Challenges you’re going to face when building a chatbot
The 3 problems listed are (in my experience) not the most important ones you need to know about when you&#x27;re making a bot. I&#x27;m not sure how this got to +100 points here on HN so quickly, since there are plenty of more informative bot articles that would better serve the HN audience.<p>The article describes:<p>1 (scalable architecture) : but the common solutions to this problem are not unique to chatbots<p>2 (a conversational agent must converse) : actually, that&#x27;s a design decision for each individual bot, there are alternative ways of thinking about it.<p>3 (users will get frustrated) : this is actually a not a tech&#x2F;AI problem, but a UI (user expectation) problem, see below.<p>The actual top 3 problems chatbot makers face are (in order):<p>#1 Discovery (!!!) : people don&#x27;t know where&#x2F;how to find bots and Facebook does not have their shit together in this regard (almost a year after launching their bot platform, there are still crucial errors. Result: most bots that could make a difference in the real world never get any traction, or enough users to train or iterate.<p>#2 Onboarding &#x2F; setting expectations : the majority of (non-test or -product hunt) users of your bot are having their first chatbot experience with yours. Guiding them in the correct way is your #1 design priority. Result: a dissapointed general public.<p>#3 Inflated expectations : Mainly a problem for those who try to sell chatbots in B2B. Its&#x27; almost the opposite problem to #2. Most people and media conflate AI with chatbots. But the recent advances in machine learning (which are the reason for the current attention the term &quot;AI&quot; has been getting) are not (yet) applicable to chatbots in general. Add to this expectations of a Jarvis, Siri, etc. but then &quot;for x&quot;. Result: dissapointed clients and an even quicker deflation of the hype.<p>And this is not even going into monetization!<p>All in all, I&#x27;m just frustrated that everyone involved in bots seem to assume that we already know how bots should work. I work in bots and I have yet to see one really impact user&#x27;s lives. I wish for more humility and experimentation. At least we&#x27;re all sharing what we&#x27;re learning, so there&#x27;s that.