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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

#161

Post by vidarh »

dbot wrote: post #140
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 completely. I saw a similar issue with sites like Operator, Magic, etc. The requests were very vague, making me wonder, "Am I spending too much time thinking about where to order a pizza from?" And if I know which pizza shop I want to order from, what's the benefit of adding an intermediary?

I use an intermediary for all my takeaway. Basically in the UK there are now two big intermediary sites. On one hand they are annoying to many of these businesses as they obviously take a cut including of a lot of repeat business. On the other hand, I receive an e-mail around the time I start getting hungry on Friday afternoon giving me a link to click if I want to re-order from my favourite Chinese, that lets me choose to pre-fill the order with what I usually order. It makes it a lot easier than hunting around for the phone number or their website and placing an order manually.

That's why I use an intermediary. If that intermediary was being able to just say "I'd like my usual pizza/Chinese/burrito, but instead of X I'd like Y" and just have it confirm what it was about to do, I'd love that.

If want something new, or I'm somewhere I haven't been before, that's different - then I'll be spending time looking at the menu etc.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#162

Post by vidarh »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #92
mbesto wrote: post #14

The first thing I see when someone asks "find me a good burger place in Chicago" is "how can companies game this through official ($) or artificial (spam) means?"

Yup. That's why believe that any "personal assistant" technology run by a commercial third party will be shit - it'll be used to try and sell you stuff, not recommend actually good options.

Not necessarily because there will often be options that are comparable, where it boils down to a toss of a coin which one to recommend. Done well, such a service will give you great results, but they'll mine their data and see that when people ask for "best X in Y" results A and B give equal satisfaction, and ask both A and B to bid for how much to prefer one over the other when they rank equally.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#163

Post by deepGem »

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…

Very valid and am glad am not the only one who thinks on similar lines. Again, no intention of trolling but I'll be happy if an AI system understood a narrow question "I want to eat at the nearest available Lebanese restaurant" and gave some options.

Bassed on my understanding of semantics and Knowledge engineering, this is doable.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#165

Post by murbard2 »

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…

Exact same feeling, but I don't know how representative that is of the general population. I don't use tripadvisor because I can't afford to talk interactively to a travel agent, I prefer to use tripadvisor.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#166

Post by pbreit »

Shish2k wrote: post #158
pbreit wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I would; though for me going out to eat with friends is more about the "going out with friends" - where we end up is a fairly minor detail

For me, it's entirely "going out with friends". But that doesn't mean I'm going to leave restaurant selection to a bot. For many, people, selecting a restaurant is fun. And I bet you and your friends don't just go to some random place.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#167

Post by nashequilibrium »

nashequilibrium wrote: post #51
knn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have mixed feelings about this like I'm sure many do. Greater convenience, but less and less privacy.. Our Fb/goog/nsa overlords know what we eat, where we shit, all of our conversations and relationships. What a scary world we live in.

That is because you remember the world of privacy, the generation that has grown up with facebook do not.

Someones feelings got hurt.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#168

Post by chillacy »

foldr wrote: post #135
chillacy wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a semantic argument more than anything. A small furry mammal with four legs, a long tail, whiskers, and pointy ears is what we'd call a cat, no matter what word you assign to it.

It's not a merely semantic argument. Google's system did not learn that the sound 'cat' is associated with that particular concept. You need some kind of supervised learner to make that association.

My point is that you can still identify that it's a separate concept, even if you don't know what to call it. Even simple unsupervised learners (clustering) can do this.

It reminds me of a story Feynman told: https://haveabit.com/feynman/knowing-the-name-of-something/

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#169

Post by chillacy »

hiddencost wrote: post #139
chillacy wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a semantic argument more than anything. A small furry mammal with four legs, a long tail, whiskers, and pointy ears is what we'd call a cat, no matter what word you assign to it.

The thing is the network didn't learn the features you described. Take a simple example : neural networks confuse leopard print couches with leopards. Why? Because the network learns discriminative features based on the data it has. Theres not shared concept saying "oh this is an animal with for legs".

Okay, so then ANNs can learn the "concept" of leopard print. I still think that's interesting.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#170

Post by julien_c »

fizzbatter wrote: post #111

For those of you more familiar with NLP, are there some "dumb but effective" techniques to approach https://wit.ai/ like functionality? (Libraries would be great, but i doubt there are any, for Golang) I know NLP is difficult, and frankly i hate doing it, but i want an expressive language to "speak" to an internal process i use (a bot), and NLP seems like the only solution. I imagine a rule based approach is best (fo…

You could have a look at AIML and something like Program AB.
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