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M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

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Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#121

Post by pbreit »

tsurantino wrote: post #86
shostack wrote: post #82

My issue with these services is they always tout these use cases like: > "Can you make me dinner reservations?" or > "Can you help me plan my next vacation?" I'd really love to better understand who is actually asking those types of questions in such a vague fashion, and what their use case is. When I'm picking something as simple as a restaurant, I typically want options, I want to read reviews, I want to consider d…

The initial example is broad, but can't this just be extended with additional questions? For example, can you tell me about dinner options that cost less than $20 per person. What are other people saying? How far away is this? It's questionable whether each of these follow up questions is actually that complex. I think you are arguing that things get hard if a user tries to put that together in one single complex que…

If you look at Amazon Echo, the stuff that works is pretty specific:

Set timer for 5 minutes

Add eggs to shopping list

Play Clocks by Coldplay

Weather

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#122

Post by viksit »

shostack wrote: post #109
viksit wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Those are too broad. I'm thinking " get me a dinner reservation next sunday with patio seating for 5 in the east village at an upscale tapas place ". As I mentioned elsewhere on this page, my thesis around conversational interfaces isn't that they start off broad and use more Q/A to refine your query. That's slow, and people are visual. Rather, their power lies in the user being able to express a complex query…

Thanks for helping me get to the meat of what I was trying to communicate. It really is all about the interface and the efficiency. I have to wonder though at what point is adding all those filters more involved than checking a couple boxes and glancing at a map or some photos. I'm sure a lot of that depends on context (I can't do those things if I'm driving, but I can use voice recognition). The other thing I'm uncl…

> I have to wonder though at what point is adding all those filters more involved than checking a couple boxes and glancing at a map or some photos

_When the filters are across datasets and services that are hosted on different platforms, and there's no way one UI that allows you to access them._

Table timings are on OpenTable/Yelp, reviews are on Google/Yelp, traffic is on Google, rides are on Uber and Lyft, menus are on the web, there are recommendations you trust amongst your friends and blogs, and pictures on instagram - and you're on a messaging platform trying to coordinate with 4 other people.

At that point, whatever service helps you to narrow to 4 choices based on all of this data is a Godsend. It's about making decision taking easier.

> how such a recommendation engine can best present information about tradeoffs

That tradeoffs are still yours to dictate - you simply look at the results of your complex query and then use conversation/UI to refine. Faster than using 8 services to do this. Repeatedly.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#123

Post by choppaface »

shostack wrote: post #82

My issue with these services is they always tout these use cases like: > "Can you make me dinner reservations?" or > "Can you help me plan my next vacation?" I'd really love to better understand who is actually asking those types of questions in such a vague fashion, and what their use case is. When I'm picking something as simple as a restaurant, I typically want options, I want to read reviews, I want to consider d…

This is a great question, and probably the question that Facebook wants to answer by rolling out this experiment. It sounds like some (most?) of M's answers are provided by humans and/or highly-customized apps. This release could be more of a Wizard of Oz experiment so that they can drill down on use cases and create more effective affordances.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#124

Post by mbesto »

shostack wrote: post #82

My issue with these services is they always tout these use cases like: > "Can you make me dinner reservations?" or > "Can you help me plan my next vacation?" I'd really love to better understand who is actually asking those types of questions in such a vague fashion, and what their use case is. When I'm picking something as simple as a restaurant, I typically want options, I want to read reviews, I want to consider d…

The article on HN changed. The original one from Facebook directly made way more sense and didn't use such generic suggestions.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#125

Post by viksit »

pbreit wrote: post #119
viksit wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Those are too broad. I'm thinking " get me a dinner reservation next sunday with patio seating for 5 in the east village at an upscale tapas place ". As I mentioned elsewhere on this page, my thesis around conversational interfaces isn't that they start off broad and use more Q/A to refine your query. That's slow, and people are visual. Rather, their power lies in the user being able to express a complex query…

"get me a dinner reservation next sunday with patio seating for 5 in the east village at an upscale tapas place" Nope. I don't think anyone would ever leave it up to M (or whatever) to select the restaurant.

Agreed. But you could get 4 options to choose from.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#126

Post by golergka »

rebootthesystem wrote: post #117

User: "Hello M." M: "How may I help you?" User: "What are my options for deploying a Python/Django project and making sure it is setup for scalability from the start? Compare five hosting providers for me. No, I don't know what metrics I should look for. Please research these and let me know what they are when you deliver the report. I also need an objective evaluation of our project in order to determine the risks t…

But if it could answer this question well, it would mean that you would be out of a job pretty soon and wouldn't be casually dining in restaurants on your unemployment check anyway.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#128

Post by uptown »

piyush_soni wrote: post #96
Roodgorf wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The odd thing about the example of Messenger is that as two separate apps they seem highly coupled. AFAIK you need to sign in with a valid Facebook account to use Messenger, so you're already very likely to have the normal app at that point as I can't imagine anyone who would trust FB for messaging but not everything else. On the flip side, barring a few possible holdouts of people worried about app permissions, I do…

I, for example, one of those who is very active on FB both through Desktop and their Mobile App, but do not use their Messenger app since they separated it from the main app. I also don't intend to install it unless they add something amazing value added to its simple messaging. What is infuriating that they download all the messages on my phone even when I don't have messenger installed, but force me to install anot…

You can use Paper to access messages if you are willing to install Paper.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#129

Post by mildbow »

andyl wrote: post #118

What is the best alternative to Wit.ai, now that they have been consumed by Facebook??

Why do you want an alternative?[0]

Afaik, they haven't been shut down. It's actually even free now.

[0] not that it's a bad thing, but wondering it's more than just "facebook bought it". Funny as it is, I trust that companies will go on when facebook buys them as opposed to google or amazon.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#130

Post by unabst »

viksit wrote: post #97
shostack wrote: post #82

My issue with these services is they always tout these use cases like: > "Can you make me dinner reservations?" or > "Can you help me plan my next vacation?" I'd really love to better understand who is actually asking those types of questions in such a vague fashion, and what their use case is. When I'm picking something as simple as a restaurant, I typically want options, I want to read reviews, I want to consider d…

Agree. Those are too broad. I'm thinking " get me a dinner reservation next sunday with patio seating for 5 in the east village at an upscale tapas place ". As I mentioned elsewhere on this page, my thesis around conversational interfaces isn't that they start off broad and use more Q/A to refine your query. That's slow, and people are visual. Rather, their power lies in the user being able to express a complex query…

I think AI researchers and engineers tend to get too carried away with decision making, when the more valuable service is about communication of refined knowledge, which if I'm not mistaken is exactly your point. The problem has nothing to do with "how can a machine guess the right answer" but instead is all about "how can a machine refine all the options based on the intentions expressed thus far".

Anecdotally, if we'd ask a real person "where is a good place to eat" the chance we'd go there without more information is slim. And if we don't even trust people, trusting Siri will be a while.

What we're really doing with these questions is making our hunger known, and starting a conversation. We actually don't care that much about other people's thoughts, and we may not even have anything in mind yet as far as where to eat. We do care about how people feel if they are someone we care about, but the thinking part we love to do ourselves.

So to offer a service that "thinks" is rather misguided, and may even constitute a disservice. We already rejected the talking paperclip in 1996 [0]. It's failure wasn't it's intelligence, but in the value proposition itself. To have a paperclip presume to know better and to tell you what to do was not tempting. It's failure was it's existence.

Is it a glitch in the Matrix or is their pitch for Cortana identical?

> What is Cortana? Cortana is your clever new personal assistant.[1]

--

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant [1] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/getstarted-wha...

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