Peter Yared's Musings

This post was also published in VentureBeat. In the week since its launch, Facebook Messenger’s bot platform has seen a litany of complaints , with users arguing that it is tedious and unusable. The reality underlying the feedback is that natural language processing isn’t ready for prime time. The techies at Facebook Messenger clearly recognize this fact and have a few tricks up their sleeve that are very old school and reminiscent of the simplified HTML in Facebook’s app platform from almost a decade ago. Chatting with bots just doesn’t work Artificial intelligence experts are indeed pursuing systems that pose as humans and can pass the Turing test, but companies attempting to sell flowers or airline tickets are fast realizing that even specialized bots are incredibly difficult to create. The bot platforms are providing tools like Facebook’s wit.ai and Microsoft’s cognitive services to make creating interactive bots easier, but it is going to take years for these specia

This post was also published in VentureBeat. Bots are fast becoming all the rage in tech, offering users the ability to use a messaging app to type in simple English requests to services like Uber. The user interface is just like texting a friend, and it’s far simpler to enter a message than to download and use a clunky native app. As more bots and bot platforms like Slack emerge, it’s interesting to note that Google has spent almost 20 years perfecting how to respond to a text query. Today’s bots have a lot to learn from Google’s lessons in natural language interpretation, artificial intelligence, and user interface. The quintessential example of a bot is ordering an Uber on Slack, which is relatively straightforward since Slack on mobile knows where you are. However, most current bots quickly devolve into endless back and forth. For example, picking an airline flight via text is about as tedious as using an airline voice response system. Messaging back and forth with a bot