This Conversation Is Going Nowhere

I&#x27;ve thought for some time now that the real killer app for natural language assistants—especially voice activated assistants like Alexa, perhaps slightly less suited for text-based chatbots—lies in short, episodic, choose-your-own-adventure-style games. The more I think about it, the more I&#x27;m not really sure why this isn&#x27;t a thing yet, and why we haven&#x27;t seen a resurgence in the popularity of interactive fiction—albeit this time for the masses, and not necessarily limited to those inclined to go load up a copy of Zork.<p>And content creation is more accessible than ever. I mean, have you seen an example of what the source code for an Inform7 game looks like?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Inform#Inform_7_programming_language" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Inform#Inform_7_programming_la...</a><p>To reiterate, it almost seems crazy that there isn&#x27;t a massive catalog of $0.99 serials that you can play through in 45-minute chapters while cooking, driving down the road with the family or on the way to work, etc.

&quot;The technology to make AI-powered assistants truly useful is still far out of reach, and people aren&#x27;t rushing to close that gap by adapting their behavior.&quot;<p>Exactly; if you build a bot with the intention of relying 100% on NLP, you&#x27;re asking for trouble. But I fail to see how that fact leads to chatbots being useless when there are plenty of tools available for guiding necessary optimizations that can lead to a much better experience.<p>When websites were bad we turned to tools like Google Analytics to make website development data driven -- we didn&#x27;t stop building them.

Chatbots should be used to <i>augment</i> humans, not replace them.<p>For example, one customer service rep can hold discussions with hundreds of people with the help of AI, rather than just 10-20 without.<p>AI is an augment, not a replacement.

As a digit user, this makes me kinda sad - I actually like the chat interface for basic stuff like checking my balances. Opening an app, logging in, and navigating a UI that may or may not changed since I last used it is far more friction than typing ‘balance’ into iMessage...

I loved Digit, but then they changed their model to charge me more for the same things and the value proposition shifted.<p>I use Trim now, which actually is more feature rich.<p>But man I <i>loved</i> Digit&#x27;s simplicity.

Dear people who have product blogs like this: Please put a global header on your blog that says &quot;X is a Y that does Z.&quot; In this case, &quot;Digit is a service that helps you automatically save money based on your income and spending.&quot; That way, we get some much-needed context when we stumble across your blog articles talking about what you&#x27;ve learned by building and selling your product.