Imagine if this was a realistic conversation with an assistant:
> "Hey Google, I'd like to order a pizza."
> "Sure, what kind?"
> "Let's see... cheese, pepperoni, sausage... and maybe some green pepers?"
> "Alright. What size?"
> "Hmm, so I need to feed 4 people..."
> "Sounds like a large?"
> "Sure, let's go with a large."
> "Alright. There's a Dominos nearby, I can order that for $8.99."
> "Sounds good."
> "Alright, I've ordered your pizza. Expected delivery in 15 minutes."
No need for the human to understand what the "entry point" is, because you can approach the assistant with pretty much _any_ entry point and it'll give you a useful response. We're still not there yet, unfortunately, and I think it'll be quite a while before we are.
In fact, the pizza order is the No. 1 scenario looked at by the chatbot providers. In fact, it was exactly the scenario my old startup took as a case study and the first application we built with it. It could handle the different toppings, the sizes, and more. You could submit all your requests in one move, it would be parsed and sorted into its little slots.
The problem? There is only a handful of scenarios similar to the pizza. In most cases in the real world, you have to select from an external database, look at proprietary product names, and more. Another staple of chatbot demos, plane ticketing, only works well when limited to North America (in the English word). Good luck asking for a flight to Kinshasa, Kuala Lumpur, or even Wagga Wagga in Australia.
I am not even talking about the switchboards for multiple domains, like in Alexa. These ones only work with "leaky abstraction" (making the user learn magic keywords).
Another problem is really stupid. It's the availability of the datasets. The funny thing is, ye olde style semantic frameworks fare better than the machine learning ones, because there is not enough data for the machine learning chatbot frameworks, and without it, their mighty capabilities are pretty much the proverbial spherical cow in vacuum. But because the semantic paradigm is not kosher/kewl anymore, very few enterprises agree to deploy it.
None of that matters though because the users never liked typing a lot. Back in 1980s - 1990s the adventure type computer games switched from (mostly working) command line interface to point-and-click, and very few users objected.
My take is, the key is a conversational UI with strong visual feedback. For the pizza scenario above, I would draw icons of cheese and numbers, so that the user can be sure it worked.
And when limited to text. I once saw a demo for a voice chat for ticket orders. It took a full minute for it to tell you the multitude of options for flying 'from the Netherlands to New-York next Monday'. A human assistant can reason on what an acceptable flight may be based on a small set of parameters. A chat bot would need to know every preference in detail, like destination airport, time of day, budget, etc.
The same thing happens for McDonald's and other places replacing cashiers with touch-screen terminals, not only I am sure of how the system understood me, I can easily navigate the several options without annoying an employee with dozens of questions, going from that to conversational UI is a step back in the wrong direction.
Just this morning I stopped at McDonald's for breakfast. I gave my order, they entered it, and it showed up correctly on the screen at the drive through. However, the order taker read back something completely different (than what they just entered). Since I saw that the order in the system was correct I ignored that and simply said "sure that's right."
This is why I prefer an interface that bypasses the human order taker. They may say one thing and do another. Even in my case, they may have then thought "well he confirmed what I just said back, and that doesn't match what the screen shows, so I'll fix it to match what the customer agreed to." Then I would have the wrong order. That can't happen if I interact directly with the order system.
Once I went to a McDonald's and ordered some double cheeseburger with no onions, when the order came it was just the buns with no meat.
Especially in a place like McDonald's where they serve several people familiar with the menu, the staff seems annoyed if you don't know what the ingredients of one of their menu items are and often don't handle specific requests well.
It's not just language issues, my ex-girlfriend always asked a lot of questions when ordering at restaurants, sometimes checking with me, you can visibly see the waiter getting tired or annoyed because of this, not coincidentally, there is always some minor screw up with the order because they forgot to write something down. The same happens if you go to a restaurant with 20+ people and the waiter comes in to take everyone's order, the chances of making a mistake goes up.
Personally I'm techy and I still prefer the human aspect. In fact part of the appeal of going to a restaurant is to be waited upon - otherwise I might as well just order a takeaway online. Sure they might occasionally screw up your order but this doesn't happen nearly as often as this thread would suggest. I do eat out a lot and I honestly don't think I've had my order messed up in the last 2 years. I wouldn't say I eat at particularly posh places either though I do actively avoid most fast food establishments (not a snobby thing, I just don't like the taste of McDonalds et al) so maybe the issue of reliability is more subject to the lowest paid positions in the food service?
