzy" ways is a usability value unlock.

My take is that natural language should be use surface functionality, translate between structures, and generate personalize defaults.

Its a hybrid approach and why my co-founder and I started https://tambo.co

Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns

#17

Post by ozim »

Chatbots are nice for fooling around and that’s what most people use them currently, like I want chatbot to entertain me chat interface is perfect.

GUI is great when I have to do something and I need guidance to do it correctly because in GUI I can see what is expected from me in a glance, I can see required parts and parts I can gloss over.

Let’s not forget about CLI which is perfect when I exactly know what I want to do and I do know how to do it in least amount of motions.

People who think chatbots are great think that natural language can be efficient like CLI but it is not.

Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns

#18

Post by yetihehe »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #14
kelseyfrog wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market has already decided. If it was important for people, companies that offered easier cancellation would out-compete with those who don't.

Fuck the market. If that is indeed what it decided, it’s wrong. Markets are wrong all the time. I borrow a line from Rick and Morty, the boos of the market mean nothing to me. I've seen what makes it cheer. There is no reason at all to require a market to give us permission to make a better society.

> There is no reason at all to require a market to give us permission to make a better society.

Better societies but without good market couldn't compete technologically and militarily, so ultimately they lost. Borrowing a line from Rick and Morty: that was always allowed.

Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns

#19

Post by mikepurvis »

lolinder wrote: post #9

Chat is a terrible primary interface for working with people, too. It's fine for cursory stuff, but it doesn't suffice for anything that requires high information throughput. You can use it to follow up on a conversation that you had in person or in a video call, you can use it to check in about something that was fleshed out on a real doc, and you can occasionally use it to brainstorm a quick solution to something.…

I suppose those higher fidelity things are why it's so exhausting trying to voice-command a bot like Siri/Cortana/GA— at the end of the day, they're just doing a straight transcription into text, and then operating on that text.

So rather than the machine benefitting from that extra info, it's actually just making it worse by introducing another link in the telephone chain; hence users getting exasperated and giving up to go back to conventional HMI paradigms of keyboard/mouse/touch.

Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns

#20

Post by sorcerer-mar »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #13
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then use the regulatory pen and make them. Like good grief I know we're insanely politically polarized at the moment but I think every single person in America except for like 200 executives would get behind a law that says "cancelling a subscription must be exactly as easily done as getting one."

The market has already decided. If it was important for people, companies that offered easier cancellation would out-compete with those who don't.

No it hasn't. Even the most zealous believers in the free market know this isn't true (assuming they're not wildly naive, too).

Cancellation policies fall into two well-known failure modes of markets to actually indicate what they want: information asymmetry and inconsistencies in time horizons between counterparties.

You have no ability whatsoever to assign market preference to this without at the very least ensuring consumers are actually aware at time of purchase of the friction they'd face at time of cancellation AND the chances they'll want to cancel.

That's all leaving aside that a person's preference for Product A over Product B obviously does not mean that a person prefers every dimension of Product A over Product B.

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