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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  2148 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Tech’s Two Philosophies

It's a really stupid way to do what they're trying to do. If you want software to be able to automatically make appointments for you, the way to do that is to have it talk to other software, not call a human on the phone. We've known description logics or models equivalent to description logics were the way to do that since the 80s, and the W3C has been making standards for doing that kind of thing for almost 20 years now. No one but AI geeks have gotten interested, probably because a receptionist is a lot cheaper than a logician. But the sane way to make that work is your website knows how to describe the services you provide in a way programs can reason with, and the users' phone app knows how to decide if what you offer is what the user wants.

Edit: left implicit that an advantage of doing it the sane way is being able to assume that if a business isn't providing a way for customers to automate talking to them, they don't want customers to automate talking to them.





kleinbl00  ·  2148 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    It's a really stupid way to do what they're trying to do.

Here's a guess: They Pareto Principled their way to "80 percent of these interactions are bone simple, we just need to fisher-price together some speech recognition and iterative learning and fuck all the rest" without realizing that it's the 20 percent they're willing to scrub that are going to form the basis of everyone's experience.

    left implicit that an advantage of doing it the sane way is being able to assume that if a business isn't providing a way for customers to automate talking to them, they don't want customers to automate talking to them.

I mean, let's say I open a nail salon tomorrow. I'm going to google "nail salon scheduling website" and top hit is fuckin' $25 a month. Google ain't disintermediating shit at that price. So... who am I scheduling with? What tasks am I solving? because lemme tell ya - if you've got a business, you're being plastered with offers to do this shit for you. If you aren't doing online booking now, you aren't doing it for a reason. Like us. We have two warring EMRs (one for midwifery, one for naturopathic medicine) that refuse to talk. One of them will schedule Google and CalDAV because they think they're HIPAA-compliant. One of them won't because they explicitly have stated that they don't think either are. We've got to hand-collate. Google's robot is only going to eliminate our ability to talk to the client.

So Google is doing it because they don't want you using everyone else's platform. They want to lock you in that sweet, sweet Alexa silo. Google, the first name of the Internet, wants to get your ass off the web and sitting there natural languaging your way through their vertical integration.

    You walk regularly from home to work. Microsoft and Apple will tell you that the route you take sucks and that you should use their toll road. Facebook and Google will throw up a barricade and waylay you on the way. When you gripe to Microsoft or Apple, Facebook and Google will cut them in on a share and Microsoft and Apple will tell you that the highwayman fee is a value add.

https://www.androidcentral.com/youll-start-hearing-ads-alexa-2018

user-inactivated  ·  2148 days ago  ·  link  ·  

If they wanted to integrate all the existing online booking services by hand, that would be a reasonable if messier and more labor intensive thing to do too. But using your phone to ask Google to have a chatbot make a phone call to a receptionist to make an appointment for you is some Rube Goldberg shit even if they manage to learn their way into not annoying both you and the business.

It'd be funny to make an app that tries to solve the same problem by making requests on mturk.com. Not funny enough that I'm tempted to do it, but funny.