The audio interfaces are so bad I resort to one-word answers to every question, to get me to a human as fast as possible.

"Hi, in a few words, what can I help you with today?"

> "billing"

"It sounds like you have a question about your bill. I can help you with that! If you can give a few words to describe the reason you are calling, I can help you with your bill."

> "billing"

"OK, let me get you to a representative who can help!"

... instead of spending 10 minutes wrangling with the vapid AI, I can actually move on with my day after speaking to a human. Was this the future we envisioned in the 90s? I think not. Some systems let you spam 0 (zero) and it transfers to a human, but more and more are requiring you to interface with the system in some way, even if disabled or impaired.

"Please enter you account number"

> one two three etc

"Please hold"

"Hello this is agent a, Can I verify your X"

> It's XXXX

"Looks like you have <totally unrelated subject to what you called"

> Yeah but, I called for Y

"Oh ok"

> Y this, Y that, I need Y to do Z

"Let me forward you to an agent that can help you"

"Hello this is Agent Q"

> I need to do Y! damn it I've been on hold and transfering for 20 minutes

"I can help you with Y, but first, I need your account info

> FREAKING A 1234

"Can you verify XYZW?"

> YES GOD DAMN IT YYYY

"Ok sir, I'll need you to FAX it in"

> What, that's technologies from the 1920s

"I'm sorry sir, is there ANYTHING ELSE I can help you out with <condescending voice>"

> PLEASE KILL ME NOW

"Would you like to take a survey?"

a week later, 7pm you get a robo call

"You had a call with Agent X how did that call go"

On the flipside, think of the joy of realizing you've finally been connected to a smart, competent person who is empowered to solve your problem. It is like finding a call center unicorn.

It really depends on what sort of organization you're dealing with. My credit union has always been a pleasure to deal with because their phone people are all hired and trained locally. On the other hand they only take calls during business hours which can be a little awkward when I'm in another timezone.

That's like saying death is a good thing because you still get to live a few decades.

That's not a terribly uncommon position, not everyone wants to live forever. Arguably it's a healthy attitude to take, since death will come for you eventually whether or not you make peace with that inevitability.

Lots of people say that every time the subject of human immortality arises.

I had this experience once and it was the result of finally getting a local call centre with better trained and empowered employees (most calls were being farmed out to overseas call centres which followed a very simple script).

Haha. Meanwhile all the business people meet at conferences and get high on AI and blockchain... get the real easy stuff right first!!!

This. So many times I dictate or enter my account number, only to have to say it again once I get an actual human.

Can't they see what I just typed before? Seriously, how bad can this be.

Sounds like calling any medical insurance or provider company in the US. It's the ubiquity of fax that is most flabbergasting.

It's one thing I don't miss at all after getting out of health tech. I hope to never read the phrase "secure fax" again.

This happens way too often. I wish I knew why systems ended up like this. Seems to be a business opportunity to fix them once and for all. This is 2018, we can do better

USAA really impressed me recently with a really slick feature: I was in their mobile application, and realized that what I wanted to do was a little too complex for what the app could handle. So I called support, and they (1) automatically identified me based on my number and (2) knew I was just using the app, and asked if I'd like to transfer directly to a person!

It is probably not the most complex integration technically, but it made the experience so smooth.

The app also has a useful feature to launch the website with session tokens, so it keeps you logged in if you were logged into the app.

So if you know where the thing you're looking for is on the website, you can just launch the website and use that.

Super simple feature but it seems like for so many companies, if you go online, it redirects you to their mobile site which has been "phased out" and tells you to the get their app, which you have and would have used if it had the feature you needed.

For such a "post computer" world it seems ridiculous how often I throw my hands up and find my laptop when trying to complete an online chore from my mobile.

USAA can be pretty great. In some ways they are ahead in tech, and have been for a long time. I do wish they'd add support for virtual credit cards tho.

It seems like it's a pattern to ensure security and discourage people from calling.

