Chatbots are great if they assist me with quick actions, like viewing my order/shipping status, and when it's obvious that I'm "talking" to a bot. What gets annoying are chatbots that start with "how can I help you?" and attempt to use natural language processing on my reply to guesstimate a response. More often than not I end up frustrated, wishing there was an 'Operator' button that I can use to talk with a real person. It's way easier and more comforting to be talking to a real person behind the business when I need something.
It's distressing that more and more chatbots are spawned every day to take the human element out of customer support or when engaging with a business. Chatbots work when they're a complement to human customer support, but when they're up front and center they tend to be distracting, frustrating, and their attempts to act human often amuses me. I do like Kik's and Messenger's approach to a bot and I think they are on the right path.
Well as everyone knows, ordinary users find CLIs easjer to use than GUIs!
I am only half joking. The reason nerds like CLIs is that they can just tell the computer what to do without having to first coax it into offering the appropriate menu.
The same is true for non-nerds, except they no one really wants to learn the exact commands. If for some reason, clicky-window GUIs had not been invented in the '80s -- then the hot thing in UI research might have been fuzzy, english-like text interfaces, including online help.
That is basically what is being re-discovered via chatbot technology.
I think this is a good point. There is a lot of time spent in finding things nowadays. A small example: Was helping my wife (doing it myself) with updating her direct deposit information at her employer. I used their search, the first link has a page with a non-working section that doesn't work (tried two browsers), the second page didn't work, the third page is a general page which has a section with a working link. I use that link to go to a page with mostly whatever I need. Except it needs a branch code. Which we don't exactly know. Then it has some other confusing text which we don't know applies to us.
So while I am skeptical, I am starting to understand the value of a chatbot and possibly a single way to do things. Maybe the "easy" path via the chatbot and if someone is a real poweruser they can use the window and type all information themselves.
Because you don't have to coax CLI to do what you want?
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One's inability to read the API documentation isn't the API's fault. If I address an English-speaking person in Spanish, I probably wouldn't get very far either.
It actually turns out that some non-technical people are more capable of navigating a conversation with a chatbot than the average website. Basically it solves the problem of finding your own information vs the chatbot finding the information for you.
For example: we had a bot that could take care of HR, expense, and IT issues. So instead of having to look in one of the systems or the documents on SharePoint, you could just ask: "how many days of PTO do I have left?" Or "when will my last expense report be paid?" or "can I get email on my corporate phone?", and the bot would be able to handle it. Especially in larger companies with lots of systems finding that can be difficult.
HN is probably not the intended audience for chatbots :)
It's distressing that more and more chatbots are spawned every day to take the human element out of customer support or when engaging with a business. Chatbots work when they're a complement to human customer support, but when they're up front and center they tend to be distracting, frustrating, and their attempts to act human often amuses me. I do like Kik's and Messenger's approach to a bot and I think they are on the right path.