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.

Now imagine how awful a chatbot made by that same web developer would be...

Because you don't have to coax CLI to do what you want? % Invalid input detected at '^' marker. % Invalid input detected at '^' marker. % Invalid input detected at '^' marker.

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 :)

edit: typos