Vendors do this because they know they can get away with it, i.e. no perceived counter party risk. However what they don't understand, is that there is a HUGE counter party risk.

If its a charge on my credit card or checking, that's what I do, I give them this counter party risk. I call and do a charge back. Basically after 20 minutes with a vendor on hold, I declare that they are being unreasonable and they are unable or unwilling to refund me, I call the bank to do this charge back.

Now, what you tell the bank is critical. For whatever reason, vendors have been able to un-do my chargeback. So instead, I tell the bank that I dispute the charge -- but that I am also disputing the method of payment. So if they argue that the charge is valid in the investigation, I say that is fine -- however, the bank is not authorize on my behalf to pay them, and if they think the charge is authorized they must contact me to arrange a different method of payment. And under no circumstances can they use the bank to make payment. So yeah if they argue the charge is legit, that's fine, contact me (I wish I could put them on hold haha), and I'll pay them -- but the bank can't. The bank likes this because they are off the hook and I like it because they don't get to screw me. Worked every time.

If everyone did this, and made this a huge country party risk, these vendors would stop putting people on hold and ignoring or purposely inadequately addressing their greivences with their product/services.

A solution for me is to avoid dealing with shitty companies like this and seek online-only alternatives (with a good web UI), and failing that, if a shit company screws up and I can’t fix it quickly through their awful customer support I stop paying and let them call me.

It’s funny how they never keep their promises of calling you back until you actually stop giving them money. They also magically start paying more attention to what you say, and complaint letters that went unanswered for months and presumed “lost” suddenly become found and answered.

how can you dispute payment method especially when they tell that you used your card with OTP/signature giving your consent to use this payment method? Just trying to understand so can use this technique if situation arises :)

The reason why is that the phone tree/IVR and back-office systems were developed by someone like IBM, Accenture, Oracle, etc instead of actually competent developers. The budget being blown on the aforementioned companies, they have no choice but to stick with it.

'Agent' or 'representiative' will usually do it faster.

But I hear you. I recently wanted to change the ownership of my cellphone account. "Change ownership", "It sounds like you want to change cellphone plans, is that correct?", "Agent", "Okay, let me get you to a representative".

The only tasks these things are equipped to do, are the tasks that I can do via the company's online portal, and in a much less frustrating manner. I wonder who is actually using these things.

>> The only tasks these things are equipped to do, are the tasks that I can do via the company's online portal, and in a much less frustrating manner. I wonder who is actually using these things.

Old people. I'm not kidding. I used to do PCI compliance work with call centers. I've listened in on many a call to verify procedures. Call centers deal with an unending stream of older people who cannot or will not use "computers". They want to talk to a person on a phone. The people who are comfortable with the online interface only call when the online interface fails them. Old people go to the telephone first.

And there is a growing subset of old people who are functionally illiterate. I don't mean they don't know how to read, I mean their eyesight is diminished to the point that using the computer/phone/tablet is uncomfortable. Or their fingers don't move well enough for a keyboard/touchscreen. The phone is simple and reliable, not requiring either visual or physical dexterity.

I agree with everything you've said, and I feel really badly for how tech's dark patterns, crappy UX, and removal of humanity have treated the elderly.

Even non tech items like opening a bag of chips or box of crackers. I estimate that some packaging must require 40+ lbs to open. And I think of the "how it's made" show and how advanced manufacturing plants are. So they use all this tech to make a box of crackers as cheaply as possible, they have cameras fast enough to find and remove a single dark grain of rice in a torrential stream, but put zero thought into the UX experience and how the user can open the box.

It sounds like the simplest "tech fix" for this phone menu is once their account is found,

if (age > 60 ) sendToPerson ();

Furthermore, you could do "soft" account verification with their number. So if they call from a number that matches an elderly customer, just route it straight to a human, even though numbers can be spoofed it's not going to harm the customer to just assume it's them for that step only and fully verify their acct later.

There needs to be an alternate queue for people who call because the online interface failed.

"We are sorry our website didn't work, let me get you a human..."

