Chatbots were the next big thing: what happened? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.growthbot.org/chatbots-were-the-next-big-thing-what-happened <comment><USER4> Chatbots were never the "next big thing" by any measurable metric other than artificial hype created by the companies trying to create a new platform for extracting revenue and data from users.

For this argument to make any sense, there would need to be data that showed growing usage of chatbots, followed by a plateau and then a drop off. I'm not sure what that data looks like, but I'm pretty sure there was never a high growth phase where users were actually interacting with the chatbots. It was all hype created by Facebook and a few idiotic VCs who wasted money on what they thought would be the "next App Store."

I, and many others, were saying around the time of this hype that chatbots would never become a category defining product, simply due to inherent usability flaws in their design that have been discussed ad nauseum.

The only people surprised that chatbots failed to become the "next big thing" are the people who mistakenly thought they ever would be. This assumption was never grounded in any real data of user desires or real problems. Chatbots were then, and are now, a solution looking for a problem. I'm not surprised at all.

<comment><USER5> I fully agree with you. I also dismissed Google Glass and other hypes. I feel smart about that.

On the other hand, if someone would have pitched Facebook to me, I would have also dismissed it. I keep that mind to stay humble.

For any trend/hype there will always be people dismissing and praising it. Thus, if it is successful or not, there will be people who say "I told you so" afterwards.

It does not matter what a comment on HN says. You personally have to decide, if you want to speculate/invest in some hype or not. You have to decide which new technology you learn and which ones you ignore. In hindsight, it would have been great to learn machine learning five years ago.

<comment><USER6> Eh, Facebook was a natural evolution of social networks going back to MySpace, Friendstr, SixDegrees. Each one fixing mistakes of the past and becoming the next big thing until their own mistakes caught up to them.

The one that I dismissed was Twitter. In fact I thought it was a joke when I first heard about it, something making fun of how long winded boring blog posts on services like Livejournal tended to be. I also thought Vine would be doomed to fail.

<comment><USER7> I also thought twitter was a joke until I realized most Americans are too lazy to write a blog post, or even read one.

"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." - Mencken (paraphrased)

[http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2011/09/no-one-ever-went- brok...](http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2011/09/no-one-ever-went-broke- underestimating.html)

<comment><USER8> Twitter is the weird thing it is because it began with an SMS interface (hence 140 characters). It took off originally because you didn't need a smart phone or a data plan or a PC to use it.

<comment><USER9> I thought it took off because they managed to get celebrities on it.

<comment><USER10> This. Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore were amongst the first celebrities on Twitter to actually post the content themselves rather than by a manager/PR agent. This got a lot of media attention and many other celebs followed shortly after.

I still remember finding it strange to see how Ashton and Demi personally wrote short messages, since every form of communication from famous people at the time were formal statements released via the press.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's just like why all voice interfaces are shitty: no one has any idea what the thing can or cannot do. They have a hidden user experience but the interface makes it feel like you're talking to a human, but it's so far from being a human.

These interfaces are almost like a dark pattern because of how bad they are.

<comment><USER12> The audio interfaces are so bad I resort to one-word answers to every question, to get me to a human as fast as possible.

 _" Hi, in a few words, what can I help you with today?"_

> "billing"

 _" It sounds like you have a question about your bill. I can help you with that! If you can give a few words to describe the reason you are calling, I can help you with your bill."_

> "billing"

 _" OK, let me get you to a representative who can help!"_

... instead of spending 10 minutes wrangling with the vapid AI, I can actually move on with my day after speaking to a human. Was this the future we envisioned in the 90s? I think not. Some systems let you spam 0 (zero) and it transfers to a human, but more and more are requiring you to interface with the system in some way, even if disabled or impaired.

<comment><USER13> 'Agent' or 'representiative' will usually do it faster.

But I hear you. I recently wanted to change the ownership of my cellphone account. "Change ownership", "It sounds like you want to change cellphone plans, is that correct?", "Agent", "Okay, let me get you to a representative".

The only tasks these things are equipped to do, are the tasks that I can do via the company's online portal, and in a much less frustrating manner. I wonder who is actually using these things.

<comment><USER14> It's likely that these are for company itself. Ain't no one got time to deal with questions that are already explained on the website. This is made to filter mindless or lazy drones who don't want to search and its totally fair.

<comment><USER15> I've noticed that companies without IVR lines have switched from hold music to recordings that repeatedly list all the things you can handle online instead.

It's annoying when my issue isn't on the list, since I'll have to hear it 50 times. And it's incredibly aggravating when my issue _is_ on the list, but the website doesn't actually work right. But it's not hard to understand why it happens.

<comment><USER16> I was on hold with my insurance to file a claim, the IVR loop said for the third time "Did you know? You can file your claim online!" so I gave in, hung up, went online and all the form asks for is my contact information (phone + email) and my preferred method, so I enter email.

I get an email "Hey, I need to contact you so we can proceed, what method would you prefer?" I reply "Email, please" provide the information I assume the rep needs and which the online form should have been able to ask me and offer "What else do you need".

"Is there a time I can call you and [go over the script and fill out a form on my computer, as if you'd just stayed on hold hours ago]?"

10/10

<comment><USER17> I see you too have had to deal with AAA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I always found the chatbot idea odd, it felt like a step backwards in terms of interaction. We started out with very basic input methods to computers, like punch cards. Then we moved onto a command line interface where you could type in words. Then we eventually got GUIs, graphics, websites, all sorts of complex and nuanced ways to interact with a computer.

To go back to interfacing with a program using written language seemed like an odd step. It's never been the most efficient way of doing something, and it requires very advanced technology to accurately understand what people are trying to say, in whatever slang, shorthand, or bad spelling/grammar they use.

Besides, it's not really dead, the tech just moved to "voice assistants" rather than "chatbots" \- really just spoken word rather than written word. And I'm not convinced that's the "revolution" most people are expecting either. I'll stick to clicking buttons and typing things into my terminal.

<comment><USER19> Yes, it kind of reminds me of those old text adventures where you had to guess what the computer would understand

>get sword

I don't know what "sword" is.

<comment><USER20> Yes. There is a reason why we don't have text based adventures anymore. Because we can have new ones with beautiful graphics and interfaces.

<comment><USER21> The human-machine communication issues are the same in both cases. When a video game doesn't understand what you're trying to do, nothing would happen or you get a negative, non-specific feedback. You think it is better because you get distracted by the colors, lights and sounds but the communication channel is as narrow, if not narrower actually.

By the way, what OP says may be true of a game like Dunnet. I don't know if it is no more maintained or if it is kept that way because nostalgia, but more recent text-based games (that is, one that could have been programmed by your father instead of your grandfather) do way better than this. Just try some popular MUD (the MMO version of text adventures), I'm sure you'll be surprised.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Whenever a company's phone is answered by an AI, it never does what I ask it to do.

At that point I just push 0 and repeat "speak to a human."

Why, oh why, would any rational person think that this kind of technology was about to suddenly take over everything?

This is a typical example of groupthink delusions.

<comment><USER23> Unintelligible grunting works too. After a few "I'm sorry, I didn't get that" it always transfers me to a human.

The most annoying part of the experience to me is the menu items are always ~25 things I can trivially do on the website. No, I'm not calling to check my balance, pay a balance, update payment information, etc. I'm calling because your website specifically said that function isn't available online and I need to speak to a representative.

<comment><USER24> My guess is that most people call for stuff that's easily doable in the website, but they can't or won't use it

<comment><USER25> My father in law, who at 71 is fairly tech savvy, still defaults to calling when he needs help with something. He's always saying "I was on the phone with Apple for 3 hours yesterday" or "I was on the phone with Xfinity all day yesterday."

I think if you're from a certain era, you just pick up the phone first and want to talk to somebody, even if it might be pretty easy to find what you're looking for online.

<comment><USER26> Must depend on eras, yes, because personally I avoid using the phone at all costs. I'd rather take my eyes out with a spindle gouge than talk to someone over the damn phone

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> 1\. "Chatbots" is horrible branding. Especially with the hype coming near the unfortunate timing of Russian bots interfering in the US election.

2\. "Chatbot" makes me think the user is leading the conversation. The bot is interpreting what the human says, and then the bot tries to respond appropriately. This leads to customer service or operations (like calling a car) use cases. These specific use cases are hard to pilot, hard to get right and really tricky to show value to the user or the company. I've never seen a compelling problem/solution/use case for customer service chatbots. The math doesn't work.

3\. Messaging is a real channel. It has advantages over phone calls, email, direct mail and even face to face conversations. Chatbots just aren't the right concept for the messaging channel. Dentist reminders work great for instance.

4\. If you like thinking about this stuff, I do a podcast all about messaging. It's called The Chat Bubble, and this episode is a good place to start if you want to go deep on FB Messenger. [http://thechatbubble.com/2017/11/edit- content-the-playbook-o...](http://thechatbubble.com/2017/11/edit-content-the- playbook-overview-the-4-top-marketing-use-cases-for-facebook-messenger/)

<comment><USER28> I'm curious about #3. I've done some online chats with tech support where I was chatting with a real person, and I found them infuriating. First there was the very fake small talk the reps are required to do. Then there are the long pauses between when I input information and when they react to it because they're clearly chatting with 4 or more different people at the same time. Then they don't really read what I wrote carefully and give answers that make no sense or that I've already said don't work.

