>Yet another Next Big Thing that I was right about predicting would fail.
I was hired at my current company 4 years ago to work on our chatbot client. Despite years of engineering effort put into an NLP based decision tree system, over 90% of chats were still falling back to a live agent. They just recently sunsetted the product for lack of interest. Thank god that fad is over. Web design trends come and go, but that was by far the most obnoxious one yet.
I got the impression the entire thing was pushed by Slack probably by way of some PR firm.
I utterly despise how mindlessly faddish this field is. For a field supposedly so full of smart people who often pride themselves on being "contrarian" (sometimes to a fault), people sure do bleat like sheep when the next fad comes along.
Not sure, but the Slack things are more the "chat as commandline UI" with fixed commands and such, not the kind of bots discussed here that suggest you can actually talk to them, aren't they?
I think a lot of people wanted it to be true because building a chatbot is way easier than building a full 2-dimensional UI. To the extent that you can get users to use a command-line interface in the 21st century you've made your job as a developer much easier.
I disagree, but then agian, the only Slack bots I've seen are useful: they provide updates on the status of Jira tickets. Better to see these on Slack than have to use Jira's garbage interface or fill my inbox with status emails.
This should not be read as a disagreement with anything you’ve said, but smart people are still human. We’re all susceptible to the same flaws, but those flaws are just expressed with more complexity as intelligence increases.
I was hired at my current company 4 years ago to work on our chatbot client. Despite years of engineering effort put into an NLP based decision tree system, over 90% of chats were still falling back to a live agent. They just recently sunsetted the product for lack of interest. Thank god that fad is over. Web design trends come and go, but that was by far the most obnoxious one yet.