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We've had a better alternative to "chatbots" for a long time, it's called a command line.

All of this obsession over "natural language processing" is annoying to me.

I have a Google home, and it can't do even the most basic things and struggles to understand whenever I tell it to do something.

It would be nice if I could just talk to my Google home as if it was a command line, with very explicit and specific commands that do powerful things. "Google take a note. Do the laundry." "Google play spotify on the living room speaker" etc. Instead the interface is an unhelpful mess that doesn't know how to help me get it to do what I want.

I feel that it is the same with chatbots. Stop trying to process natural language, and give me a command prompt with good documentation and user on-boarding.



Actually I could see chatbots being useful if they behaved more like command line applications, with functionality known ahead of time and a language model that doesn’t change. Then I could just prepare a script and do something like:

    cat cancel_service.script | /use/bin/comcast_dialer
and let the bot talk to my script and execute the needed task.




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