Like anything, it depends on how the person on the other end acts, but in my experience, they're set up to make the interaction repulsive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think it's equally wrong to just write off chatbots. They are a User Interface tool that works in some areas and doesn't in others (and recently has been dramatically misapplied).

Chatbots work well as an input when your hands are otherwise occupied:

\- driving/directions (Google Maps telling you where to go)

\- cooking (reciting a recipe)

They work well when you're requesting a specific thing:

\- "Play Everlasting Light by the Black Keys"

\- "Add Eggs to my shopping list"

\- Responding to Answers in Jeopardy: "What is Syracuse?"

They can work as an alternative CTA in certain narrow areas where they function like a traditional "wizard". I've seen some ecommerce stats for things like "Are you shopping for a Fathers Day Gift? Does your dad like sports? Does your dad like gadgets? Want to see some popular gift ideas?"

Where they don't work:

\- complex NLP dependencies

\- data entry

\- when there is an expectation set that you're talking to a human.

<comment><USER30> I'm curious, are there any good Alexa/ghome apps that do recipes _well_

As in, not just reciting but allowing me to ask how much of X is needed or what the next step is? That would be great

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Users never wanted chatbots, really. But platforms wanted them because it meant yet another way to ensure content is locked away inside their platform. So, platforms shout to the high heavens, and everyone rushes to adopt they realise there is no audience.

<comment><USER32> And customer service costs for companies could be reduced to basically zero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> > An oversized assumption has been that apps are 'over', and would be replaced > by bots

That was never going to be the case for sufficiently complicated tasks with enough decisions to make. Same reason Google Home/Echo are awkward interfaces for almost anything other than getting music to start playing.

GUIs on phones/desktop are tremendously productive because they're information rich and trivial to use. I can search, choose, customize, and purchase an item on Amazon in like 15-30 seconds flat. A bot isn't going to beat that for the general case.

<comment><USER34> > GUIs on phones/desktop are tremendously productive

They used to say that GUIs were toy interfaces and only CLIs could offer real productivity. I don't know where chatbots are going but I wouldn't expect the current state of the art to be anything like where they end up.

<comment><USER35> The reason the productivity of CLIs was often extolled is because throughout most of interactive computing's lifetime, CLIs and scripting have been intertwined.

It was possible and commonplace to invoke parameter-oriented CLIs from another process, and use the CLI as a perfectly adequate API, while other interface paradigms like TUIs and GUIs never quite achieved such ease of programmatic manipulation.

<comment> yoz-y CLIs are still vastly more productive for repetitive tasks and are quite passable as an API. For one-off things GUIs are usually better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> For me, Chatbots felt like almost a violation of my privacy. Many marketing industry related sites would get your permission to send you an eBook, but would slowly after a couple of days drop you a random message about an upsell to their event/conference/webinar/coaching (some random high ticket value item) and it's terrible than email spam because email is not intrusive, but chatbots are VERY intrusive. Suddenly, my phone would buzz, my chrome would send me a notification and my watch would vibrate all at the same time only to find out that this shitty marketing firm had sent me something I don't care about. And the worst ones are the ones that keep sending you stuff with no way to opt out unless you resort to blocking them. These should be made illegal.

Another case study - I worked with a large pizza chain to implement chatbots onto their site. In the end, I (although I knew I'd lose money) told them that their basic add to cart, checkout experience on their e-commerce site was far better than a chatbot asking you 101 questions to make a f __g pizza. I didn 't advice them based on just intuition, we actually setup Google analytics and saw that the conversion rates were far better on the E-Commerce site and that it was impossible for the IT team to keep up with the marketing team that kept running promotions which led to tons of edge cases for their ordering flow.

So, another example of great technology, great potential, but destroyed by greedy marketers, poor implementations and businesses that simply want to ruin an otherwise perfectly customer work flow.

<comment><USER27> To your first point, Facebook has clear policy against sending a marketing message more than 24 hours after a user messages in. They just haven't been enforcing it. You can definitely report them in the app.

With SMS, in the US, it is illegal if a company is sending unwanted texts. Covered in the TCPA - Telephone Consumer Protection Act ~2015. Any legitimate provider will automatically opt you out of the campaign if you reply STOP. You can also copy the text and forward it to the number that spells SPAM (7726). They will send a bounceback and ask you what number sent the message.

It's super cludgy, but the carriers do seem to act on complaints, although it can happen slowly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Chatbots have no ability to interpret unexpected responses, and are very infrequently trained correctly. My electric company has a good chatbot, because when I said:

"The electric pole outside my apartment looks like it's going to fall over"

It ended up using that sentence to determine that I should go to emergency on- call, which is all it needed to do; further parsing was irrelevant. But then I called Fedex this morning and told their chatbot:

"My package has a delivery exception."

And it simply couldn't wrap its head around the problem at all — apparently Fedex doesn't train it to recognize terms displayed to shippers! — and so I had to battle through the usual "operator, domestic, 1234" route.

If you have a chatbot, be absolutely sure to train it on every word your company uses for official purposes. The electric company clearly recognizes "pole" \+ "falling" as an emergency, but Fedex doesn't recognize "exception" because their mindset is "which division of Fedex Multinational Conglomerocorp do you need", even though they directly asked "why are you calling".

<comment><USER38> I bet the electric company probably takes all instances of "electric pole" to be a probable emergency report, since that is probably the most frequent reason for somebody to be mentioning an electric pole and it's safer to default to assuming an emergency.

I bet if you said something like _" This electric pole isn't good for the aesthetic of my neighborhood, please bury your wires."_ it would assume that to be an emergency too (or maybe mentioning buried wires would take you to the "call before you dig" department...)

<comment><USER37> Yes! Precisely correct, and as it should be. If I'm calling to discuss an electric pole, no computer system is going to react properly, no matter how many phone tree options it has. Better to risk a false positive of an aesthetic complaint now and then, than to have someone give up and hang up and then their house burns down later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> We've had a better alternative to "chatbots" for a long time, it's called a command line.

All of this obsession over "natural language processing" is annoying to me.

I have a Google home, and it can't do even the most basic things and struggles to understand whenever I tell it to do something.

It would be nice if I could just talk to my Google home as if it was a command line, with very explicit and specific commands that do powerful things. "Google take a note. Do the laundry." "Google play spotify on the living room speaker" etc. Instead the interface is an unhelpful mess that doesn't know how to help me get it to do what I want.

I feel that it is the same with chatbots. Stop trying to process natural language, and give me a command prompt with good documentation and user on- boarding.

<comment><USER40> Actually I could see chatbots being useful if they behaved more like command line applications, with functionality known ahead of time and a language model that doesn't change. Then I could just prepare a script and do something like:

        cat cancel_service.script | /use/bin/comcast_dialer

and let the bot talk to my script and execute the needed task.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I think all people with some technical insight could've told you that 3 years ago. But still I'm happy the world finally realizes it. Now it only(!) takes another 5-10 years until my employer figures it out. Some of these bigger companies just start to bet on chat bots, but of course will fail at the same hurdles as everybody else.

</comment><comment><USER42> 'Next big things' are never the next big thing.

What happened with Chatbots was the result of some very very poor 'ui translation' from Asian apps. The product designers and managers of the western world looked at 'mega chat apps' like WeChat and Line that have all these built in apps and interfaces and tried to replicate that. Instead somehow they thought they were textual chat interfaces (buy plane tickets in natural language) when in reality they all had their own GUI with buttons and things to press.

Then all the businesses and agencies and consultants that thought they could cash in on this opportunity saw it and started pushing it even harder.

There was never any real user problem that this was solving - just businesses trying to cash in.

<comment><USER43> > 'Next big things' are never the next big thing

Counterpoints: web, mobile, cloud

<comment><USER44> Countercounterpoint:

cloning, the semantic web, and fog computing

<comment><USER45> That's not really a counterargument when the original claim was "never" and parent provided examples of times it did occur.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Disclaimer, I work for a chatbot startup that is doing really well in the Nordics. In two years we have grown from 3 employees to almost 100. Chatbots are a real big thing, our business is stronger than ever, end-users and our customers are engaged in this! We solve real business problems, we integrate the chatbot with existing business systems. With this is mind, chatbots are not perfect, but most end-users are forgiving and accept this.

Chatbots are not a fad, its a real thing, and you will only see more of them in the coming years.

<comment><USER43> Out of genuine curiosity, what real business problems do chatbots solve? The only ones I encounter are "customer support" bots, but I'm wondering if there are other uses that businesses and customers find value in.

<comment><USER46> Good question! Some things a chatbot excels at:

Finding information quickly: no menus, no clicking around, no more searching.

Customer facing chatbots are one alternative, but many of our clients also have internal chatbots for either HR stuff, or for finding internal information. One good example we see is onboarding new employees who benefit from a chatbot as they ask a lot of questions. Also they are not afraid of asking too many questions as they no longer fear that they are nagging nor asking "dumb questions".

Automating processes: for example filling out the insurance form. Or filling out tax returns. Placing an order, getting status of an order. There are also a lot of HR tasks that gets automated. How many days of vacation there is left, business travel, arranging meetings, company benefits and so on.

Think about it this way, a chatbot is a very advanced full text search engine that excels at filtering out most of the noise. That is also why they have another name, virtual assistants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Actually, they may not be the "next big thing", but they're still a pretty huge deal. Especially for IT and ecommerce support. The support sector is estimated to a value of a few trillions of USD / year in the coming years, because of the progressive shift of large cohorts of customers to the cloud.

