Did the "Chat Bot" boom end?

Microsoft school girl high school student AI "RinChatbot that reply like human like doing something to talk to and doing various work, as typified by 2016FacebookYaGoogle,Microsoft,LINESuch as providing a development platform has been drawing attention as a "next growth market". Although the performance of the chatbot has steadily advanced in 2018 only two years later, I can not feel the temporary momentum that caused the chat bot to think that the GUI will be threatened as "interactive UI".

Chatbots were the next big thing: what happened?
https://blog.growthbot.org/chatbots-were-the-next-big-thing-what-happened

The figure below illustrates how expectation for new technology changes with timeHype cycleWhat is called. After the new technology appeared in the hype cycle, has it been that there are many that would be disillusioned will collect an excess of expectations. Chat bot can be viewed to be in this disillusionment phase current.


There are various things other than the chat bot in how the user interacts with the application. Looking back on history, the initial user who came out was running the machine by typing a specific command. thisCUI (character user interface)I call it. Next time it appearedGraphical user interface (GUI)In this, it is possible to give instructions to the computer in an intuitive way of pointing and clicking the button displayed on the screen with the mouse. Although the mouse turned into a finger with the appearance of a smartphone, it is an input method widely used to the present.

Since the GUI appeared in the 1960's, researchers have been searching for ways to input in natural languages ​​that we usually talk about. One of them is a chat bot. New products are said to require two out of "better" "cheaper" "earlier" to spread the service, the chatbot is inferior in terms of "cheap" "fast" The question remains whether it is "better" or not, in fact the spread has been limited.


For example, the figure below is an example of a conversation with a chat bot. In response to the bot's question "What is to put in the shopping cart", the user replies "four apples", "a mistake of four bananas", but the bot can not recognize well, "four apples and a banana 4 books "in the cart.


GUI has been refined for decades, so if you challenge the battle straight from the game you do not seem to win much. However, instead of "replacing" instead of "replacing" there is a possibility that it will work. The household account application "Penny" has succeeded with a hybrid approach combining GUI and chat bot.


Chat bots are often constructed to respond to specific keywords using decision tree logic, but while this logic is easy to build, the ability of the bot to build "keyword predictive power There is a problem that it is strongly restricted to. For example, the image below is a scene that the user is asking "show the option" against the message of the bot "Please select from the above options", but words other than the word in the option are registered in the keyword The bot is not able to recognize the user's word because it is not.


Because human beings are very visually dependent creatures, visual information is easier to handle. It is quite natural for children to love touch screens. Interactive UIs require more cognitive skills and are inherently only exchanging simple options with more complex ones.

Now I can play music on Google Home and order pizza from messenger, but still need considerable skill to do natural conversation. Although computers are good at searching data and processing numbers, they are not good at understanding human emotions. Empathy and emotion are important To support sales and customer support you need human support.

"As we have Bill Gates' words that we always overestimate the changes that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the changes that will occur in the next decade and should not be spared in an idle manner, Even if we are disillusioned as of 2018, we would like to avoid underestimating the daily evolution of chatbots.