You think old people don't just hit zero, pound, or say 'agent', to go to a person, to do the things the phone tree can do?

If they don't, is that because they don't know any better, or because they actually want to use the IVR?

My guess is either they go straight to a person, or they don't know that's an option. So if I'm correct (and I think the onus would be to prove that old people think differently than everyone else in this regard), these things exist to take advantage of the ignorance of old people to save a company some money. Greaaaat.

It's likely that these are for company itself. Ain't no one got time to deal with questions that are already explained on the website. This is made to filter mindless or lazy drones who don't want to search and its totally fair.

I've noticed that companies without IVR lines have switched from hold music to recordings that repeatedly list all the things you can handle online instead.

It's annoying when my issue isn't on the list, since I'll have to hear it 50 times. And it's incredibly aggravating when my issue is on the list, but the website doesn't actually work right. But it's not hard to understand why it happens.

Oh my Goddess, there is nothing worse than hearing: "It's on the website".

Yeah, that's unhelpful if "the website" is a sprawling, vast wasteland. Finding a specific thing on an obese, convoluted site is like trying to find the bucket of ice cream in Siberia. I always check the site first, so if I am calling... it's because your website is pretty bad.

So if I do find the thing I need and it is broken, then I call and dodge the idiot AI, and the beleaguered agent or offers the pathetic advice of: "It's on the website". I tell them it doesn't work, and this has led to two outcomes, either the agent tries to do it and it is so broken and fucked up that they tell me that's it's down and I have to call back or try the website days or weeks later, or I am lucky and the agent has to do a tedious task that I would have preferred to do myself online.

I was on hold with my insurance to file a claim, the IVR loop said for the third time "Did you know? You can file your claim online!" so I gave in, hung up, went online and all the form asks for is my contact information (phone + email) and my preferred method, so I enter email.

I get an email "Hey, I need to contact you so we can proceed, what method would you prefer?" I reply "Email, please" provide the information I assume the rep needs and which the online form should have been able to ask me and offer "What else do you need".

"Is there a time I can call you and [go over the script and fill out a form on my computer, as if you'd just stayed on hold hours ago]?"

10/10

I see you too have had to deal with AAA.

Like when you call an ISP because your internet is down and their recorded message goes "check our website...." well I'd love to but...

This is always annoying because the only reason I would ever call is if I've exhaustively tried every way to use the website and encountered some sort of roadblock/edge case where they tell you to call in.

This is stacked against power user just like anything else in this world. Technology is dumbed down for the average user whereas I believe we should strive to make the average user smarter instead. Not happening tho it seems.

So make getting to an agent at least as difficult as figuring out the web interface?

In other words, paying customers

I encountered a system that replied in the following way:

"I'm sorry, it looks like you want to talk to a representative. You need to answer a few questions first."

Very HAL-like.

And then when you get to the representative, he proceeds to ask you the exact same questions.

I think you answered your own question.

The people using the automated phone services are the people without internet or even computers.

Believe me, they exist ;)

Mashing # works well too.

Usually you'll get it try to say stuff, give up and then say "Thanks, I'll put you through to one of our team"

- Phone: Say "representative" to talk to an agent

- Me" "REPRESENTATIIIVE"

- Phone: Sorry, I didn't get that. Say "representative" to talk to an agent

- Me" "REPRESENTATIIIVE"

- Phone: Sorry, I didn't get that. let me transfer you to a representative

(This specific one happens on United calls, every single time.)

Or immediately hitting "0" once the prompt begins.

Bashing # several times quickly also works on a lot of systems. I always give it a go first time around - when it works, the voice bot typically says 'I didn't understand that, I will connect you with a.. [human]'.

Failing that I also resort to answering in one word answers. Bots can't handle any sort of ambiguity. Even when they manage to solve the language-parsing problem, people will still just bark one word answers at anything that looks or sounds remotely non-human[1] because that's how the early AI's trained us. The future-concept of people chatting away to robots is incredibly unlikely because to do that you need a level of empathy for the person/object you are talking to. We've clearly shown so far that we just don't have it for bots.