The point is not to have chat-bots handle all cases, but if they can handle 80% of cases, which are generally trivial, then it'll good enough.

Of course I hate talking to a bot just like anyone else, and being cornered into a dead-end discussion with one, or to be in an infinite loop, or in a situation where the bot has no answer and does not offer another path to resolution. But, from a business perspective, it's a rather sound approach to have people go through a bot first rather than have every single complaint clog an inbox. It doesn't scale so well.

<comment><USER48> HR support within organisations, too. I'm aware of some large organistaions currently investing in chatbots right now to help people find out how many vacation days they have left, find policies relating to their job etc.

Though this issue might equally be resolved by intranet search engines no longer being painfully bad (e.g. ones powered by Microsoft Graph).

<comment><USER49> Why does that need to be a chatbot, though?

That seems like it should be something that could be a trivial CRUD website, with far less complexity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I seem to remember these were the objections that were made at the time.

The basic tech dates back to SHRDLU and ELIZA. In some ways this is similar to the partially-self-driving-car problem: if it's a mechanical interface where the human is in control it's fine, and if it's a hypothetical human-equivalent AI it's fine, but in the middle people forget to adapt to the limitations of the system. And the limitations are very severe as soon as you go outside the lines.

<comment><USER51> AsI recall, Terry Winograd later claimed SHRDLU was the beginning of the end of the strong AI trajectory, at least at that time. I believe he, or someone close, said the central weakness of the system was that when it failed, it did not have any understanding that it had failed, much less why. Seems this is the current SOTA in chatbots now, given the somewhat snarky examples in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> There are/were two main problems with chatbots.

1) There's a huge consolidation around Siri, Alexa, and Google. No one wants to download an app, and you're never going to win against wake words.

2) Doing the NLU and intent modeling is really hard to get right. All too often, someone comes along, thinks all they have to do skis throw together some regexps or toss the neural net du jour over some text and it will all just work. It won't. It doesn't. It's just really really embarrassing.

Intelligent back off is a thing. Understanding when you don't understand something is a thing. Conversation management is a thing. UX matters.

Also, trying to fake chatbots with people, and then saying "We'll just train up a model and get rid of those folks" was never going to work, because you'd always have to have people, because you set your bar at hard AI then. Sure, that's a decent strategy of you already have a call center that you're trying to cut costs on, but for a startup, that's just hubris.

</comment><comment><USER53> I'm the creator of a Slack bot (Pull Reminders). I ended up building a web UI to configure the bot rather than using slash commands. The main reason for this was that Slack's platform is still evolving and I thought it'd be difficult to build an intuitive experience/interface within Slack. I've seen other Slack apps do a pretty good job at this though. Check out Eventbot or GitHub's official Slack app.

It's been fun figuring out how to tackle UX problems like onboarding and engagement with Slack as the primary channel (versus email). I think chat is replacing email for many teams and so there's a big opportunity to rethink traditional workflows with a "chat first" user experience.

</comment><comment><USER54> Recently built a chat/comms. system for my last company. I think key to this user experience is automatically routing to a human when AI systems cannot determine intent. Most cloud products in this space now provide some way to determine a confidence measure. IE the default should be human interaction, unless an intent is certain and a simple remedial action can be taken. This kind of workflow does have the ability to increase efficiency, and improve customer experience if done correctly, but it can easily go wrong.

For example, with my bank, automated telephone banking is often much more efficient and quicker, than talking to a human CSR/Banker, for moving money around in my accounts.

</comment><comment><USER55> > On the input side, it's easier and faster to click than it is to type.

I disagree with this. It may be easier, but it is in no way faster. For those who don't use computers very often I can see it being slower. But for people who use computers on a daily basis, for mice to still be a commonly used input device is disappointing. With constant context switches, moving an object across the desk with you wrist, while keeping your fingers in the same place to click, and carefully putting the cursor just in the right place isn't nearly as fast as the same interface using typing. Or comfortable for that matter.

I'm not saying I disagree with the article as a whole.

 _EDIT: typo_

<comment><USER56> The GUI makes a computer easy to use, while the CLI makes a specific job quick to execute.

<comment><USER55> I think that a combination of GUI with a keyboard can be great too. I think CLIs have stuck around for so long for their consistency. You type something and press return. The web on the other end of a spectrum is full of surprises and therefore requires something to be able to handle it's unpredictability.

Who knows what is really going to happen if I press Tab here? Will it really bring me to the next field or some random link in the other side of the page?

I wouldn't doubt that once the web finally settled down from this hype, people will find ways to get the full potential out of both GUI and the keyboard in a consistent way.

The web is the only reason I need a mouse during work anymore.

<comment><USER57> "I think that a combination of GUI with a keyboard can be great too."

Yup. Spreadsheets proved this many years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Hype is nothing but unrealistic optimism and thats what the current world of tech is filled with. People see staged demo and the media start throwing wild speculations. I never ever get excited by any demo and thats what I suggest to people but I guess the whole stupid idea of "be optimistic" is so rampant in current culture that people just blindly start following anything.

</comment><comment><USER59> I think we set the goals way to high. It seems like everyone expected "chatbots" to be in their final form right away. Currently, the best "chatbots" aren't really chatbots, but act of as sort of human backed, virtual assistant in a narrow but widening domain. For example, real estate. Most real estate companies have an insides sales agents that does lead qualification, sets appointments, etc. There's a company in the space doing this now and judging from their website, they are doing alright.

[https://structurely.com](https://structurely.com)

I don't see one mention of "chatbot" on their page, it's always virtual assistant. Even just checking out their marketing material it looks pretty compelling. [https://research.structurely.com/customers](https://research.structurely.com/customers)

<comment><USER60> Im the CEO @ Structurely.

We made a deliberate decision not to call ourselves a chatbot, as the stigma around them is poor and didn't want to get lumped into that category.

We decided that an A.I. assistant is more aligned with our product - which is backed by humans - but a very vast majority of our conversations are handled entirely by A.I. only.

Every conversation here was 100% A.I. [https://research.structurely.com/customers](https://research.structurely.com/customers)

Good chatbot companies have to deliberately not call themselves chatbots. X.ai is another good example who calls their "chatbots" A.I. assistants on purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> When every tech journalism outfit is saying "<X> is the future." you can be sure it won't be.

<comment><USER62> Kind of like when your taxi driver is giving you stock market advice.

The most obviously useful technology, usually is only obvious in hindsight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> To my mind chatbots are the great way to improve your marketing strategy. For example, our company provides different AI data analysis API's for businesses, such as multilingual summarization, news aggregation, sentiment analysis, data extraction and etc.

We are using chatbot [https://www.summarizebot.com](https://www.summarizebot.com) as a part of our marketing strategy. And this works. Potential clients in Slack and Facebook are using our chatbot and after getting interested in our SaaS solutions. The conversion rate in Slack is quit good since a lot of businesses are using it. The strategy is being successful since out potential leads are able to see and use our main technologies in the bot. Chatbot for us is like smart demo of our existing technologies and features.

</comment><comment><USER64> Having a chat with someone can be enlightening because the conversation can be engaging, can grow organically and the ensuing organic path can lead to insight.

Chatbots, to me, just don't feel very organic - it's very much a request/response paradigm, often with a limited set of useful responses (perhaps I have just encountered the basic ones). If that's all we're getting, I'd much rather just hit buttons on a screen, than type an entire question in the hope that the bot understands it (when it doesn't, it's just an annoying guessing game).

Plus, as other comments have mentioned, it's very hard to see what the bot is actually capable of. With a good screen based UI, the capabilities are much more obvious. If it's not fit for your purpose, you can just quickly move on.

</comment><comment><USER65> I think for the most part, chatbots are just stupid. They're like the untrained outsourced call center employee, except that the untrained call center employee at least has 20 years of experience interacting with humans in a non laboratory environment.

It's in the uncanny valley where it seems almost human like but a major turn off because it doesn't act like one.

It's probably just better to have the bots act like robots instead of "chatting".

</comment><comment><USER66> I'm one that's not easily swayed by hype usually.

I haven't jumped on the crypto bandwagon even, but I was working on a project midway through last year. It was a concept that would help people over come anxiety and depression so they could self-actualise and live a better life.

The thing with many people -- from out experience -- was that they don't necessarily always want to speak to a professional but they do want to share what they're feeling with someone they can trust. That's often a friend, but unfortunately friends aren't always in the best place to advise and sometimes inadvertently can make the situation worse. So we decided to build a bot that was anonymous enough to create enough abstraction but friendly enough to help. The content was driven by experts in the field.

Anyway. The whole concept just kept failing. We could barely get people past the first stage of questions. We tried so many different platforms, we did so many user studies and we kept trying to iterate but it just kept failing and all this time I did wonder in the back of my head if an app would have been a better idea. Now I know it would have probably at least been a better idea than a bot.

</comment><comment><USER67> IMHO the thing to get excited about is the potential for a somewhat ubiquitous UI to get my stuff done; not the NPL. Hopefully NPL will continue to improve and be leveraged more in the UI. But right now, the prospect of ditching the seemingly infinite number of GUIs I have to deal with between the web and mobile apps for tasks/bots in the messaging platform of my choice is what's peeked my interest.

<comment><USER68> I agree completely.

