Comment by lsy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lsy | Hacker News Reader

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The natural-language chat box (or voice command) is seductive as an interface because it elides the question of how somebody will use a product. It makes a product that uses it seem more potentially capable, because you can imagine asking it anything (we all remember the sense of possibility in the first Zork-style games). If the user was provided with an affordance to understand the range of capabilities of the product, they might realize it's too limited for them, or realize that their use case is served by something else.

The chat/voice interface is like Skinner's Box: we keep "using" because we don't know what will work and what won't, and when something works it seems magical. And it keeps being pushed on customers because it's beneficial for corporations: customers will fruitlessly navigate chat support rather than realizing they should give up and call, businesses will invest in products with open-ended interfaces because they can convince themselves it's flexible enough for their needs.

The only way I'm using a command entry if it's the result is deterministic. Fuzzy searching over the choices is nice, but I still want that to be deterministic. And some way to determine the actual choices available.

There's so many studies done on human computer interactions that at this stage, I'd believe it's just pure malice. Corporations want to push the idea that their tools will let you do your task without being trained in it, which have never happened even with physical tools. Even game console and smartphones require some guidance from other people.

>And it keeps being pushed on customers because it's beneficial for corporations: customers will fruitlessly navigate chat support rather than realizing they should give up and call

Businesses tend to thrive when consumers choose to keep using them, not when they don't. How does users fruitlessly navigating chat support serve that end?

That's a _long-term_ problem, though. This would be far from the first time that companies prioritise short-term savings over long-term revenue due to perverse incentives.

No-one's getting promoted for "declined to ruin our customer support, thus avoiding loss of X recurring revenue per year over the next decade", but they might get promoted for "reduced cost of customer support by X with AI!!!"

In the long run the invisible hand will dole out rewards and punishments here, but thinking about the short term is just _easier_ than thinking about the long term.

> In the long run the invisible hand will dole out rewards and punishments

Only in competitive markets.

That’s true in theory, I’m not sure about in practice. It could also be the case that a company says “human support is too expensive, throw in a chat bot to stem the tide”, see the number of calls drop, and call it a success. Never mind how many potential customers are lost (which actually requires competence to measure.)

It reduces costs in the short term by firing all your customer support staff.

There is no long term in modern capitalism.

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