--

[1] Like the 19th century British Explorer shouting English at the natives.

Great points, one word answers/commands are, in our minds, the most compatible with a non-human system.

"CONNECT ME WITH A HUMAN, YOU INFERNAL MACHINE."

"Okay, let me get you to a representative."

If only "Shibboleet" worked: http://xkcd.com/806/

Unpacking it...

Haiku: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_%28operating_system%29

Penguin doll: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tux

Bearded dude with swords: http://blog.xkcd.com/2007/04/19/life-imitates-xkcd-part-ii-r...

which is a recursive reference to XKCD: http://xkcd.com/225/

Shibboleet: Shibboleth from Judges 12

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth

combined with "leet"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet from hacker culture

Bearded dude touching the blade of shin ken with his fingers - stick to programming bearded dude!

For many of these systems, you actually are talking to a human. The person listens to what you say then directs your call as (hopefully) appropriate. They don't have a mic, so clarifying questions are limited to buttons they can push on a glorified soundboard -- in your case it sounds like there were several departments that handle different aspects of billing and they were trying to sort out where to route your call.

The guy you were talking to eventually just routed you to someone with the same job but who has a mic, because you weren't giving him anything to go on and all he'd have been able to do is push the button again to ask you the exact same question (and having a person do it who can at least vary the inflection of the question is less infuriating than seemingly being stuck in a chatbot's infinite loop).

--

Source: have a friend who used to have this job. He has thankfully moved on to something less soul sucking than being a human literally pretending to be a robot.

That seems utterly nonsensical and dehumanizing. If you have a human greeter/operator, why not expose that to the customer? You are already paying for the human to be in the loop, why not benefit from the impression of a friendly human touch as well?

I'd love to know more about these operations, thanks for mentioning this.

Sadly I know very little more about it, other than being able to confirm that it really is dehumanizing. You're essentially being paid for your capability of performing simple natural language processing. The amount of courtesy that call-center people get is already pretty low, and bundle in that the frustrated person thinks they're talking to a robot that literally doesn't have feelings... he had some Bad Days (though he did say that you could let a lot of things slide by just reminding yourself of how comically nonsensical the whole situation is).

I'm just speculating here, but I suspect it means that the employee needs less training. All he needs is a quick flow-chart to route the calls. No training for how to talk to customers, no liability regarding things he might say, etc.

He was glad when he found another job.

I guess during the time the recording talks, they can listen to another call? So you end up having to hire less people.

> For many of these systems, you actually are talking to a human.

Is this practice widespread at all? I've worked at several contact center software companies with many customers and never once heard of this. It's always been automated IVR software controlling this. This sounds to my ears like maybe an outlier of a particularly awful contact center? I'd certainly pause before claiming this is how it works for "many of these systems".

That's actually a good question -- I don't know. My only window into this world was through him, and from his point of view it seemed widespread. I'll update my comment accordingly.

Edit: ahh I can no longer edit it :|

Wow, I'm sorry your friend had to go through that. This is the first time I've heard that this job actually exists!

It seems very strange to have a human who can listen but can't speak. I guess these companies think that by removing speech as a possibility, they're able to pay the employee less or something?

I think it's less about having to pay them less and more about less "customer interface" training, less concern about liability with regards to what the person might say, not having to worry about the potential stigma associated with a foreign accent, etc. But I'm just speculating here.

Weird! A Nuance license would be cheaper and works just as poorly.

A colleague of mine worked on the automated call center systems in the early 80s. The fastest way to get to a human is to cuss it out. This has worked for almost every system I’ve worked with so far (not sure if they’re using the same underlying software or if this behavior has been ported over). I only opt for this trick when I have no idea where to go given the menu read out to me because I like to think that support menu systems are designed to make it easier to navigate an organization’s own bureaucracy primarily, not necessarily to help me with my issues.

> "more and more are requiring you to interface with the system in some way, even if disabled or impaired."