Side note: It's "piqued" my interest... [http://www.dictionary.com/e/pique- peak-peek/](http://www.dictionary.com/e/pique-peak-peek/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Chatbots solve the same problem as a search interface, but in a way that is lower bandwidth, less intuitive, and mildly personally insulting (the attitude from the company using the chatbot seems to be 'our users totally will not mind wasting time trying to interact with a really shitty set of canned responses'). The bigger question for me is 'why did anyone think this was a good idea?'

</comment><comment><USER70> Chatbots are an infantilization. Just give me a list of commands I can type straight in and quit with the fake human bit.

Chatbots are basically command lines with some guidance for non expert users. Convenient when you don't want to build a bunch of custom GUI for new features but often gives a worse user experience when the commands are dreadfully buried in long winded conversations.

</comment><comment><USER71> Chatbots are the next big thing. The reason they didn't take over is because NLP and AI sucks (and "sucks" is putting it very lightly). Current AI is stuck in a rut, and they don't even realize it. True innovation in AI will come, and surprise everyone, and like all innovations before, it will come from cutting edge scientific research.

</comment><comment><USER72> I'm unable to recall a single instance in my life where an automated system was more useful than talking to a human or having great documentation.

From phone directory systems to automated help-desk responses, I've spent more time in recent years trying to get around an automated hurdle to talk to a human than waiting on a forum response in 2004 or sitting on hold back in the days of 1-800 help numbers.

Chatbots were a predictable failure.

Maybe I'm just older now. Settled in my ways so to speak. But I've dedicated my professional life my tradecraft of media production and publishing. At some point the technology tools stopped focusing on improving life or solving the problem.

\- The first VR movement was WAY too premature. \- 3D TV's were DOA. \- 4k+ / High resolution is a drastically misused/misunderstood medium and technology. \- The current VR movement just simply doesn't have a platform that can support the level of processing and bandwidth needed to be worthwhile. \- Apple has lost it's way. \- I don't even know what Google actually does now, but I cared more when the search engine was amazing. \- There's too much media, not enough curation. \- Blogs and personal websites were the golden age of great information \- RIP copy editors \- Social Media is a game of smoke and mirrors \- WHO IS CLICKING ON ALL THESE ADS?!? Nobody I know, yet the big players are making billions? Are the ads worthless? Are we going to wake up one day to see the internet crashing and burning the same way cable television is? Don't get me started on newspapers. \- AR is back? Why?!? \- I'd love for RSS to make a comeback, if there was anything left to subscribe to. \- AI seems to be the future but I've yet to be impressed. The things that are promising are far out of reach from everyday users that it just seems far far away at this point. \- Fortnight seems to have hit the nail on the head.

</comment><comment><USER35> With the chatbot hype, there was a healthy number of skeptics throughout: people who wondered about the technical realities of delivering satisfying UX, ones who worried about unanswered questions about business models, and ones who figured out that this future would be most beneficial to gatekeeper- platforms who'd then act as discovery facilitators for users to select from among competing bots, rather than for botmakers themselves.

It's no accident that Amazon and Google are currently leading in the consumer voice assistant market: they had large, pre-existing base of users and enough intrinsic first-party functionality to bootstrap their assistants into rudimentary usefulness, but then they built platforms where third-parties could compete for users the same way it happened for apps. In the app boom, aside from a few runaway hits, the only ones who reliably got rich were the platform-owners.

</comment><comment><USER73> Probably people realised that in many cases, a chatbot simply wasn't a good choice of interface for the product/service they were building. Yes, they can work well in some cases, like with help desk type support, sales, general gimmickry on chat rooms and forums, etc.

But in a lot of cases, a traditional UI (whether visual or command line focused) is simply far more usable than a bot, and people/companies realised that. As much as it may sound old fashioned, talking to everyone is not necessarily better than using a keyboard/mouse/controller/whatever, and having a bot that has to figure out what you want with far less sophistication than an actual person makes it even worse.

The technology isn't there yet for chatbots to be as useful as they need to be, and in many cases, bots and chat interfaces and what not simply aren't a good solution for the problem at hand either.

</comment><comment><USER74> Chatbots are a feature, not a product. I'm not a customer, but I would say Lemonade seems to have successfully used a chat-style bot as the main feature to onboard new customers. To me, I see context-driven "Google" searches such as WolframAlpha as more valuable than holding a text-style conversation with a bot.

</comment><comment><USER75> Chatbots were the "next big thing" just like how "Blockchain but not Bitcoin" is supposed to be the next big thing.

It's just bunch of people who look at existing phenomenon that's working (people use chat a lot on the phone), and then trying to turn it into something completely different (if people chat a lot, that probably means people want to buy stuff over chat a lot!), powered by dumb money (stupid VCs in case of "chatbots", and stupid ICO crowds in case of "blockchains")

The reason these things don't work is because the people who build these things don't truly understand why something is working, because the original product they tried to replicate was not easy to understand.

Same reason why it's so hard for dumb electronic companies to copy Apple. They think they know, but all they're copying is the superficial stuff, and they never work.

</comment><comment><USER76> A part of the job of a call centre operator is negotiation with the client - this is hard to do with a bot. Even more so that this is kind of hidden spec, because companies don't want to admit that the role of the call centre is to make it hard to get something from the company while pretending to enabling it.

</comment><comment><USER77> Chatbots can only work if they learn to communicate in the millennial language using emojis and acronyms - basically more urban dictionary than dictionary. The older generation, preferred talking to people over searching, or typing a message even if the talking meant they were on hold for 20 mins. Alexa solved for those with a voice based interface, as did google, and people realized that talking to a bot is better than typing. With the voice to text conversion equaling human capabilities, chatbots went down simply to be replaced by a newer and more easy to use technology. Only difference being that they did not get the time to be ubiquitous or become the next big thing as predicted. The evolution of the service, and CX was ultimately slower than what was expected and hence they are replaced/not popular anymore.

</comment><comment><USER78> Do you really have to ask? This AI merry-go-round has been spinning for decades now. I can't imagine people don't know the drill by now. We've all been riding this around, some of us our entire lives. The people who thought this was going to be the next big thing were just the latest fools to be fooled by this merry-go-round into thinking that AI is once again, just barely out of reach and reachable within a few years. As usual, they are proven wrong again and again because AI is so far from being useful for such tasks like having a conversation with humans. The bottom line is AI isn't there yet and probably won't be the next time the hype rolls around. Or the time after that. Or the time after that ... I should just write a loop here that likely won't break in our lifetimes or possibly anyone's.

</comment><comment><USER79> Chatbots basically killed a startup I was working with a couple years ago. We had really nice apps, with a realistic exit strategy. Then came "The Pivot", and we were all working on chatbots. Didn't take long for me to leave that company, who went out of business not long after.

<comment><USER80> Sounds like the company was dead anyway and you are mistaking causation. Companies that are "alive" don't pivot. Companies that are dying people to avoid death. That the company had to pivot suggests the owners decided the exit strategy wasn't actually realistic.

<comment><USER81> > Companies that are "alive" don't pivot.

They can pivot into being a company that is alive, though. Remember that Slack was a pivot from an online game.

<comment><USER82> I did not know that, any good rendition of that story available online?

<comment><USER81> I found this: [https://mastersofscale.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/11/13-the...](https://mastersofscale.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/11/13-the-big-pivot-with-slacks-stewart-butterfield-.pdf)

You can also see a piece of the game on Slack's 404 page! [http://slack.com/404](http://slack.com/404)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> I for one would LOVE to try a spoken UI for an email client. My thinking has always been that compromising sacrificing plain english with a more strict/limited set of mnemonic keywords would introduce a learning curve but with a bigger payoff in reducing confusion.

Also emails delivered from this sort of interface need some means of indication that they were a spoken format, not typed such that the reader properly understands the context.

To me, a verbal UI seems attainable by lowering the bar of what we expect from the AI. Lower the need for AI to interpret your requests from general english to limited keywords. Allow for an adjustable vocabulary for spoken word recognition to accomodate a smaller dictionary with less mistypings. Make it clear the produced content is dictated and not hand-written quality

</comment><comment><USER84> I called this like 2 years ago. I am still waiting for better apps.

[http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace- apps....](http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps.html)

</comment><comment><USER85> I think everyone has called their bank or cable company at least once or twice and found themselves lost in a Kafkaesque loop of not being able to get done what they needed and have subconsciously written 'bots' off as incapable of helping them perform a task, and/or an executive excuse to put tens of thousands of call center employees out of work. Just because it's on a website and the dialpad is replaced with words doesn't mean it's different.

Whether or not anyone wants to admit it, the whole "talking to robots" thing... I mean, the world is already empty and lonely enough without adding another layer of "inexorability" to the processes we engage in, in order to accomplish pretty basic tasks.

</comment><comment><USER86> The discussions here (at least what I've read so far) have been about customer service bots. That's not where chatbots are going to be fun and interesting. Fun and interesting is the "expert in your ear" that we'll soon have.

</comment><comment><USER87> I agree with the article in general when it comes to NLP, AI and the dull hype machine. But in certain domains well understood usage patterns in conversational interfaces have advantages over custom UI's. Conversational interfaces with micro UX elements, maps buttons images selectors ..., rather then text input. They advantage is a universal timeline. Be it booking a table in restaurant, ordering a car, searching for an article, all conversational interface allow you to go back in time in a uniform well understood way. By scrolling back. Also your interaction history is searchable. No need to introduce a new UX element for that.

