Posted by nnx 4/1/2025
Absolutely agree. An agent running in the background.
Comparing "What's the weather in London" with clicking the weather app icon is misleading and too simplistic. When people imagine a future driven by conversational interfaces, they usually picture use cases like:
1. "When is my next train leaving?"
2. "Show me my photos from the vacation in Italy with yellow flowers on them"
3. "Book a flight from New York to Zurich on {dates}"
...
And a way to highlight what's faster/less-noisy is to compare how natural language vs. mouse/touch maps onto the Intent -> Action. The thing is that interactions like these are generally so much more complex. E.g. Does the machine know what 'my' train is? If it doesn't, can it offer reasonable disambiguation? If it can't, what then? And does it present the information in a way where the next likely action is reachable, or will I need to converse about it?
You could picture a long table listing similar use cases in different contexts and compare various input methods and modalities and their speed. Flicking a finger on a 2d surface or using a mouse and a keyboard is going to be — on average — much faster and with less dead-ends.
Conversational interfaces are not the future. Imo even in the sense of 'augmenting', it's not going to happen. Natural-language driven interface will always play the role of a supporting (still important, though!) role. An accessibility aid when e.g. temporarily, permanently, or contextually not able to use the primary input method to 'encode your intent'.
You know, doesn't matter what you say. If businesses want something, they'll do it to you whether it's the best interface or not.
Amazon forces "the rabble" into their chatbot customer service system, and hides access to people.
People get touchscreens in their car and fumble to turn on their fog lights or defrost in bad weather. They get voice assistant phone trees and angrily yell "operator and agent".
I really wish there were true competition that would let people choose what works for them.
Just infuriating. Instead of a normal date- and timepicker where I could see available slots, it's a chat where you have to click certain options. Then I had to reply "Ja" (yes) when it asked me if I had clicked the correct date. And then when none of the times of the day suited me, I couldn't just click a new date on the previous message, I instead have to press "vis datovelger på nytt"/show datepicker again, and get a new chat message where I this time select a different date and answer "Ja" again to see the available time slots. It's slow and useless. The title bar of the page says "Microsoft Copilot Studio", some fancy tech instead of a simple form..