In a sort of sick and very selfish way, I find myself somehow glad that blind and deaf people exist and are protected by accessibility legislation. I've often found accessibility features, particularly those in software, to be exceptionally useful even though my vision and hearing are fine.

Reminds me of a tech talk I went to last year, where the speaker/developer was trying to get on the Alexa hype train by building a "virtual doctor" application of some sort. He was very excited about the possibility of reducing physicians' administrative overhead, but my thought the whole time was, "seems like one of those terrible phone navigation systems..."

What I need to replace a virtual doctor is automated medical testing.

I need a machine to take all of the measurements and make decisions entirely without any kind of subjective judgement on my part.

Please, validate my health the same way automated testing and other such diagnostics checks work.

A fun hack on a lot of these systems is to start cursing a lot. It's like dialing "0" for operator.

This does work, but I worry the AI's will hold it against me someday.

I worry the human operators will hold it against me. The quality of assistance they provide may be biased by how irate and short tempered they think I am, even if I was just putting on a show for the robot.

I wouldn't expect a human to be offended by "operator agent fucfucfuc" spoken in a calm voice. There's no need to yell at the robot.

Hah, I really do, if ever so slightly, feel this way. Surprised by the down votes. Just disapprove because you frown on humor, which it wasn't intended as, or somehow did I offend you?

By and large, voice user interfaces still fail to abide by Grice's Maxims[1]. In your example, that's the maxim of manner:

> when one tries to be as clear, as brief, and as orderly as one can in what one says, and where one avoids obscurity and ambiguity

In a sense, this is not unlike an unskilled and nervous attendant who, faced with a request that they don't understand, starts to chatter more and more in hopes of eliciting the information they really need.

[1]: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/grice.html

There's also a rise of interfaces where talking to a human is not an option, and it's actually very challenging to break out of the default set of options. AirBNB is an example of this. This might be OK for the majority of calls, but when you need something outside of the normal set of problems, good luck. They're almost trying to not document the problems that they haven't already documented.

https://gethuman.com/ is an excellent resource!

I've noticed a sharp increase over the last year or two maybe in the number of companies that will bypass the awful classifier and connect you to a human immediately if you yell the word "fuck" into the phone because the machine thinks it's got an angry customer on the line. IME it weirdly has to be the word "fuck" and it has to be loud. I don't pretend to know all the ins-and-outs of IVR systems, but it seems like maybe one of the bigger service providers these companies use have this one weird trick programmed into them?

Note that a lot of the time, the point of those interfaces isn't to direct your call, so much as it is to collect information ahead-of-time, and transcribe it with voice-recognition, so that when you do begin speaking to a representative, they already have your question in front of them on the screen.

And yet for some reason I have to tell them my account number after I have already entered it on a keyboard. This frustrates me beyond belief as it says to me they have disparate software systems that don't talk to one another.

I'd like a "billing" tab on their website the most.

Always having to ask for permission is tiring.

I just yell “aaaaaaa” and usually after three attempts it gives up and sends me to the human.

I just mash the zero key frantically until it connects me to a human. Works ~95% of the time.

I find cursing at the bot gets me to a human right away. It's also therapeutic.

For me, these AI solutions always feel like I'm talking to a very stupid person who has no idea what's doing but has a booklet in possession that may or may not have the information that I'm looking for. Just give me that booklet and I will figure it out,geeez... What a frustration to deal with these smart machines.

With Siri or Google Assistant, you soon figure out few things that this very low intelligence person can do(like telling the weather or setting an alarm) and stick with it.

This is also why I'm excited about iOS12 with all these Siri shortcuts, instead of pretending that we are talking to a smart being let's have a concrete list of things that can do.

On the other hand I do believe that these voice interfaces have some potential, just the technology is not there yet.

Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17265683

> very stupid person who has no idea what's doing but has a booklet in possession

When Siri first hit the Iphone and I was trying to figure out if it was useful for me (no), I named my phone Searle[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Chinese_room_thou...