</comment><comment><USER88> Chatbots were the next big thing before VR was the next big thing before 3D printing was the next big thing before...

You get the point.

Crypto is the next big thing right now and like all these "big things", it's going to fall flat on its face as well

</comment><comment><USER89> Chatbots represent an extremely and unnecessarily pessimistic view of humanity. We are interfacing with a machine, that has a certain API. Now, we have two choices:

(1) Assume humans are too stupid to be able to adapt their communication and learn something about what that API is capable of and what commands it understands.

(2) Credit humans with the ability to do it; perhaps even evolve their communication abilities a little to go along with this brave new world populated by AIs.

No intelligent human wants to talk to an API in natural language when they have some idea of the capabilities of that API and the commands it understands.

</comment><comment><USER90> There's a lot of discussion here about hype, but I think many are overlooking exactly why expectations were so high.

Downloads of new mobile applications have been decreasing in growth steadily for years now[0]. Instead, user's spend more time inside their existing applications, particularly messenger applications. Take a look at just a few of their user bases:

      - Facebook Messenger - 1.2B+ [1]
      - Whatsapp - 1B+ [2]
      - Kik - 300m  [3]

Considering that writing a single bot that was capable to connecting to all of these platforms was trivial, it gave the developer access to a new and very significant user base.

Add to this the fact that Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Slack and others, with a combined market cap in the trillions, were simultaneously contributing to the support of chatbots in one way or another.

It's a classic rendition of the Hype Cycle[4]. We're probably somewhere in the _" Trough of Disillusionment"_, but give it a few years and we'll get to the _" Plateau of Productivity"_, and chatbots will probably make their way to a more useful purpose.

[0]: [https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/29/forget-apps-now-the- bots-t...](https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/29/forget-apps-now-the-bots-take- over/) [1]: [https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/12/messenger/](https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/12/messenger/) [2]: [https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/1/10889534/whats- app-1-billi...](https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/1/10889534/whats- app-1-billion-users-facebook-mark-zuckerberg) [3]: [https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/11/kik-already-has- over-6000-...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/11/kik-already-has- over-6000-bots-reaching-300-million-registered-users/) [4]:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle#/media/File:Gartner...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle#/media/File:Gartner_Hype_Cycle.svg)

</comment><comment><USER91> With most advanced interfaces or tech, people adapt their interactions to the tool as well. If the tool is capable of evolution, then there is perhaps an equilibrium point where people can be productive with the tool in an idiosyncratic way. This doesn't seem to be considered by people proposing AI agents. "Enactive cognition" \- where cognition is compared to the way a cell and its environment mutually define the boundary between each other - <USER2> perhaps the model to pay attention to here.

</comment><comment><USER92> My city went to one to pay for water, trash pickup, etc. It's a horrible experience to use. It takes longer and is less efficient than just logging into a modern website and paying.

</comment><comment><USER93> Perhaps even more worrying then that nothing came out of it: now all that money has flowed into the hands of short-term opportunistic thinkers who might amplify or incentivize even more hype driven companies in the next iteration of this mechanism. Sure, by no means are all of them bad apples (some just jumped on the bandwagon but will long term perhaps become the next Elon Musk), but I think a strong argument could be made that there are enough people of that ilk in the cohort to be worried.

<comment><USER94> If the chatbot revolution didn't happen then did those people make a return? Or are you saying it's the employees getting paid (who also piled onto the dad) who are now the ones with capital?

<comment><USER93> The chatbot revolution didn't happen but there were plenty of companies sold, with founders who've now gone on to become investors (of the, I claim, possibly hype-jumping kind).

<comment> le-mark Were they not all hype jumping before, as you say?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> I have someone to chat to and they're aren't a bot, and maybe they have like a lifetime of experiences from a nation I will never really know and cannot really imagine. It's cool and I have utmost respect for it. I've worked with humans from places where food is considered sacred and given away for free, places where the Volkswagen is almost the only auto to be found, and humans who have survived genocides. They are worth a premium, sirs!!

</comment><comment><USER96> The two biggest flaws with building chatbots are a) the lack of good tools to express chat flows at a higher level (no, modeling it as a graph isn't good enough) and b) no Natural Language Generation that's good enough to trust in production.

The first one leads to subpar bots that can't respond to most things, the second means humans have to fill the 'long-tail' of potential responses by hand, which is impossible.

<comment><USER97> I think the biggest flaw is chat is just a black hole of a UI. Until the machine is a full AI, you have to be able to put boundaries and parameters on expected inputs. Otherwise, it's like putting a casual user in front of a Linux terminal and asking them to use a website via curl. Unless you give them very visible paths to interaction, you're done. The fact is, we have had that kind of thing for ages and it's called IVR.

<comment><USER52> One of the best insights we had at Ozlo was putting prompt bubbles on our UI. They served two main purposes. First they showed what type of questions you could ask; and second, they showed how to ask a question.

They provided guard rails so to speak. If you don't really strong hints about what you can do — and at least recognize intents you can't handle — you're screwed. There is always some asshole who sees "Hi, I can tell you about restaurants and entertainment. What are you looking to do?", and answers "What's the atomic weight of boron in nanofirkins?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> I think the only way you could think this was "the next big thing" is if you never did M-x doctor in an emacs buffer.

LSTMs do reasonable cocktail talk if you want someone to answer your emails for you as an agent, and expert systems shells are actually useful for navigating legal documents and insurance forms (with a ton of human intervention). Otherwise, it ain't really a problem that needs solving.

</comment><comment><USER99> The people that I know that heavily use chatbots are teens on discord and they use them a lot. They are more versatile than the old bots on irc, use them to play games, stream audio, images, access wikipedia... one bot we use actively translates between different languages across different channels. And they are popular! I think this is a case where the media sees possibility but adoption takes time.

<comment><USER100> Sure, but those are usually not chatbots _per se_ , but rather simple commands. The Wikipedia bot, for example, only performs a search on the website (and is less useful than the actual search when it does not directly find a page).

<comment><USER99> Oh, I guess since I was interacting with a bot in a chat I got confused. So in this case I guess it's just kids continuing their time honored tradition of mirc style bots...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> Just like many other here, I feel very smart now :D.

My friend was all neck deep into hype. Yet never could explain how would he train the chatbot to learn all the facts about the business(es). And in end all chatbot could do is act like decision tree with some NLP to extent it could understand few variations.

Which is great but very few limited business use cases, and poor use case for support unless you want your users to hate you.

</comment><comment><USER102> I actively use chatbots on Telegram, but not so much on messenger. Telegram bots are predictable compared to messenger which relies heavily on NLP.

</comment><comment><USER103> Well, any and every promising new thing gets overhyped.

(because the press, and experts -- whether real or just self-claimed -- and enthusiasts have plenty of incentives to hype new things and few reasons not to)

But that's independent of whether or not the new thing actually has merit.

Even when the new thing really _is_ the next big thing, the hype almost invariably runs far ahead of schedule.

Personally, I think the jury is still out on chatbots.

</comment><comment><USER104> Like self driving cars freeing humans from the tedium of driving while they could be doing productive things; applying AI to chatbots could free humans from ever having to chat online. Ever.

Imagine how humans could do more useful and productive things. More time for study and contemplation. AI powered chatbots could relieve us from the burden of ever having to chat online.

</comment><comment><USER105> Airplane is not a bird Ship not a fish Car not a horse .... Computer is not a smarter human AI will never have human intelligence Chatbots will never be humans ... These and many other inventions are useful. They extend human capabilities. But will never be humans, unless we create a human (as opposed to giving birth).

</comment><comment><USER106> Chat bot was terrible UX to begin with, because while you're at the screen, why not have a visual interface to show you all your options?

Voice interfaces hold the promise of releasing us from the tyranny of screen time. I imagine walking the dog and replying to emails with my headphones. Might seem silly now, but would love that. NLP/NLG just isn't there.

</comment><comment><USER107> Slack stopped promoting their "thing" as much as last year, which is why you don't hear much about chatbots anymore.

</comment><comment><USER108> I'm surprised how most chatbots focus on a 1:1 interaction with the user and the bot. I find chatbots most productive and novel when you allow the one bot to interact with a group of users. For example, deploy bots, where each user can have the bot deploy as well as they can see the chat history to get context on what has been deployed.

</comment><comment><USER109> It was painfully obvious to anybody who's used conversational UI in their daily life that this was not going to happen.

</comment><comment><USER110> To me, chatbots were nice because:

\- I could navigate them much faster than I could navigate a phone tree.

\- They were very accessible in the sense that I wouldn't have to install a custom app but instead use a platform that I am very likely to be on already. As a developer, this also allowed me to set up an unlock-my-door app for my friends much easier.

</comment><comment><USER111> They're awkward, and they often don't do what you expected or hoped.

I think millennials especially are used to getting things done themselves since they're so accustomed to UIs that walk them through getting tasks done. There's a sense of finer control in user interfaces that chatbots have a hard time solving for.

</comment><comment><USER112> I wonder if, if someone released a study showing that using rainbow colours in your marketing emails increases your perceived humanness by 40%, we'd see a phase where all marketing emails come in bright rainbow colours and I could create a simple filter rule to get rid of them.

</comment><comment><USER113> I think the big issue really for me personally has been that I know that these interfaces are clunky/inaccurate and I don't want to be talking out loud and giving out info in public spaces etc.

