alt Hacker NewsHave you ever had a chatbot solve your problem? I don't think this has ever happened to me.
As a reasonably technical user capable of using search, the only way this could really happen is if there was no web/app interface for something I wanted to do, but there was a chatbot/AI interface for it.
Perhaps companies will decide to go chatbot-first for these things, and perhaps customers will prefer that. But I doubt it to be honest - do people really want to use a fuzzy-logic CLI instead of a graphical interface? If not, why won't companies just get AI to implement the functionality in their other UIs?
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Amazon's robot did replace the package that vanished. I don't believe it ever understood that I had a delivery photograph showing two packages but found only one on my porch. But I doubt a human would have cared, either--cheap item, nobody's going to worry about how it happened. (Although I would like to know--wind is remotely possible but the front porch has an eddy that brings stuff, it doesn't take stuff.)
Actually, I have, Amazon has an excellent one. I had a few exchanges with it, and it initiated a refund for me, it was much quicker than a normal customer service call.
Outside of customer service, I'm working on a website that has a huge amount of complexity to it, and would require a much larger interface than normal people would have patience for. So instead, those complex facets are exposed to an LLM as tools it can call, as appropriate based on a discussion with the user, and it can discuss the options with the user to help solve the UI discoverability problem.
I don't know yet if it's a good idea, but it does potentially solve one of the big issues with complex products - they can provide a simple interface to extreme complexity without overwhelming the user with an incredibly complex interface and demanding that they spend the time to learn it. Normally, designers handled this instead by just dumbing down every consumer facing product, and I'd love to see how users respond to this other setup.