Hacker News Reader

Comment by Guyag | Hacker News Reader

Do you know any good resources on the future of conversational agents? In terms of what need they fulfil - I don't use Ok Google/Siri/Cortana, and rarely use my Echo but for music, and find it hard to understand where they fit in. Home automation is the only thing that comes to mind ("only").

View on HN

The term they should be able to fulfill is natural interaction with a humans.

You should be able to crawl into your car and sputter "take me cough to the hospital" to which the car vocally responds "Right away" then drives itself to the hospital.

edit: Meaning, this interaction should play out exactly the same as if you had a full time driver/butler whos only job is to sit in the driver seat of your car and wait for your commands.

Check out X.ai and Clara labs. Some of their blog posts highlight what needs they fulfil. These are not messaging agents but conversational nonetheless.

Has anyone stopped to think, "do people actually want to talk to a computer?" I think we are more simply interested in commanding them to get our tasks done easier, but this "conversational" nonsense and making it more human like is, well, nonsense.

>but this "conversational" nonsense and making it more human like is, well, nonsense.

Can't say I've ever been impressed when one of these systems fails to understand me and replies with a human-like response. Feels disingenuous.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com