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're making a bot. I'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'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/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't know where/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 / 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' 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 "AI" has been getting) are not (yet) applicable to chatbots in general. Add to this expectations of a Jarvis, Siri, etc. but then "for x". 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'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's lives. I wish for more humility and experimentation. At least we're all sharing what we're learning, so there's that.