Add "fucking" to your Google searches to neutralize AI summaries

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.

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.

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.

My partner has dyslexia and finds forms overwhelming. Chatbots break this down and (I suspect) give the same feeling of guidance. As for specific examples NHS has some terribly overwhelming forms and processes - image search IAPTUS.

Another example; I was part of a team that created a chatbot which helped navigate internal systems for call centre operators. If a customer called in, we would pick up on keywords and that provided quick links for the operator and pre-fill details like accounts etc. The operator could type questions too which would bring up the relevant docs or links. I did think looking into the UX would’ve been a better time spend and solved more problems as the system was chaos but “client wants”. What we built in the end did work well and reduced onboarding and training by 2 weeks.

> As for specific examples NHS has some terribly overwhelming forms and processes - image search IAPTUS.

Are those example where a chatbot helps fill out the form, or just examples of where forms are hard?

My image search did not find any results of AI chatbots that helped fill out the form for you. Do you have a direct link to a form by any chance?