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.

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.

Well, one BIG difference with command line interfaces is that there's logic behind ("NLP") that guesses what the user wanted to do and matches it with the correct command (matching an input with an intent).

Heck, that's basically most of the value the bot frameworks I've tested provide (speech to text, some UI creation and a bit of domain framework being the rest).

And it's not a small amount of value, we currently have an SMS-based menu system, and people complain that autocorrect changes what they wanted to type in, that it doesn't recognize typos, etc. Only programmers and power users are comfortable with the rigidity of a command line.

I'd say that a well-designed chatbot IS better than a command-line interface because it combines the power of command line (combining commands) with not having to learn and master the commands (and being lenient towards typos and missing parameters and stuff like that).

I'm not a fan of chatbots (even though I work with them) but I do think there's a valid use case when public needs non-frequent interactions with a system (ie help desk or customer support or nonfrequent purchases), and they definitely always need a way to access a real 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.

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.)

agree with this cirgue. they shouldn't pretent it's bots or humans, just be honest and say some script is auto replying to sift out some nonsense and quick wins.

What would make a true 'chatbot'?

Once the word "bot" is used, I pretty much discount the entire experience. A bot cannot "be more effective than good documentation with good search functionality."

Messaging has potential as a channel, but "bots" are a misstep. Faking a personality makes it even worse. Pretending to understand the user is just utterly transparent.

Messaging is good at collecting data, prompting response, reminding people and triggering actions like calls or clicks. None of the strengths are bot-based.

I (fortunately) haven't had to interact with an online chatbot, but in the case of voice ones, shouting a few expletives usually gets me a real human. I wonder if the same thing works here.

It's not:

There's just a massive failure of leadership in tech companies (well, in general), so rather than deal with real challenges, they smother themselves in carbon-monoxide statistics -- things that don't set off alarms, but destroy the business through misoptimization.

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.

I think they are great, I can load them up in one window, keep working, respond when necessary, and get my problem solved. Much better than a phone call where I have to wait 30 minutes, and can't cut and paste.

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...

I've often found that Alexa doesn't even save me that trouble. It's useful for the useless things that I wouldn't do manually. The things that took a lot of time take even longer with Alexa (if they're supported at all), and the small things ... great, changing the lights now takes 3 seconds instead of 5 seconds, so I do it twice as often.

Voice is just a medium, what I really want is more powerful abstractions. Do more with fewer interactions.

I don't want to ask Alexa what movies are playing nearby, that's as good as the 1985 moviefone service. I want to know whether there are movies worth watching, and have Alexa check movies/times/ratings/weather/traffic/my calendar and tell me "Yes - X is certified Fresh and <friend> recommended it on Twitter recently. It's playing at Y theater for $Z, you can walk there in time for the 8:00PM show. Would you like me to buy a ticket?"... I don't want to buy an HDMI cable from Amazon, I want a sample of physical/digital retailers with prices/ETAs/ratings...

Voice, GUI, heck even CLI is fine.

And when it comes to smart homes, I expect learning and proactivity. If I follow GSW, don't make me ask if they're playing, then ask to turn on the TV, then change the channels, then adjust the volume... learn that I care, ask if I care now, and get the game on ASAP if the answer is "yes".

I agree, a lot of chatbot projects seem to be built because of the hype + the team also gets to dabble with some "AI/ML." I think there are very few conversational agents or chatbots today that people use regularly, and of those I honestly don't think many people enjoy using them.

Users are never happy with chatbots, but they can be happy with chat experiences if they never realize there's a bot behind the scenes.

That's a sick burn but I think it needs updating now that there isn't such a thing.