Somebody I know described Siri as "less of a Chinese room, more of a tourist's Chinese phrasebook", and it seems to sum up the issue pretty well.

Maybe we should rename it to artificial stupidity.

Some are actively designed to make you give up on the call, at least that is what it seems like to me.

How many times have you called and the prompts go:

Press 1 to talk with sales Press 2 to talk with marketing .... Press 9 to talk to tech support, the only reason anybody dialed this number

Then: Speak your 18 digit account number, being sure to pause between each digit to make sure the computer records it correctly.

Then: Speak your phone number

Then: Speak your 24 digit hexadecimal product code

Finally you get through to a person and 100% of the time they ask you for all of that information again so they can type it in (and get it wrong).

And even when you get a person on the line they make you go back and do all of the stuff you already tried before finally transferring you to someone with half a clue.

I work for a large ISP. The reason why tech support ask again for information is one of these, or any combination.

a) The backoffice is really shit, broken, and doesn't even display any info (down, badly designed, etc)

b) Backoffice and/or VPN connection from outsourced call center to ISP is really slow, so they work faster by asking info.

c) CRM/Customer database has no consisten quality information, so agents do not trust it.

I may forget something, but those are the most common ones.

All of that buck-passing doesn't explain why the info is requested in the first place.

So they can know who they are talking to. IDK in the US, in Spain most services use DNI (national identity document 00000000A) to identify a client and the telephone number as most easy way to know which location is the customer asking info about (people might have more than one landline, DSL or whatever service).

Spanish law also require a second ID verification to disclose some information (let's say your wifi password), in our case it's the las 4 digits of the bank account number.

Also to pipeline you into different call centers, because it won't be reasonable to demand agents to know all the tech and commercial info about the company, it's just too much.

Walgreens prescription refill has a good voice input system. It doesn't pretend to be intelligent. But you can read a long prescription number to it, speaking rapidly, and it gets it right. It's better than humans for that.

I suspect most of the time the agents hate the systems like you describe as much as the callers. They are actually trying to make things work better and faster by asking for this info, so when you have to repeat it it's a failure rather than a deliberate design decision...

Time spent talking to a robot is free, people are expensive. So the company prefers 1hr with robots + 1minute with human, over 10 minutes with each. It's customer-hostile though, raising the cost of the service in a hidden way.

And I don't even want to blame the interfaces entirely. To me the real problem is people building and deploying things when there is a giant gap between hype and reality.

The Web was legitimately the next big thing. And after that, mobile. Both of them have changed our lives in deep and lasting ways. But we as an industry are absurdly hungry for the next, next big thing.

How many dumb-ass voice and bot and AI and blockchain projects are there out there now? That basically don't work, but have been shipped anyhow? How many millions of dollars have been wasted? And really I should say billions. Theranos alone burned through $1.2 billion of hype. And there was the wave of "Uber for X" companies, busily failing to replicate the business model of a company whose success still isn't a given.

I should be clear that I'm not opposed to trying new stuff. I'm all for it! But I think if we explore technological possibilities with less flagrant waste, we'll learn more. And be able to explore more.

There are a lot of smart and motivated people putting effort into voice interfaces. It's the past (we've been speaking for over a hundred thousand years) and it is the future. It will take some time, but I'm pretty confident that computers interacting with our auditory cortex will replace small slabs of glass that we look at and touch for many tasks.

I think that's highly unlikely. We've had radio for 100 years. The written word is still thriving and TV gets twice as much time from people as radio does. Audio's fine for some things, but it's so very limited.

And as an aside, we haven't really had voice-only interfaces for 100k years. Really, they've only existed since the telephone. What existed previous to that was humans, whose in-person interactions are almost always far more than voice. People have different estimates of the amount of information conveyed in a conversation through expression, gesture, posture, glance, and the like, but it's never a small amount.

While I didn't say "voice-only", your point is still quite valid that there is non-verbal information.

My point is that voice is a powerful and ancient channel, and it's about time that computers leverage that channel.

You did say "replace small slabs of glass that we look at and touch", so I think "voice-only" was a reasonable interpretation.

