21–30 of 61 posts
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.
I may still try it in an app I'm building.
Docs -> RAG -> tooltips / onboarding sounds like it might work out ok.
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
LLMs handle the query understanding part, but it is still up to the backend developer to implement the functionality to fulfill the various possible requests. And the opaque nature of the interface gives the user no clue as to what requests are supported. We all experienced this problem with smart speakers, with their ever-changing features, and resigned to using an increasingly limited set of features.
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.…
The chat/voice interface is like Skinner's Box: we keep "using" because we don't know what will work and what won't, and when something works it seems magical. And it keeps being pushed on customers because it's beneficial for corporations: customers will fruitlessly navigate chat support rather than realizing they should give up and call, businesses will invest in products with open-ended interfaces because they can convince themselves it's flexible enough for their needs.
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
Ctl-Shift-P does the job where available. Not entirely sure how AI makes it any better.
> 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.
When I was 14 I went to live alone in a motel room in Vermont (long story). I had little money left for food, and one weekend had to go without food at all. But I had a bag of sugar, so I reasoned that I could live on sugar alone— it was calories after all. I discovered that eating nothing but granulated sugar for 48 hours made me quite sick. Watching companies force chat interfaces into everything is like watching a…
This reminds me of the time I had a horrible ant infestation in my dorm room shared kitchen (also had a horrible room mate infestation, but separate story). Lines of ants everywhere through the kitchen, but I had a 5lb bag of sugar. Went outside, found the ant hill right next to the building window and dumped the bag of sugar on the hill. Half of it was gone in a day! The next day a little more, but there were NO mor…
The natural-language chat box (or voice command) is seductive as an interface because it elides the question of how somebody will use a product. It makes a product that uses it seem more potentially capable, because you can imagine asking it anything (we all remember the sense of possibility in the first Zork-style games). If the user was provided with an affordance to understand the range of capabilities of the prod…
Businesses tend to thrive when consumers choose to keep using them, not when they don't. How does users fruitlessly navigating chat support serve that end?
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.…
IDK, to me text has higher information density and throughput than a video meeting. Ever listened to a swagger file?
If you’re communicating purely technical information about a subject everyone is already aligned on, text is fine.
But the information density present in facial expressions, vocal inflection, body language, etc. is significant and much is lost without it.