alt Hacker NewsThis is really cool in terms of the tech, but what is this useful for as a consumer? I mean it's basically just a chatbot right? And nobody likes interacting with those. Forcing a conversational interaction seems like a step down in UX.
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I don't even like video calls with real people in my real life. Texting works great. This is really neat but I'd much rather just have a text chat with a real customer service rep. I don't need to see a face, don't want to, and especially don't want to see a fake face.
That's actually a good question. For example, the technology is still currently at a level where the user can still cleary tell that it's a chatbot, but now with a face. Does this make their experience better? Or does it add a weird level of uncaninness to the experience?
The way we see it is that this brings us closer to communicating with computers the way we communicate with each other. It has vision and can (not perfectly) take into account your expressions, your surroundings, and can respond accordingly.
This is a really good question. While you're right that a common use case would be chatbots for product support, it isn't the only one. Some examples:
- interactive experiences with historical figures - digital twins for celebrity/influencer fan interactions - "live" and/or personalized advertisements
Some of our users are already building these kinds of applications.