If there is an option to type, I got for it the first thing. Anything else feels gimmicky.

</comment><comment><USER114> There just aren't compelling use cases yet, though eventually the technology will improve and they'll resurface. This happens frequently in tech.

On a similar note, I suspect in another few years we'll be reading an article titled:

> "AR was the next big thing: what happened?"

</comment><comment><USER115> It quickly became obvious that they were the most annoying and pointless UI feature since Clippy.

</comment><comment><USER116> Chatbots were always a technology looking for a problem to solve and lets face it those of us reading HN knows exactly how that always turns out. There will be lots of chat bots in our future and already are but there is nothing "big" about it.

</comment><comment> white-flame Any time a HN discussion gets as big as this, it's because he content is controversial and people are arguing.

I don't think I've seen this many replies in unison. It's an amazing testament to how poorly these systems work at all levels.

</comment><comment><USER117> This is crazy, people actually believed chatbots were going to catch on? My employer developed chat bots, but only so we could grab the associated PR from a few press releases to ride the hype. We knew no one was going to use them.

</comment><comment><USER118> For the longest time chat bots were a nuance, if you didn't need it it was there and if you did need it, it was there and it would take all day. Those unnecessary pauses to make it seem more human is such a waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER119> In perfect timing, Bank of America released Erica, "your virtual financial assistant."

[https://promo.bankofamerica.com/erica/](https://promo.bankofamerica.com/erica/)

</comment><comment><USER120> The AI winter is upon us and its first casualty is the chat bot.

After all, if AI is as ubiquitous and threatening as many are claiming, then why has the literal least complex implementation of it, a chat bot, failed completely?

</comment><comment><USER121> First thing I do when I encounter a chatbot is to type 'Live Agent'

</comment><comment><USER122> Thank god. Too often, they just work as a hindrance to get the help you need.

<comment><USER123> >Sorry, I didn't understand that.

<comment><USER124> It's a common scenario: you want to solve a problem by reading online help or contacting customer support and a window pops up "Hi it's Brian, can I help you?" Of course you know it's not Brian, it answers by spiting out some pieces of badly-prepared script, can't answer any specific question, and sooner or later you realize it's worse than useless as it only took your time you could use to actually solve the problem.

<comment><USER100> >Sorry, I didn't understand that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER125> This article sets chatbots as endangered, and then works very hard to reset their context.

I'm don't work within an industry where chatbots were a solution.

From this naive position, what are the exemplary examples of chatbots?

</comment><comment><USER126> Yet another tech that nobody wants. They are the next worst thing after the "allow notifications" pop-up that every landing page seems to be infested with these days.

</comment><comment><USER127> Chatbots, like most tech buzzwords, were always a scam. The only question was if you (investor/exec/"researcher") were dumb enough to fall for it.

</comment><comment><USER128> conversation ui developer here and I know I might be biased. For sure there is a hype. People seems to think that chatbot/voice assistant will be the new platform. But really chatbot/voice assistant are meant to augment the current platforms.

We can already see this with voice assistant integrated to mobile devices and in the near future VR's and robots.

It will be interesting how it works out once everything gets standardized.

</comment><comment><USER129> Nobody likes being duped by a non-human when you're looking for help. Rather like nobody likes to hear a recording down a phone line.

</comment><comment><USER130> "humans like talking to other humans" lmftfy, should be "humans don't like talking to computers all that much"

</comment><comment><USER131> They flunked the Turing test.

In a serious vein, they were more of an annoyance than help.

Similar to the Paper Clip from Microsoft. (Sorry, don't remember the name)

<comment><USER132> Office Assistant aka Clippit aka Clippy

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant)

</comment></comment><comment><USER133> every 2-3 years a certain buzzword gets hot among silicon valley circles to be on its way to become the next big thing. usually after it mostly dies down in less than a year another buzzword will be propelled to the top. thats how silicon valley works, thats how they keep investor money flowing into the industry.

</comment><comment><USER134> Chatbots, just like Alexa, OK Google, and Siri, are just terrible. Last night, "Alexa, show me new releases." Nothing. "Alexa, show me new movies." Nothing. "Alexa, what's new." "Today's news from NPR....". Damnit. In the time I spent trying to discover the hidden menu of voice control, I could have manually gone through known menus including typing with arrow keys.

<comment><USER135> I've found Alexa to be much, much worse than Google Assistant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER136> Depends how you look at it, Siri, Cortana, Alexa,.. all are chatbots and they all are doing pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER137> Hah chatbots. What a joke that trend was... I'm just surprised the hype lasted as long as it did

</comment><comment><USER138> Multiple bots were accused of racism, surely one reason for pumping the brakes.

</comment><comment><USER139> David Cancel will probably still sell yet another company for 7+ figures eg [https://www.drift.com/](https://www.drift.com/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Probably because you need real (strong) AI.

</comment><comment><USER140> Aren't they alive and well on Twitter?

<comment><USER141> I think what you're referring to are distinct from chatbots. Chatbots are meant to take input from a user and do a wide variety of tasks like a customer service representative would do, Twitter bots usually do just one thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER142> Feels like they moved to blockchain

</comment><comment><USER143> I hate talking to a bot in general.

</comment><comment><USER144> News coming from a bot oriented site

</comment><comment><USER145> they just weren't

</comment><comment><USER146> no, no they weren't

</comment><comment><USER49> The typical thing where a seemingly cool technology that is really hard to do correctly outside of a few toy examples gets overhyped.

</comment><comment><USER147> Chatbots are the Juicero of user interfaces.

</comment><comment><USER148> The best one I have seen is going to start beta testing later this summer.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bd1mEm2Fy08](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bd1mEm2Fy08) Google Duplex Demo from Google IO 2018 - <USER3>

</comment><comment><USER149> On the other hand, I can think of at least two prominent elected officials (one at my state's level and one at the national level) who no longer speak in sentences that I can parse with my own mental model of English. The one from my state released a statement yesterday that seemed identical to the kind of thing one would get from a late '90s IRC chatbot that was trained on a big dataset of energy company press releases.

<comment><USER93> Care to name them? I'd be curious to read what they've written.

<comment><USER149> I was trying to keep this as a discussion about the technology and not about the politicians involved, but it apparently didn't stop most of the thread from ending up dead anyway, so the statement I had in mind (you can find more on the source if you're interested) was:

> "Our electric grid system is not stable. If it can be down or you have > rolling brown outs or black outs and we know that is possible. If you don't > have base load that means something, some type of energy that will run 24/7, > rain, shine, no matter what happens is uninterruptible. The only two things > you have that does that on a uninterruptible basis is coal and nuclear"

This isn't the first time I've wondered at the applications of natural- language processing software in political [speech]writing. I'm not sure where best forum is for people to discuss these ideas, but I apologize if this was too political, regardless, for this site.</comment></comment></comment>


7,000 Starbucks Locations Added to the Square Wallet - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20121107/7000-starbucks-locations-added-to-the-square-wallet/ <comment><USER2> This is really not impressive if you know the POS sphere. Starbucks' POS is a Micros-based system. Micros is the only major POS provider that is currently working with 3rd party vendors (such as Square) to allow direct integration between those vendors and Micros' clients. If this pays off for Micros, maybe we'll see more of it, but for now, others like Aloha are making so much revenue off their own products that they've shown no indication of adopting Micros' strategy.

Long story short: Don't expect many non-Micros clients to start getting added to Square, or anyone else, any day soon.

<comment><USER3> Well put. People also don't seem to get that Square is not becoming Starbucks's payment processing provider.

edit/correction: This article reports that Square will become their processor, but none of Square or Starbucks's actual releases seem to mention this. Interested if anyone can actually clarify.

edit 2: Took a while, but I think I figured it out. Square actually is processing SB's payments. It's a big win for Chase Paymentech since they are the actual entity behind Square's processing and a big loss for BofA and First Data. Interesting. Source: [http://www.businessinsider.com/square-starbucks- chase-bank-o...](http://www.businessinsider.com/square-starbucks-chase-bank- of-america-2012-8)</comment></comment>


Measuring Polymorphism in Python Programs [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://people.dsv.su.se/~beatrice/python/dls15_large_images.pdf <comment><USER2> The article's spin is that since so little of the program uses complex features, we don't really need those features in our language. However this conclusion is not justified. The right question is how much more work it would take to write the program without those features.

The real use of this kind of work is studying how to best optimize dynamic programs. The conclusion is that a Python JIT optimizer can assume the first data type you see is likely to be what you'll always see, add a small sanity check for that case then goes down a fast path. This will correctly optimize 98% of the code. And there is nothing good to be done with the remaining 2%.

This is a concrete data point. JIT optimizers for other dynamic languages (particularly JavaScript) have discovered and taken advantage of similar things.

<comment><USER3> Or maybe not.. what about mypy?

[http://mypy-lang.org/](http://mypy-lang.org/)

If 98% of the code has very basic types (i.e. function takes a Integer and returns a Decimal)... we could encode that in type hints with something like mypy, and get many of the type checking that statically typed languages get, without a crazy type system.

Hey I will take a 98% statically type checked language over 0%... if in so many cases I clearly know the types of stuff, let's put that info in there and detect and code time. So much of the standard library could use this to be cleaner.

<comment><USER2> That would be an interesting tool.