As I said, I'm all for trying new stuff. We should look at the extent to which computers can usefully leverage that channel. But I don't think we should presume that it will be particularly useful.

There's an issue of trust, as well. When I call a support number, and I get a robotic voice that assures me I can speak to it as if it were a person in plain language, I simply don't believe it.

It's just not true, either. So I end up trying to figure out how to structure my query so the robot on the other end will understand what I want, instead of just saying what I want.

In the end, I just repeat "human" and mash the 0 button over and over until I get a real person to talk to.

It's not unlike a programming language that attempts to resemble written English. Sure it looks like English at first, but really there is a rigid API there that you must adhere to, and that breaks any resemblance to natural language; at which point you wonder, why make it look like English in the first place?

Also a problem with Apple's "3D Touch."

They hide key functions behind a 3D Touch, but there's absolutely no discover-ability. So you're either left trying to 3D Touch everything to see what works, or actively researching 3D Touch tricks.

As phone gestures become more popular, they'll have the same issue.

This is a huge problem with phone interfaces in general. There's a big push to make them "clean" by removing obvious widgets and basically hoping the user guesses correctly that they need a horizontal half screen swipe to bring up the search bar or tap and hold on an item to bring up options. You're basically just jabbing at the thing until it does what you want. Eventually people figure out various developer's favorite tricks and try them first and it isn't quite so bad, but for new users smartphone interfaces can be quite daunting.

Seriously, watch someone on a new iPhone and it's just painful.

Oh, I created this contact for fun, now how do I delete it. Tap it? Nope. Tap and hold? Nope. Double tap? Nope. Is there a menu somewhere? Nope. Maybe I slide it over? Nope, that brings me back to the previous page. Maybe I pinch? Nope. Guess I'll pull up the help, oh there isn't any. Off to Google then. Oh, I have to slide it over from the middle, not from the edge.

What's really sad is that this has come around multiple times. I remember hearing about intelligent agents coming anytime to MSN Messenger or whatever it was called at the time back in the early to mid 2000s. And people have had this delusion since ELIZA that natural language interfaces are just on the cusp. A good demo is very convincing, but reality creeps in as soon as you use these things for more than a few rote interactions. The only real innovation of the latest generation of natural language interfaces is their ability to somewhat reliably understand the actual words you use. But even that is highly context dependent and limited to straightforward constructions. And it's all built on just having huge massive datasets against which to compare what's being said. But "natural" language doesn't depend on having past analogues. "Natural" language is constantly finding new ways to say things. And I've not seen any evidence we're any closer to that now than we were in 1966.

I find voice interfaces absolutely infuriating to use! I invariably have to put on an American or English accent in order to get them to understand anything I say, and even then it takes several attempts.

I’m mostly RP English and I usually have to put on a US accent to get anywhere.

In other words: they were never a thing. They were a media-driven and fad-investor-driven hype wave. They never should have been a thing. Good riddance.

Relevant, excellent blog post: http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2012/01/21/the-politics-of-...

Very interesting point, I never thought about why I hate voice interfaces like that so much.

The tipping point for me was when the AT&T small business line I used to use changed to a voice interface and included fake keyboard taping sounds after each interaction. That just felt so damn insulting.

Lately I just say ridiculous shit with these interfaces to see what happens.

A few days ago I was using one for Delta that couldn't tell the difference between "Yeah" and "Yes". Sigh.

That typing sound is to ensure that you are aware the call hasn’t disconnected. With just silence, users feel like they have been disconnected.

Doesn't make it any less condescending. Replace it with some quiet white noise or something...

I'd prefer randomized 'hard disk seeking' noises; not the click of death, the sort of soft muted chirping you used to get from very large and slow magnetic media as you actually heard the heads seek back and forth.

In an alternate pinch, licence some item get sounds from vidoegames and do A B testing on customer satisfaction.

Interestingly, before making this change the line did use a simple "enter account your number" prompt that was followed by a consistent combination of little clicking sounds that seemed to indicate something was happening. I found that much more pleasant than fake key taping.

