I'll take a human any day. The amount of times I've had a person say "Oh. I see the system always does this." And suddenly my previously intractable problem disappeared is staggering. Granted experienced people are hard to find, but when false positives occur it's the only thing I have seen fix it. I need that.

If only there was a way to speak to a chat bot first, in order to filter out the 90/99/99.9/99.99% of problems that can be handled efficiently by the automaton, and then transfer to a human being for the most difficult tasks!

If only there was a way to quickly bypass the chatbot when you knew you had a problem that needed a human.

But it was almost the same before chatbots. You got a human, but it was a human that had a script, and didn't have authority to depart from it. You had to get that human to get to the end of their script (where they were allowed to actually think), or else you had to get them to transfer you to someone who could. It was almost exactly like a chatbot, except with humans.

Some of those humans had a script that was useful and thus worth going through - 99% of the time your issue is the same as the one everyone else is having. Maybe you check before calling things like it is plugged in, but even then there are many common problems and since you don't have the checklist they need to go through it to see what item on the checklist you forgot.

What humans do well though is listen - the 1 minute explanation often often gives enough clues to skip 75% of the checklist. Every chatbot I've worked ends up failing because I use some word or phrasing in my description that wasn't in their script and so they make me check things on the checklist that are obviously not the issue (the light are on, so that means it is plugged in)

>Every chatbot I've worked ends up failing because I use some word or phrasing in my description that wasn't in their script

This is an interesting insight I’ve experienced as well. It makes me wonder if the use of chatbots becoming more and more prevalent will eventually habitualize humans into specific speech patterns. Kinda like the homogenization of suburban America by capitalism, where most medium sized towns seem to have the same chain stores.

So the chatbots are going to program us to work with them, since we can't program them to work with us?

I for one do not welcome our new robot overlords.

In this case I support them - language variation like this eventually leads to a new language that isn't mutually understandable. Anything to force people to speak more alike increases communication. Ever try to understand someone from places like Mississippi, Scotland, or Australia - they all speak English, but it is not always mutually understandable. There are also cases where words mean different/opposite things in different areas leading to confusing.

There are lots of other reasons to hate chatbots, but if they can force people to speak the same language that would be good.

I think there's a pragmatic upside and an artistic downside. Would the world be better if Dickens and Hemmingway wrote in the same style?

Sometimes variation in life is beautiful.

Some variation is beautiful. However too much is not.

So you're saying that chatbots are actually...cats?

Catbots???

In many cases you can just say that you need a human (perhaps a few times; the chat equivalent of mashing 0 button to skip past the IVR). I usually state my request and if I see that bot doesn't do anything helpful on the first try I do this. Sometimes it doesn't work though, and that's what really drives me mad.

Did you need to chat with a bot for that? I've seen a worrying trend of companies creating what could be basic forms as "interactive" chat bots.

Yes, it required me to chat with a bot to do the process. It could have been a form but some of the choices for which recalled products and how many of each recalled product would have likely made the form rather convoluted.

Chat bots like this, where basically they're executing a wizard type questionnaire seem totally reasonable to me. It's approachable to a wide audience, only asks you one question at a time in a clear way, and can easily be executed on a mobile device or normal computer.

> It could have been a form but some of the choices for which recalled products and how many of each recalled product would have likely made the form rather convoluted.

I'm not sure I understand how a chat bot is better in this case. This sounds exactly what a form is for, and you can have multi-step forms or wizards.

Incidentally, a ubiquitous feature in with forms that I seldom see on chat bots is the ability to return to an earlier question and change your answer.

It could be a form, but a custom one. You'd need someone to create the form, put it some on the website where people can find it. The bot already has a spot, no need for a new interface/form, it's easy enough to find and it's just a small update to the database powering the bot.

Easy for the company, maybe, but it puts me in the awkward position of having to roleplay with a robot.

Better to waste the customers time than your own money.

That sounds like it belongs in the Ferengis "Rules of Acquisition".

Keep wasting their time, and soon you won't have much money.

> Chat bots type a lot faster than call center pay-grade humans.

Most chat bots I've interacted with have artificial delays and typing indicators that remove this one advantage in favour of instead gaslighting me about what I'm talking to.

How do you tell the difference between an artificial delay and a slow API endpoint? Are we measuring all the response times and looking a distribution?

A 10-20 second delay for a line or two of text feels artificial to me. Many chatbots now have the "..." pop up for a few periods within that time to suggest someone is typing as well.

Maybe they do have a really slow API, but those sort of response times are uncommon and when the chat window and everything else about it seems to be working much faster, I think it's a reasonable conclusion to draw that it's artificial.

Just wait unti you get the post-call survey for the different chat bot personas.