Run a program while it is instrumented. The tool figures out what every type seems to be. Then goes back through the program and tries to prove that those types are correct.

It could then automatically annotate large chunks of code in a way that lets them run faster and will produce a warning if an unexpected type makes its way in in a future iteration. (An unexpected type, of course, being either a bug or a likely candidate for something that might expose latent bugs.)

<comment><USER4> That's basically how most JIT compilers work. But it would be nice to be able to get the annotations back out of the JIT. Anyone know of a JIT that lets you do that? (In any language, since now I'm just academically interested.) It that would be darned useful when one "inherits" a large, dynamically-typed code base... it would greatly increase freedom to refactor if you were more sure that such and such a function really does only ever get a number, despite all the code you see for handling objects and strings, for instance.

<comment><USER5> In Pharo (modern Smalltalk implementation) you can get some info from VM and JIT.

Someone is already working on type inference using VM caches.

See [http://forum.world.st/parameters-of-the-virtual-machine- td48...](http://forum.world.st/parameters-of-the-virtual-machine- td4897121.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder whether the authors consider "value = somedict.get('somekey')" or "match_object = re.search(pattern, somestring)" as returning a single type. Both of those common calls can return None.

I'm also curious as to what they consider "unbounded polymorphism". Calls like "len(s)" or "with cm" or "for x in s" work with many different types (though usually only on one type at a particular part of a program). Likewise, most of the collections types and classes are necessary generic (in one place you make make a set of integers and in another place you use a set of strings). The _use_ of the collections is typically monomorphic but the collections themselves are necessarily generic.

Another thought is that when I write programs that use a single type for a given variable, I still place value on the duck-typing and polymorphism (to ease future maintenance, support debugging, and leave the code loosely coupled). For example, when I write a function that accepts a file object and the calling code only passes in file objects, I still value my ability to pass in a StringIO object instead.

Another thought is that I find the mechanical extraction of percent usage statistics to be dubious since the results are profoundly biased by the kind of code being sampled. For example, my data analytics code is nearly 100% monomorphic. However, code that uses ORMs like SQLAlchemy, Peewee, or Django or that uses templating engines (like Jinga2, Cheetah), or that does anything interesting would tend to have much different statistics. (Performance Guided Optimization in C has taught us that data and usage patterns greatly affect the statistics).

All that said, I don't disagree with the authors that a lot of Python code could be statically typed. Tracing JITs have already proven the value of call site specialization to a particular type.

<comment><USER7> > I wonder whether the authors consider "value = somedict.get('somekey')" or > "match_object = re.search(pattern, somestring)" as returning a single type. > Both of those common calls can return None.

      val get: 'a dict -> 'a -> 'b option

      val search: re -> string -> match option

Above is an hypotetical type notation in OCaml for both functions. I think it pretty much covers everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > In simple terms, only 2.5% of call sites in most programs can't be handled > by name-based typing with single inheritance. Adding parametric polymorphism > (i.e., generics) only makes half a percent of difference, and most of the > remaining cases can't be handled by widely-used mechanisms.

If parametric polymorphism only helps with 0.5% of all call sites, then probably:

(0) You're relying too much on implementation details across module boundaries. This destroys opportunities for type abstraction.

(1) You're unwittingly repeating the same logic over and over for multiple types. Not likely the case in Python.

(2) You're relying too much on unenforced conventions.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't understand the link's final remark:

> This doesn't mean that languages shouldn't include more complex type > systems, but it does (or should) mean that the onus is on their designers to > show that the complexity is worthwhile.

In general, the "complexity" of more advanced type systems is not presented to the programmer, with C++ being a notable exception.

Instead, the programmer benefits from ease of expression of types _even when they are mostly writing monomorphic functions_. For example, I would say that > 95% of the benefit I've ever derived from Haskell's static typing system has been due to the clarity of type expression and the codification of intentions _in monomorphic functions_! All the extra stuff with advanced type class features, higher order types, quantified types, etc., is nice and all, but it probably has only ever mattered to me for at most 5% of the cases.

Regardless though, in those other 95% of monomorphic cases, the clarity of the static type system, the way it has made me clarify my design and think about the type constraints in function call chains, the way it has made me codify my intentions for other developers to see, the way it has prevented silly bugs or highlighted misconceptions I wouldn't have otherwise caught -- this has all been very valuable, all without me ever having to really deal with any "complexity" of the Haskell type system. As a mere Haskell user, I don't have to fiddle with that. The existence of the fancier type options never gets in my way if I don't need it for anything.

Now, I love Python and I'm not saying static typing is always better. I'm just saying that if a language has a fancy and "complex" type system, that's not the same thing as saying that a day-to-day programmer will ever have to interact with that complexity in order to get benefits from it. They probably won't. They'll get lots of valuable benefits more or less for free even (perhaps _especially_ ) when their programs are mostly monomorphic.

</comment><comment><USER10> What features would a type system require to be able to soundly type check 100% of the patterns that are found in dynamically typed programs? Dependent types? Refinement types? Is it possible?

<comment><USER2> It is impossible. Dynamically typed programs are able to look at the name of the type, write arbitrary Turing complete code reasoning about it, and then do whatever they want with it.

For example a unit test framework might walk your class hierarchy, identify all classes whose name matches a particular pattern, and then start doing stuff with that.

Of course there is always a way to accomplish the same thing without abusing the type system. But as soon as you do so, it is a different program.

<comment><USER11> Many type systems allow encoding arbitrary Turing complete code, so that doesn't necessarily imply typing those programs correctly is impossible.

<comment><USER12> That is not what btilly means. You are talking about using a type system to write an arbitrary program. btilly is talking about using an arbitrary program to specify the typing rules for a set of values. His assertion is correct: if you can use an arbitrary program to determine what the types are in your program, then figuring out the types of your program is undecidable.

Again, this is different from using a type system to write an arbitrary program. But, it _is_ true that type systems which allow you to write arbitrary programs _are_ undecidable. Because it's possible that such programs written in the type system cannot finish, then they cannot be well-typed. _Most_ programs will be okay, and can be verified to be well-typed, but there still exist some that cannot be.

<comment><USER11> > That is not what btilly means. You are talking about using a type system to > write an arbitrary program. btilly is talking about using an arbitrary > program to specify the typing rules for a set of values. His assertion is > correct: if you can use an arbitrary program to determine what the types are > in your program, then figuring out the types of your program is undecidable.

Right, but my point is that it's not necessarily impossible to just express the program that figures out the type in the type system.

<comment><USER12> I'm not quite sure what you mean. Being able to "express the program" (which I take to mean a human writes the program) is independent of being able to statically verify what it does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not only this makes sense, Python offers pluggable type systems that let you type some of your program, or all of it - as much as you'd like.

A similar trend with TypeScript emerged in JS land where it's gaining traction. (and flowtype to some extent although that is seeing a lot less adoption)

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting that type parameters only make half a percent of difference. So for 2-3% of Python code, the equivalent statically typed code would get really hairy I assume?

<comment><USER15> I think it's analogous to generics in Go. Go left out generics, which isn't a problem for most code. But when you need it, it's super annoying not to have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Url changed from [http://neverworkintheory.org/2016/06/13/polymorphism-in- pyth...](http://neverworkintheory.org/2016/06/13/polymorphism-in-python.html), which points to this.</comment>


Deconstructing the evidence-based  discourse in health sciences (2006) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.ucl.ac.uk/Pharmacology/dc-bits/holmes-deconstruction-ebhc-06.pdf <comment><USER2> This is beyond moronic.</comment>


Ask HN: Advice for self-publishing books - <AUTHOR>

I have an idea for a short series of books and I have found a few ghostwriters to write them. Do you have any experience with the rest of the self-publishing process? Is it better to go with on-demand printing or order a conventional run? How much should I expect to pay for editing, design and layout? Is a Kindle/iBooks-only release a good measure of interest? <comment><USER2> I have written and self published two books: Zero to Superhero <http://3.ly/9tBV> and EconomTricks <http://3.ly/KN4y>.

I went with Lulu, a POD (Print on Demand) service for both books because there is no initial investment required (none, only your time) which allows you to make changes and improvements to your book on the fly. I can't tell you how important that is!

Once you've got your book written, edited, formatted and released to the public via Lulu, Lulu (for a fee) will get you into the big online retailers like Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble and a bunch of small ones. I've seen Zero to Superhero in online stores based in Norway (or was in Finland?) and niche online vendors elsewhere in the world.

And you can have it both ways. You can have a conventional run done as well from Lulu (pricier though). It's a win/win.

I probably sound like a pitchman for Lulu, but it's a great service. I can't understand why someone would take a big upfront risk and do a traditional launch without testing the market first (and a POD soft launch is perfect for that). You'd have to be pretty darn sure that you've got pre-built demand for the book, and that your marketing plan is a solid multi-channel one (you'll need that anyway).

Good luck to you.

<comment><USER3> That's great useful advice.

How do you promote your books? And if you're willing to share: How many have you sold?

<comment><USER2> Glad you find it helpful estherschindler.

To date, I've sold maybe 500-600 of Zero to Superhero, mostly the ebook format. I marketed Zero to Superhero through the website and blog (won't mention the urls because I'm not trying to sell anything), and answered questions on related discussion forums (I put a link to my website in my sig).

The most sucessful of these marketing vehicles was the blog. I "linkbaited' posts I thought were compelling on Digg (which was huge at the time).

