91–100 of 175 posts
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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.
Grocery stores have been tracking your food purchases since the 1990s at least. That's why they have those shopping cards.
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?"
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 que…
It's much faster for me to hit a few filters on things like prices and locations. Distance is just a simple ".2 miles away" text on the box, which shows an image and snippets of reviews. People are more and more visual.
I don't think a conversational interface _replaces_ a visual one.
It's that the initial query can be complicated, and it allows you to get into that 5-6 tier deep part of your search that you would have gotten to by using 5 filters and scrolling through 50 results.
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The odd thing about the example of Messenger is that as two separate apps they seem highly coupled. AFAIK you need to sign in with a valid Facebook account to use Messenger, so you're already very likely to have the normal app at that point as I can't imagine anyone who would trust FB for messaging but not everything else. On the flip side, barring a few possible holdouts of people worried about app permissions, I do…
I "actively" have a FB account by most measures, and I don't use Facebook Messenger. I only access their mobile site through Tinfoil for Facebook, and the messaging works just fine in that.
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…
To make this useful, perhaps you could set up some kind of saved preferences. For example, let's say I'm setting up a business trip. I like hotels that are within 1 mile of the conference center, and they have to be at least 3.5 stars and up. Provided they meet those criteria, the cheapest option is acceptable. I also need a plane flight that has no more than 1 layover, and that layover cannot last longer than 90 minutes or less than 45. I am willing to pay up to 25% more for a nonstop flight. The flight must arrive the day before the conference, but it can depart on the day the conference ends.
Setting up those criteria for each individual search would be irritating and a waste of effort, as they don't change from trip to trip. However, if I could say something like "Let me tell you about my criteria for choosing a location for a business trip.", and then go into detail once, that might work. Hell, I'd be perfectly happy setting up the details on a website. Then, the next time I said "I need to set up a business trip", all it would need to ask is the conference center and the dates of the conference.
Until it supports these kinds of detailed requests, it doesn't make sense to use these kinds of services in the way they market them - you'll end up using it in the same limited way you could use Siri. For example, if you've already decided what restaurant you want, you might say "Make me a reservation at Dorsia for 7:30 this evening" instead of the examples you provided.
Just my 2 cents.
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Who knows, they might move toward a mega-app. Consider for a moment, though, that currently we're talking about Facebook Messenger, which is a huge, and fairly recent example of the exact opposite thing happening (it was part of Facebook, but pulled out into a separate app.)
The odd thing about the example of Messenger is that as two separate apps they seem highly coupled. AFAIK you need to sign in with a valid Facebook account to use Messenger, so you're already very likely to have the normal app at that point as I can't imagine anyone who would trust FB for messaging but not everything else. On the flip side, barring a few possible holdouts of people worried about app permissions, I do…
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…
I'm thinking "get me a dinner reservation next sunday with patio seating for 5 in the east village at an upscale tapas place".
As I mentioned elsewhere on this page, my thesis around conversational interfaces isn't that they start off broad and use more Q/A to refine your query. That's slow, and people are visual.
Rather, their power lies in the user being able to express a complex query in one go - which is equivalent to tapping 10-15 filters and scrolling through results - ideally combining data from sources that aren't limited to one service.
You can now execute related actions to your result set through the same interface, without needing to shift to a single purpose app that would allow you to take the action, but for most purposes, won't keep your context.
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…
Which is why I'll now plug the company I work for, MindMeld, since (i) we do that better than Wit and (ii) we are not feeding our data to an advertising team.
I want Amazon to build a personal digital assistant, and then integrate it into filters. Today I was searching for socks, I care about 3 things, the size, the color, and whether they go up to the ankle or not. It seems like information they probably have (or a well trained net could figure out), so it would be nice if it was offered as a filter. A few weeks ago I was trying to find toys for my son. I was most interes…
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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…