Chatbots need a personality • Hacker News Board

Re: Chatbots need a personality

#31

Post by vadimberman » Wed, Nov 29, 2017, 6:08 AM UTC

Steeeve wrote: post #26

Chatbots are like IVR systems and phone trees. It's a neat idea, but they are a pain in the ass, nobody likes them, and their benefit over a human is marginal in a best case scenario.

Unfortunately, the IVRs persisted. It's going to be more complex for chatbots though because they will have to compete with other automated solutions that are proven to work to some degree, including phone trees.

Re: Chatbots need a personality

#32

Post by adrianN » Wed, Nov 29, 2017, 7:16 AM UTC

rightos wrote: post #30

cirgue wrote: post #25

We do not yet have chatbots. What we do have are publicly-facing undocumented nondeterministic command line interfaces which expect the user to guess the right commands. This interface further insults the user by pretending to be a person.

I've never seen one of these (well, minus the really stupid AIM and Skype spam bots), where do you find them? Are they on the sites that constantly nag you to click through to live support on every page? The few of those that I have used all seemed to be real humans.

Some companies replace their HR websites with chatbot interfaces.

Re: Chatbots need a personality

#33

Post by olavgg » Wed, Nov 29, 2017, 9:03 AM UTC

cirgue wrote: post #25

We do not yet have chatbots. What we do have are publicly-facing undocumented nondeterministic command line interfaces which expect the user to guess the right commands. This interface further insults the user by pretending to be a person.

I know that many on HN really dislike chatbots because they don't understand their super special case. As a chatbot maker, with several different chatbots that are live, I can tell you that I've seen the data. Which concludes that chat bots do work, and our clients agree. Chatbots will be everywhere the coming years.

Some of our clients have over 5000 intents, which cover quite a lot of the business, still it is important to let the chatbot be humble and connect the user to a human when it is too difficult to help.

Re: Chatbots need a personality

#34

Post by smnrchrds » Wed, Nov 29, 2017, 9:47 AM UTC

cirgue wrote: post #25

We do not yet have chatbots. What we do have are publicly-facing undocumented nondeterministic command line interfaces which expect the user to guess the right commands. This interface further insults the user by pretending to be a person.

I thought chatbots were the worst form of customer service, but then I had to deal with WES. The only option they provided for customer service was a question form. I clearly laid out the three questions I had and submitted the form. Three days later, they sent a reply that didn't answer any of my questions. It seemed to be copied off of the first help page that came up if you searched the keywords of my first question. Their response was from a noreply@ address. So effectively, they took a useless chatbot, added a half-week delay, removed any possibility of interaction with it, and presented it as their only support option. I hate that company with every fiber of my being.

Re: Chatbots need a personality

#35

Post by hchasestevens » Wed, Nov 29, 2017, 9:52 AM UTC

olavgg wrote: post #33

cirgue wrote: post #25

We do not yet have chatbots. What we do have are publicly-facing undocumented nondeterministic command line interfaces which expect the user to guess the right commands. This interface further insults the user by pretending to be a person.

I know that many on HN really dislike chatbots because they don't understand their super special case. As a chatbot maker, with several different chatbots that are live, I can tell you that I've seen the data. Which concludes that chat bots do work, and our clients agree. Chatbots will be everywhere the coming years. Some of our clients have over 5000 intents, which cover quite a lot of the business, still it is impo…

Could you expand a bit on the niche you see them filling? I think some of the negative perception of chatbots recently owes a lot to exactly what the OP said - gross overapplication in areas with very marginal benefit, if any, to user experience (e.g. why do I want to interact with your service though an opaque natural language interface versus less ambiguous search controls/interface?).

Re: Chatbots need a personality

#36

Post by bschwindHN » Wed, Nov 29, 2017, 9:53 AM UTC

olavgg wrote: post #33

cirgue wrote: post #25

We do not yet have chatbots. What we do have are publicly-facing undocumented nondeterministic command line interfaces which expect the user to guess the right commands. This interface further insults the user by pretending to be a person.

I know that many on HN really dislike chatbots because they don't understand their super special case. As a chatbot maker, with several different chatbots that are live, I can tell you that I've seen the data. Which concludes that chat bots do work, and our clients agree. Chatbots will be everywhere the coming years. Some of our clients have over 5000 intents, which cover quite a lot of the business, still it is impo…

Can you give some examples of the "data" and some concrete examples of chatbots "working"? What is this super special case you're talking about?

Re: Chatbots need a personality

#37

Post by tikwidd » Wed, Nov 29, 2017, 10:34 AM UTC

olavgg wrote: post #33

cirgue wrote: post #25

We do not yet have chatbots. What we do have are publicly-facing undocumented nondeterministic command line interfaces which expect the user to guess the right commands. This interface further insults the user by pretending to be a person.

I know that many on HN really dislike chatbots because they don't understand their super special case. As a chatbot maker, with several different chatbots that are live, I can tell you that I've seen the data. Which concludes that chat bots do work, and our clients agree. Chatbots will be everywhere the coming years. Some of our clients have over 5000 intents, which cover quite a lot of the business, still it is impo…

Got any pointers on getting into your line of business (e.g. as a business consultant)? What are the big problems you deal with in this space? I really see chatbots as disruptive for customer service, especially for power users, if implemented in the right way.

Re: Chatbots need a personality

#38

Post by Steer » Wed, Nov 29, 2017, 10:42 AM UTC

rightos wrote: post #30

cirgue wrote: post #25

We do not yet have chatbots. What we do have are publicly-facing undocumented nondeterministic command line interfaces which expect the user to guess the right commands. This interface further insults the user by pretending to be a person.

I've never seen one of these (well, minus the really stupid AIM and Skype spam bots), where do you find them? Are they on the sites that constantly nag you to click through to live support on every page? The few of those that I have used all seemed to be real humans.

https://shopbot.ebay.com/

(you need to log in to try it out)

Re: Chatbots need a personality

#39

Post by stuartlangridge » Wed, Nov 29, 2017, 10:47 AM UTC

cirgue wrote: post #25

We do not yet have chatbots. What we do have are publicly-facing undocumented nondeterministic command line interfaces which expect the user to guess the right commands. This interface further insults the user by pretending to be a person.

Yup. Shilling my own work here, https://kryogenix.org/code/the-ux-of-text-fusion/ is a talk which explicitly calls that out -- we can do better than this, and whoever works out how to deliver chat interfaces where you can't imagine the underlying nodejs commands will have people love their stuff. (And the answer certainly isn't "pretend to be a human", either, as you know; be a bot, be known to be a bot, and have people relate to you anyway. But now I'm just reiterating the talk.)

Re: Chatbots need a personality

#40

Post by wiz21c » Wed, Nov 29, 2017, 11:21 AM UTC

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #20

The problem is not that your chatbot needs a personality. The problem is you implemented chatbot in the first place so you don't have to directly deal with customers.

spot on! I remember Bezos showing an ugly table in his office, saying "we want the customers to know we spend money on what counts for them".

I wonder how one could justify the bots...