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.

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

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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

This, this, this!