In any case, even if you did have your way and entered your orders directly into a computer, you'd still have to deal with the fallibility of humans with the chef cooking your food, waiter / delivery driver distributing your food, and anyone else who exists along the chain. In fact I wouldn't be at all surprised if many of the mishaps described in this thread were actually failings of those individuals rather than the order takers whom you assumed had messed the order up.
But if I'm at a good restaurant, a server is actually part of the service. They can give you recommendations on dishes, and wine matches, and help you get exactly what service you want. Also the human experience is just part of the fine dining experience.
It would be really strange if I want to Eleven Madison Park or Bouchon and they just handed me an iPad to order my food from.
That just sounds like a very poor database.
It's not just simple pairings, but includes nuances that would take many different fields to capture: Dish X can be made vegan, but tastes better if you then order with extra seasoning.
With a tablet, you could filter the list with a single tap. I've thought about building such an app a few years ago because I'd love to use it, but I have no idea how you could sell it to restaurants. It seems most places are too conservative and cash-strapped to tie themselves to proprietary tech.
It’s awful — probably an order of magnitude more awful than dealing with a non-English speaking cashier. As with anything digital, it’s a sales funnel designed to trick you into ordering whatever their profit driver is. Have fun not buying a value meal.
But what if you don't know what your options are and how much they cost? You have to ask the person to list off the possible pizza styles, sizes, toppings, and the prices for each one. Then they have to tell you about all the available side dishes and desserts (with prices, again) and how there's a half-off deal if you get THIS side with THAT pizza on a Tuesday, and on and on and on. It'd probably take a good 20 minutes to convey all that over the phone (I hope you have a good memory or are taking notes), and by the time they're done, the poor employee is probably so frustrated that they're ready to strangle you.
Or, I can suck up all that information at a glance on dominos.com, and I won't have to repeat my credit card number over the phone 5 times before they get it right.
Restaurant websites always, without exception, suck. Dominos, while the pizza is garbage, has a wonderful ordering website. But even then the actual menu is awful.
They are always a sales funnel first, menu second. They cannot give accurate ETA, ever. It’s harder to display multiple choices well on a screen vs a sheet of paper.
Unless you are a place with 5 menu items, the paper menu is superior in almost every scenario.
Otherwise, they're just acting as a voice interface for a GUI that I'm perfectly able to navigate on my own, and I'm not a fan of voice interfaces when dealing with technical systems.
I think this is an assumption that might not hold true, outside of the tech sphere.
Us? Of course we want imperative interfaces! E.g. "Order me a pizza using JSON with my pizza_now script with options -g and -b and promo code CASEOFTHEMONDAYS"
People who are not technically inclined? End-state declarative. I see most as fine saying "Order me a pizza with pepperoni" and having it show up at their door.
Ordering a pizza as shown in the above example is very contrived, no one needs that, a GUI is much better to execute this use case. But the power of chatbots will light up if it can answer 'Would this pizza be too spicy?", "can you deliver this after 4pm?". What I mean is when the chatbots can take over more of customer queries which otherwise might be directed to the store via phone call. Or something which requires deep knowledge of the product and when not every corner case can be put on the GUI menu.
"Ok Google, get me 10 Margherita pizzas by this evening" is super convenient.
Wait...
A while back, one of the big features Google advertised was the ability to start a transaction by voice, and then continue it on a device with a screen.
I'll pay but I prefer when someone else orders a pizza.
Correcting that means now you’re arguing with Google/Alexa/Siri, which is an infuriating experience.
[1] https://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublicat...
For the average consumer who otherwise didn't specify, Dominos is a good choice: it's cheap, reliable, they understand the menu and deals, and it's consistent across time and place.
What if Dominoes doesn't have green peppers? What if they don't like the pizza brand? What if they're asking because they have a coupon? You may end up repeating sections of the conversation multiple times, and in the end the user will just end up so confused they give up.
The only difference is that you would want a confirmation step with the VUI - i.e. "Alright, you want a large cheese, pepperoni, sausage, & pepper pizza from Dominos, which will take 15 minutes to deliver. Place the order?"
I do see the benefit for employers.
> take lamp
You can reduce it to a flow of information. And chat is not always the best way to convey that information.
If we had a secretary (think 1950 when they were common) doing this job mine would choose something nice, yours would come back with your choices. Either way flowers would arrive. Your secretary would probably learn your preferences eventually and soon come with one picture for final approval (which would be right). Mine would remind me a week before our anniversary to start working on the poem.
Both perspectives are correct. There is no reason an AI couldn't handle both, and every reason they should - but of course it will be years (at best) before they do. The first time the AI comes with "I found these flowers, see the pictures [on whatever screen is handy]". I respond with "whatever, just pick something", and the ai decides to not bother asking again. I'm depending on the AI flower ordering algorithm to not make a bad choice - making me happy is harder than making you happy.