They remind me a lot of the user experience of text adventures that weren't very thoroughly playtested.

Except that with text adventures I was willing to overlook an obtuse parser if I was enjoying the game. I never call my bank just for the fun of it.

Chatbots proposed to solve a problem that current technology is bad at: understanding natural language. Very few experts claimed that algorithms could master the combinatorics of natural language beyond a few very narrow domains. On top of the technical risk, the voice and chat UX does not give a lot of visibility to users, as this post points out. What happened was: algorithmic advances in other areas lead to analogous reasoning by non-experts whose self-promotion aligned with the media's need for something new, big and understandable. And then it failed.

The irony, of course, is that research is making strides in NLU, it's just too late for the last wave of chatbots. Here are two recent papers from DeepMind:

Learning to Follow Language Instructions with Adversarial Reward Induction https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01946

Relational inductive biases, deep learning, and graph networks https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01261

I don't want to talk to it like a human. The main advantage is that you can just say "temperature outside" or "turn light off". And I expect short answers too, not the Google/Amazon boring long sentence shit.

These chat and voice interfaces are basically the public's version of a command line interface. It has the same flaws and virtues. The main difference is marketing.

Of the bots that are marketed to be more human with lots of machine learning. From my experience, they feel no more better than the original ELIZA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA) despite the leap in tech.

I think voice is greatly underrated but that it will be the next generations (our kids) will use them without feeling weirded out.

When I look how my kids interact with Google home it's becomes fairly obvious to me that to them this is completely natural. Google Home is almost like a pet to them not just a tool.

We are finally at a stage where voice recognition starts to become powerful enough to understand nuances now the next question is what to connect them to. One thing that I really like is that it allow us to retrieve information without having to look at a screen. It feels like having a 5th person at the table.

At First Principle, we built a little a voice app that allows you to ask Google Analytics or Salesforce for data (and potentially whatever you want to connect with) for meetings so we can ask instead of having to look up. It becomes a natural part of the conversation and everyone have access to the data.

That's where I think it will first make an impact. In meetings with relevant data.

It's a funny coincidence. I've just gotten off a phone with a bank officer about a simple question "Is my card there yet?". It took 29 minutes, including a few minutes at the beginning talking to a bot before getting to a human. I'm being unfair and emotional, but right now I'm not sure if humans are really better.

I was trying to get in contact with my bank to allow a large transaction through that they were blocking. Was impossible to talk to a real human, super frustrating. I finally decided to say I wanted to "open a new account"; was immediately connected to a human that helped me from there.

Depends. As the article states, the hybrid approach is becoming more common. This gives users the ability to use various applications from facebook messenger, and the UI capabilities of messenger is pretty much good enough to achieve anything.

Oh and this comes along with a modern website that can execute all those use cases too.

But then you throw in the natural language, enabling users to write complex queries in English. That and great funded teams focussing on niches.

My experiences with bots are becoming outstandingly good.

"affordances", amiright? https://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/affordances_and.html

That's definitely a problem, but it seems like the promise is great enough to where we'll figure out a solution to that eventually.

Humans are bad interfaces too. That’s why we have computers. People only like humans because they are also human. Nobody will miss the long lines at McD, but they might miss the smile. If a robot smiles at me, I won’t be happy, I’ll be scared.

Would not say the Google one is shitty. We started with an echo and it did require more rigid language but the Google home is pretty good.

Not perfect but good enough that it provides value.

I now use voice a lot because of the quality with Google tech.

Oddly, my problem with Google is that it's too flexible. Most of the time, it understands me, and that's great. But when Alexa doesn't understand, there's usually an error. When Google doesn't, it seems to call people, cancel navigation, and do all sorts of loony things I didn't ask for.

80% success and 20% no action might be usable for an assistant, but adding in 5% random behavior makes it drastically worse than useless.

this. I feel like such an idiot when I tell Google to save a reminder in public.

This, this, this!