Sales for Economtricks, on the other hand, have been quiet. I've sold maybe a dozen. Then again, I never marketed it in any serious way - just a landing page and some SEO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Have you done your market research? What's the size and make-up of your intended audience, do they prefer e-books or chunks of dead tree, do they habitually browse bookstores or buy online -- or do they not tend to read books at all, but prefer a different written format (magazines, piece-works, chapbooks, or the like)?

How much of the potential audience do you think your marketing channel(s) can reach and how high a conversion rate do you expect to get? From that point, how many books do you expect to sell? Only once you have a ball-park figure for the market can you run a title P & L sheet and use it to do what-if modeling considering different printing technologies (POD, conventional offset, or whatever).

Intro to P & L calculations:

<http://www.bizmark.net/publishing.htm>

Hint: marketing and distribution are key. The distribution tail eats around 60-70% of a conventional publisher's lunch -- the SRP for which books are sold -- and it you don't pay _very_ close attention to your distribution chain you'll run the risk of seeing it eat your profit margin.

(As the old joke puts it, the easiest way to make a small fortune in publishing is to start with a large one.)

</comment><comment><USER5> If you're doing fiction, can I suggest reading everything J.A. Konrath (jakonrath.blogspot.com) has to say on this issue? His strategy is building a stable of cheap genre fiction distributed via the Kindle, and he is both killing it and clearly having a ball doing what he loves.

<comment><USER2> Yes, Lulu can format your book for the Kindle (although I have not done so). Great point Patrick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I strongly suggest you read book written by Aaron Shepard on self publishing ...

Visit : <http://www.newselfpublishing.com/> and <http://www.newselfpublishing.com/books/PODProfit.html>

I would also suggest to go with Lightning Source as your POD provider as most of the big names go to them directly or indirectly (very few people know this and that's the reason you should read that book by Aaron) - Good Luck

<comment><USER7> For those who don't know, Lightning Source is owned by Ingram, one of the largest (if not the largest) book distributors.

Additionally, anyone interested in publishing should probably subscribe to "Book Business" magazine, a free trade publication.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm traditionally published (Crown & Portfolio), but I've also spent a lot of time researching the options available for self-publishing and promoting. A few thoughts...

1\. EBook or print + eBoook - If you are open to starting out with an ebook only, options get a lot bigger. I'd move beyond Lulu.com and look at <http://www.smashwords.com/> and <http://www.fastpencil.com//> as fast, very affordable alternatives who can also help get your ebook listed at major online sellers. FastPencil can also help with book design and packaging and I believe they can do print books as well.

2\. Cover/Jacket Design - Depending how serious you are and what genre the books are in, the cover can become hugely important. Cover design can cost anywhere from a few hundred to thousands, depending on the quality of the designer. I'd do two things. First, just google "book cover designer" or "book jacket design" and you'll find the sites of a bunch of designers with portfolios. Second, go to the bookstore and write down the names of the jacket designers for the books that really jump out at you, then search for them online. You can usually find their names in small print on the bottom of the inside fold of the back cover. Many are findable and will freelance.

3\. If You Build It...They'll Rarely Come - Writing the book first, then figuring out you're going to market it after it's done is a giant mistake. Start building your platform, if you haven't already NOW! There is nothing more important (beyond writing a phenomenal book) in making your book succeed than having already developed relationships with a sizable, rabid community of potential readers and second-wave influencers who line up to not only buy your books when they come out, but champion them.

At a bare minimum, for authors these days, that should include a blog, FB fan page, twitter and potentially a 4th community that is topic relevant. And, yes, this is still mandatory for fiction writers today as well. You just have to go about sharing in a different way.

I spent nearly two years just building my online platform before my first book was published, then piled on a bunch of more tactical launch strategies in the months leading to publication. But, truth is, in the end, even that's just kindling designed to build enough momentum to get your book to tip into a word of mouth phenomenon. And, for that to happen, you've also got to write or hire someone capable of writing a fantastic book.

Hope that helps!

</comment><comment><USER9> Unless you have storage space and are prepared to handle distribution yourself (including drop-shipping and getting it into stores), POD will probably suit your needs best. Most POD publishers these days have relationships with retailers (particularly online ones) -- Lightning Source, as was mentioned, is one that serves both self-publishers and smaller presses, and has very legitimate distribution channels (i.e. if you go to your local bookstore and convince them to carry your book, they will do so because they will be able to order it through the traditional publishing catalogs).

Editing costs will depend on how far along the book is. If it needs major structural work or substantive editing, expect to pay more; if you just need copyediting, then you will be able to find it on a fairly reasonable hourly basis. (Many "vanity" POD services like Lulu or Xlibris offer editing services, but you can also find it through other freelancing sources.) Design and layout are also frequently offered by POD services, and Amazon's CreateSpace has pre-made templates you can use.

Kindle/iBooks release as a gauge of interest would depend on your target audience. Who are you trying to reach? If you're looking mostly for tech-savvy early adopters, it's probably useful. If you have a built-in platform already, like Seth Godin, also probably useful. If you are trying to capture a more traditional segment, it may not show you a true indication of potential reach.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is right up your alley: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1797868>.

You should also state whether you intend to publish solely online or also sell through brick and mortar. The latter makes Lulu a lot less attractive. Otherwise, Lulu are a great choice for an online PoD store.

Another thing to consider is that if this is your first time publishing, you will look a lot less attractive to a publisher in the future, because they can't promote you as a debut author. I have a bookmark about this somewhere, I'm sure, but it's on another computer.

<comment><USER8> Interesting, I've actually found the exact opposite to be true. If you self- publish and do the work of building a platform and marketing enough to show that you have to ability to move books in a real way, not only will publishers be more interested in your next one, they'll more interested in picking up the one you've self-published.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Would anyone have tips to promote books published via Lulu ? Do you go the SEO road, or try to get your book in reviewer's hands, or anything else ?

One thing I did for a book done by my brother [1] was to create a quick heroku app that displays a lulu preview, a "buy" button and more informations about the book, on a dedicated domain.

[1] <http://www.zoo-imaginaire.com/> french book for kids

</comment><comment><USER12> Buy block ISBN numbers from Bowkers if you want to sell through commercial channels. Use Lyx to typeset. Design or have a designer design covers. Run to Createspace. Pro Plan costs $35.00/year. You buy proof copies (Proofs of my 200 page novel, Freein' Pancho, cost $3.85 plus shipping), when you release, they place in Amazon, Ingrams and other distributors. You market (hardest part).

</comment><comment><USER3> Asking "how much should I expect to pay for editing, design, and layout" is like asking, "How much should I expect to pay for a software developer?" It depends on the expertise and experience of the person you're apt to hire, the size of the project, and a number of other factors. Not the least of which is "How awful is the text to begin with?" and "How much formatting is necessary?" and "How much of a PITA will this client be?"

That said, I'm a professional editor (as well as writer) who has bid $4,000 or so for a project that sounds similar to what you describe (though that was a full-length book). I'm an eensy bit well-known ::cough:: so I expect you can pay less; depending on the expertise of the book editor, you might need to pay more. (And I'm too busy right now, so that's not an offer of assistance -- just a ballpark number.)

</comment><comment><USER13> If you're in need of an ebook creation tool, please consider using eBookBurn.com, which is a service I recently released (mentioned on HN here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1972827> and an early review here: [http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2010/12/07/ebookburn- launc...](http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2010/12/07/ebookburn-launched-new- epub-creation-service/)).

I'd be happy to offer you a free trial subscription.

Also, I'm a co-founder of Fifobooks.com, so please consider selling your ebooks there (we're non-exclusive, so you can still try Lulu or Amazon, but we give you a higher percentage of every sale).

<comment><USER14> I just signed up to ebookburn. When I tried to create a new book, the first thing I'm asked to do is pick the amount of editing time which costs from $25 to $7300. Can I first at least try your software? How can anyone trust you with their money without first seeing what you've got to offer?

EDIT: It looks like the same is the case with fifobooks.com. It asks me to fill in tax and payment information before I can publish a book. I understand it must be a legal requirement, but I think it's a bad idea to not even let the user see what you are able to provide them. At least let me go through the process to see how you process my book. Then don't publish it until I give you the necessary details. Seriously, I think this is a really bad user experience.

<comment><USER13> Let me know which email address you used to sign up on eBookBurn, and I'll issue you a trial subscription (if you use the contact form on that site, I'll see your message much sooner).

I do intend to charge for it, though I may have to experiment with the pricing.

As for Fifobooks, we need that info b/c of taxes we file on your behalf if you sell anything.

It's difficult to ask that after the fact, since there's no way of knowing if you'd provide it (and FWIW, it's the same setup as the iphone app store).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Get the audience first. Tailor your work to what the audience wants to buy. Then get the books written. Don't write a book and then look for an audience unless you're doing it for fun or sheer passion in the topic you're writing about. Approach it like a startup.

</comment><comment><USER16> I have not self-published anything myself, so I have no direct experience to answer your question. But if I could throw out a suggestion... you might get some useful info from Henry at <http://www.publishandsell.com/> He's basically a consultant who helps folks who are self-publishing books. He was one of the early employees at Lulu and is a very sharp guy.

(Disclaimer: I used to work with with Henry at Lulu, and he is a friend. This plug was not solicited by him however, and I have no financial interest in publishandsell.com)</comment>