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Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns

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Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns

#31

Post by kelseyfrog »

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.

A lot of people don't get that the market isn't a reflection of reality. It is reality - the only reality. That's the point of market realism.

Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns

#32

Post by felideon »

grouchy wrote: post #16

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

I think there’s merit in a hybrid approach, and more people should do this instead of slapping a chatbot everywhere, but your approach seems completely backwards from a usability perspective. Chat interfaces (edit: and similarly, CLIs) are at complete odds with discoverability[1]. In your demo, I’m trying to understand the point of the chatbot when all it does is convert a button, with a pretty decent CTA (“try sending us an email”), to a sentence in the first person? Why not a large “Compose Email” button? And if the chatbot can do more than one thing, how many of these potential “conversation starters” are you going to display?

What we need are designers who can help establish a foundational structure (information architecture) that leads to discoverable and simple UIs to nudge users in the right direction. Once users are at a place where they know what’s possible/available, then perhaps you can allow some fuzziness to help them cross the line to accomplish their task.

[1] https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/discove...

Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns

#33

Post by mystified5016 »

savanaly wrote: post #29
lsy wrote: post #25

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…

>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 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?

It reduces costs in the short term by firing all your customer support staff.

There is no long term in modern capitalism.

Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns

#34

Post by ozim »

all2 wrote: post #22

At a previous employer, I pitched tooltips as a potential way to surface AI interactions. I may still try it in an app I'm building. Docs -> RAG -> tooltips / onboarding sounds like it might work out ok.

Tooltips popping up for user feels like Clippy ;)

Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns

#35

Post by ninkendo »

savanaly wrote: post #29
lsy wrote: post #25

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…

>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 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?

That’s true in theory, I’m not sure about in practice. It could also be the case that a company says “human support is too expensive, throw in a chat bot to stem the tide”, see the number of calls drop, and call it a success. Never mind how many potential customers are lost (which actually requires competence to measure.)

Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns

#36

Post by sumeno »

It's very funny that this article that I mostly agree with has a chat bot in the bottom left corner that wants to discuss why chatbots are a bad solution

> It seems we're exploring why Jakob and I think chatbots might not always be the best solution! I see you've already been introduced, so let's dive deeper. Given our discussion on chatbots, what are your thoughts on the hybrid interfaces Jakob mentions towards the end of the article?

Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns

#37

Post by allemagne »

> Expecting our users to write a pitch-perfect prompt is like asking the average person to control their computer via the command line.

I admit I lean more on the "command line pilled" side of things, but to me this analogy implies that the chat interface, specifically prompting, are fundamentally intractable as an interface to AI.

Every operating system is necessarily built on compiled/interpreted text, and therefore has the ability to "fall back" to a command line interface to have finer grained control over basically everything.

Even mobile devices, completely 100% GUI, where native terminal emulators are unusable (except for the truly dedicated) are wired this way as soon as you scratch the surface of app development.

I think this analogy has to hold for AI, no? The entire current ChatGPT renaissance is built on the concept of prompting. There are no examples of breaking the mold in this article that don't rely on an underlying "chat" paradigm. Voice agents? Just turning a vocal interface (something predating GPT3) into... prompts for an LLM. Gemini summarizing documents? A button that has a prompt pre-written and ready to go.

Carrying forward the analogy, there will be a "GUI" where your AI agent will provide a streamlined experience that is extremely powerful in matching your context most of the time, but then if you want to tweak anything yourself one of the most powerful ways to do this is to get down into the "command line" of what chat interfaces control what or how these underlying prompts are structured/ordered.

Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns

#39

Post by kevmo314 »

The hate against chat interfaces is missing the real opportunity here. Consider the calendar interface the article describes: that we've managed to actually make it function within chat means we've roughly automated pretty much everything except the human interaction that's left. That's pretty amazing!

The article goes on to claim that hybrid UI's are the future. I disagree, the future is figuring out how to automate prompt generation so I don't need to even interface with the UI to begin with. Hybrid UI's are a patch over something that can't be efficiently automated yet.

The opportunity is the "yet".

Re: Chatbots-Are-AI-Antipatterns

#40

Post by rsynnott »

savanaly wrote: post #29
lsy wrote: post #25

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…

>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 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?

That's a _long-term_ problem, though. This would be far from the first time that companies prioritise short-term savings over long-term revenue due to perverse incentives.

No-one's getting promoted for "declined to ruin our customer support, thus avoiding loss of X recurring revenue per year over the next decade", but they might get promoted for "reduced cost of customer support by X with AI!!!"

In the long run the invisible hand will dole out rewards and punishments here, but thinking about the short term is just _easier_ than thinking about the long term.

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