Imagine a fashion designer having a chat with a human assistant. The designer might tell them a kind of shirt they want to use for a shoot, and if it’s not obvious what to buy the assistant will come back to them with a list of options (pictures of each on a piece of paper, for ex). The designer can ask questions about each one, ask for different shirts, and simply speak when they decide: points “this one”.
This all seems very doable with current AI assistants. Google for ex already has results from recent voice searches waiting for you on your phone.
Real AI would be fully capable of doing this just as well as a person, but it would take a lot more "intelligence" than currently exists.
But if I ask Facebook/Google/Amazon to order some flowers for me, why _wouldn't_ they monetise it? Gotta pay for those tens of thousands of engineers somehow.
This is something a good personal assistant can do easily.
Though eventually AI will gain those capabilities, one way or another.
Chat bots are on a spectrum between command line and a real human assistant. If I hire an assistant, I probably don't need a manual telling me how to interact with them. A command line is pure mystery. I might be stretching a bit for the metaphor, but the difference is how well they understand human language.
A commandline requires, essentially, learning a new language in order to converse with a computer. A human only requires a small amount of learning in getting the social dynamic relationship right.
Chat bots, virtual assistants, etc. are all pretending to be much closer to the human side of language understanding than they are and they won't be all that useful until they make quite a bit of progress. (and actually I would appreciate a much more commandline-like interface with a voice assistant for now because I'd bet it would be much more likely to give me what I want)
"What would you like to eat today?"
"A bacon cheeseburger with cheddar, with lettuce, ketchup, and onions. Fries on the side."
"Sorry we don't offer fries with our burgers. What could I get you instead?"
"I see french fries at the next table!"
"Oh, you asked for fries, not french fries. Sure, we can do french fries. What would you like for your side?"
"... I want french fries."
...
It's not actually true that any input is accepted. Pretending that it is just creates frustration.
Reminds of those text input adventure games like King's Quest, where you had to figure out a valid verb + noun combination to use.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/Nh0Nn
Anyone who is dealing with this chatbot is probably aware of its main scope -- to provide tech support/answers. Look at the example prompt that is given: e.g.: Reset my Microsoft account password
How try to find that on the Microsoft Support page as it is:
My first instinct is to do a Ctrl-F for "password" or "security"; the first term brings nothing, the second term brings up topics about viruses and ransomware. Even if you realize that you have to go to the "Microsoft account help", you still won't find it. Right now, there's a link for "How to reset your Microsoft account password" but only under the subhed of "Trending topics" -- and I would have never found it if I didn't use Ctrl-F. And past research has found that the vast majority of Internet users do not know how to use Ctrl-F [0] (and I bet it's much worse today, given how most people now just use phone browsers).
Of course the smart thing to do is to use the Search box at the top of the support page -- in fact, I wouldn't even use that because I just use Google for everything, even for finding Stackoverflow answers. But I'm guessing most people don't.
I'd argue that the average user, unlike most anyone who even knows what a command-line interface is, does not care about an interface having "acceptable entry points". And in many such cases, it may be near impossible to design an interface for such users, whose needs and means of expressing them are infinite.
For example, I know that if I can't login to my Microsoft account because my cookies expired and I forgot my password, that I should be searching for "reset microsoft password", or even, "reset microsoft live password". However, I bet there are a lot of people who will state this:
my email doesn't work or i cant see my email
The chatbot helpfully provides a list of options, including "Signing in to Outlook.com", but just in case, options like "Unable to send email". If you search for "my email doesn't work" using the support.microsoft.com search bar, you get a list of Google-like listings pointing to the answers.microsoft.com forums, for topics like "Why doesn't my Hotmail work any more?"
I guess there's no reason why the support searchbar couldn't be tweaked to return the kind of options that the chatbot does, but the chatbot has one key advantage: there's always a "None of the above" option, which takes you to a secondary list of options. This kind of funnel IMHO is way more useful/comfortable than a search interface, in which it's not clear whether you need to rewrite your query, or keep paging through pages of increasingly irrelevant or confusing search results.
Theoretically, the chatbot funnel gets better at funneling people, based on analysis of past users' paths through the decision tree. But even a very dumb bot that doesn't intelligently respond has one more advantage: if you hit "None" a few times in succession, you'll be given a link to "Talk to a person", which signals to the user that, "OK, you win, no need to keep trying search queries, let's get you some human help".
That signal doesn't exist in a traditional webpage or search interface, so the risk is that the user keeps searching the pages in vain until they get so pissed off they just give up. Not everyone has the wherewithal to demand manual help.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy...