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788 points jsheard | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.25s | source
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autoexec ◴[] No.42893484[source]
Every time some product or service introduces AI (or more accurately shoves it down our throats) people start looking for a way to get rid of it.

It's so strange how much money and time companies are pouring into "features" that the public continues to reject at every opportunity.

At this point I'm convinced that the endless AI hype and all the investment is purely due to hopes that it will soon put vast numbers of employees out of work and allow companies to use the massive amounts of data they've collected about us against us more effectively. All the AI being shoehorned into products and services now are mostly to test, improve, and advertise for the AI being used, not to provide any value for users who'd rather have nothing to do with it.

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Larrikin ◴[] No.42895251[source]
I work on a project where customers need to fill out a form to receive help. We introduced an AI chat bot to help them do the form by just talking through the problem and answering questions. Then the form is filled out for the customer for them to review before submitting.

Personally I find it slower than just doing it manually but it has resulted in the form being correct more often now and has a lot of usage. There is also a big button when the chat opens that you can click to just fill it out manually.

It has its place, that place just isn't everywhere and the only option.

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wokwokwok ◴[] No.42895905[source]
I'm sure there's a time and place for these things, but this sounds very much like the echo chamber I hear at work all the time.

Someone has a 'friend' who has a totally-not-publically-visible form where a chat bot interacts with the form and helps the user fill the form in.

...and users love it.

However, when really pressed, I've yet to encounter someone who can actually tell me specifically

1) What form it is (i.e. can I see it?)

2) How much effort it was to build that feature.

...because, the problem with this story is that what you're describing is a pretty hard problem to solve:

- An agent interacts with a user.

- The agent has free reign to fill out the form fields.

- Guided by the user, the agent helps will out form fields in a way which is both faster and more accurate than users typing into the field themselves.

- At any time the user can opt to stop interacting with the the agent and fill in the fields and the agent must understand what's happened independently of the chat context. i.e. The form state has to be part of the chat bot's context.

- At the end, the details filled in by the agent are distinguished from user inputs for user review.

It's not a trivial problem. It sounds like a trivial problem; the agent asks 'what sort of user are you?' and parses the answer into one of three enum values; Client, Foo, Bar -> and sets the field 'user type' to the value via a custom hook.

However, when you try to actually build such a system (as I have), then there are a lot of complicated edge cases, and users HATE it when the bot does the wrong thing, especially when they're primed to click 'that looks good to me' without actually reading what the agent did.

So.

Can you share an example?

What does 'and has a lot of usage' mean in this context? Has it increased the number of people filling in the form, or completing it correctly (or both?) ?

I'd love to see one that users like, because, oh boy, did they HATE the one we built.

At the end of the day, smart validation hints on form input fields are a lot of easier to implement, and are well understood by users of all types in my experience; it's just generally a better, normal way of improving form conversion rates which is well documented, understood and measurable using analytics.

...unless you specifically need to add "uses AI" to your slide deck for your next round of funding.

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Larrikin ◴[] No.42905215[source]
>1) What form it is (i.e. can I see it?)

You would need to spend thousands of dollars to become a customer, if you are not already one.

>An agent interacts with a user.

Correct, they are asked to describe their problem. There are some follow up questions, then some very specific questions if the form still isn't filled out.

>The agent has free reign to fill out the form fields.

Correct but there are actually very few free form fields and a lot of selections.

>Guided by the user, the agent helps will out form fields in a way which is more accurate than users typing into the field themselves.

Correct, the form is filled out correctly more often now

>Guided by the user, the agent helps will out form fields in a way which is faster than users typing into the field themselves.

No, I specifically said it is not. I can fill out a junk but valid form in about 10 seconds and valid with relevant data for testing in about 30 seconds. It is not a long form, but your selections will change the next selections. But I also helped build the form and have seen it go through every iteration.

>At any time the user can opt to stop interacting with the the agent and fill in the fields and the agent must understand what's happened independently of the chat context. i.e. The form state has to be part of the chat bot's context.

Would be a nice feature upgrade but if the user abandons the bot they just fill out the form as normal, same as if they decided to skip the bot at the beginning.

>At the end, the details filled in by the agent are distinguished from user inputs for user review.

Do you mean how do we know if the chat bot was used or whether it fills out the form. Both are trivial.

>Has it increased the number of people filling in the form, or completing it correctly (or both?) ?

The ideal case is that they never need to request help, but nearly all users will need help maybe once or twice a year unless something is really wrong. But yes, the number of users filling out the form incorrectly has decreased. Seems like the users don't mind spending 2-5 minutes per year chatting with the bot.

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1. wokwokwok ◴[] No.42905773[source]
> You would need to spend thousands of dollars to become a customer, if you are not already one.

Can you be more specific?

Like, where specifically would I have to spend money to see this.

> Seems like the users don't mind spending 2-5 minutes per year chatting with the bot.

This seems like an enormous amount of effort to have gone to for a single form that people use once a year.

Did you roll out the chatbot assist to other forms? If not, why not? If so, are any of those forms easier to get access to that we can see either live or in a video?

Honestly, this is why I get frustrated with these conversations.

If it works so well, why isn't this sort of thing rolled out in many, visible, obvious places. Why is it hidden away behind paywalls and internal systems where no one can see it?

Why isn't everyone doing it? I've visited 4 websites today which had a chat bot on them, and none of them had a way for the bot to interact with anything on the page other than their own chat context.

Like I said, I'm sure it works to some degree, and varying degrees depending how much effort you put into it... but I'm frustrated I can never find someone who's so proud of it working they can go HERE, look at THIS example of it working.

Does anyone have an example we can actually look at?