Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 175 posts

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#81

Post by tomg »

hk__2 wrote: post #75
tomg wrote: post #31

Have an ad network buy products on my behalf? No thanks.

If the products match what you need or want, why would you refuse that?

The PA does not work for you, it works for FB. It has only FB's interest's in mind. You are not it's employer as you do not pay for it.

It's not in FB's interest to make honest recommendations. If Bob's Burgers is paying $1000/mo in FB ads, but Karen's Burgers keeps being recommended as the "good burger joint", how long before Bob stops buying ads? And why would Karen start buying FB ads since she's getting exposure for free?

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#82

Post by shostack »

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 distance, parking, attire, etc. While their AI/human trainers might be able to handle this level of complexity eventually, the actual phrasing of the question would likely be much more complex than "can you make me a dinner reservation." Doubly so for something like a vacation which has a lot more moving parts.

But I respect that I'm reflecting on a sample size of one...me. So I'd love to hear from others with more insight into the data around this. Are people actually searching with such generalized queries when it comes to tasks like this? Do most people not sweat the details of things like which restaurant to eat at, or where to spend hundreds or potentially thousands of dollars on a vacation?

Not trolling, serious question.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#83

Post by visarga »

> Today’s artificial intelligence, you see, requires at least some human training. If you want a system to automatically identify cats in YouTube videos, humans must first show it what a cat looks like.

The article is written by someone who doesn't know what he's talking about. The "cat videos" story from a while back ostensibly used Unsupervised training, that means, the Google team didn't have to tell the deep neural net what a cat looks like, it discovered the concept of "catness" by itself (there was a "cat" neuron in the top layer).

I'm wondering who writes all the AI articles I read every day. Such a detail was crucial for the cat story. It's easy to make a cat/non-cat classifier with a few thousand labeled images for each category. The hard thing to do is to take raw photos with no labels and still discover cats.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#84

Post by bhouston »

visarga wrote: post #83

> Today’s artificial intelligence, you see, requires at least some human training. If you want a system to automatically identify cats in YouTube videos, humans must first show it what a cat looks like. The article is written by someone who doesn't know what he's talking about. The "cat videos" story from a while back ostensibly used Unsupervised training, that means, the Google team didn't have to tell the deep neur…

It may have used tags on YouTube videos to identify which had cats. Not sure if that counts as completely unsupervised.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#85

Post by [deleted] »

viksit wrote: post #77

Thought: There's going to be a need for a very open platform that can do things like this, which will offset many of the worries that have been echoed on this thread today about one or a few corporations having access to everything. To use an analogy - if messaging apps are the new "browsers", then content accessed through them are the new "websites". What FB is doing is the equivalent of AOL in the 90s. What then, i…

[deleted]

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#86

Post by tsurantino »

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 query. Do people do that though?

I think the idea with a conversational interface is that it's succinct and on-demand. You receive the most relevant information directly in as simple of an interface as possible (arguably).

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#87

Post by corkill »

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…

"Can you make me dinner reservations?" would lead to a response like "Any preferences on the type of food and location?"

Over time they learn your preferences so they don't need to ask location for example next time.

Your right though people aren't likely asking such generic things in the first place, but rather something like "can you book me a great mexican place for dinner tonight, 2 people, has parking and casual attire somewhere with great yelp reviews"

Then they send you the best options they found (and the benefits of each one and price range) then you reply back option 1 and they book it.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#88

Post by StavrosK »

tomg wrote: post #81
hk__2 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the products match what you need or want, why would you refuse that?

The PA does not work for you, it works for FB. It has only FB's interest's in mind. You are not it's employer as you do not pay for it. It's not in FB's interest to make honest recommendations. If Bob's Burgers is paying $1000/mo in FB ads, but Karen's Burgers keeps being recommended as the "good burger joint", how long before Bob stops buying ads? And why would Karen start buying FB ads since she's getting exposure…

Because Facebook will then be the "inaccurate recommendation engine" and users won't pay any attention. I don't think it's that surprising that Facebook has an incentive to work well.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#89

Post by volaski »

viksit wrote: post #36

Haha, it looks eerily similar to Myra, the cross platform assistant I launched last week [1]. Including the name. Interesting times. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10060074 .

It sounds ridiculous to hear someone claim originality for an idea as generic AND faddish as text based assistant. If you seriously didn't know of apps like these existed before you launched (text based assistants with a human name), just google them up and you'll find tons launched since last year. I'm sure even YC has at least 3 companies that launched with this model.

Re: M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger

#90

Post by TeMPOraL »

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…

> When I'm picking something as simple as a restaurant, I typically want options, I want to read reviews, I want to consider distance, parking, attire, etc.

For me, a lot of what you're doing here is the work that should be done by a machine. Considering "distance, parking, attire, etc." is basically what we have simplex method for.

But I agree the questions seem very vague in the context. To run such errands successfully, the program would have to know much more about your preferences than current iterations of personal assistant software do. And/or hold a dialog with you, asking for details and proposing options.

Post reply on HN