[HN Gopher] So you want to build your own open source chatbot
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So you want to build your own open source chatbot
Author : edo-codes
Score : 281 points
Date : 2023-07-29 09:28 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hacks.mozilla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (hacks.mozilla.org)
| kykeonaut wrote:
| If I am trying to contact a business, it is because I have a
| question that their site wasn't able to answer, or I need to
| contact a representative to do something I can't do on the
| website (think canceling a service).
|
| Having a talking FAQ page is, in my opinion, trying to compensate
| for lacking UX practices, and chances are that if the business
| didn't include the information I am seeking for in their website,
| they won't include it in the chatbot.
|
| That said, I think that chatbots could assist customers in
| getting in contact with the right representative, but trying to
| have chatbots as a wall between getting human help is imho an
| anti-pattern
| zlwaterfield wrote:
| I've worked on a few support sites for companies over the
| years. In all my research I found >40% of customers never look
| for the answer before contacting support. That's why you'll see
| sites add a bunch of questions with recommendations to answers
| based on your description before you can contact support. Even
| AWS support does this.
|
| Bots may be annoying but they can also save the company tons in
| custer support costs. I'm for it if the UX is good and I can
| quickly contact an agent if the bot can't answer my question.
| This is assuming the bot won't hallucinate and just tell me
| random fake facts.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| I can't think of a single time where a customer support bot
| was ever useful. Not one. They're incredibly annoying and I
| categorically avoid them these days. At least companies
| should make it clear that their bot basically just links to
| the FAQ, then the rest of us don't have to waste our time.
| zacharybk wrote:
| This is because the tools that CX teams have been provided
| by companies like Zendesk or Intercom are no more then
| IFTTT widgets. These tools are rigid and scream RTFM
| because they're incapable of taking action or providing
| anything specialized to your situation.
|
| What you want is to be understood and treated like you're a
| human with unique needs. You need someone or something to
| look up your account data, listen, and to act based on your
| situation. The current tools were never built for this.
|
| The next generation of these CX tools will deliver this.
| Here are ways that they will be dramatically better for
| customers and companies: - They will learn from successful
| interactions in the past and mirror those outcomes - Handle
| customer interactions based on company policies such as
| escalating bugs - They will surface new insights for the
| company - Won't hallucinate
|
| When you watch any CX agent do their job you'll witness
| them utilizing 4-5 SaaS applications to get a simple answer
| for a customer. The hurdle to adopt Generative AI in a
| company will require that companies care to build
| read/write APIs for these tools to utilize.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I can. Chipotle screwed up my order. Their support thing
| sent me to a chat bot that had me select which items were
| missing and I was able to get through the process of
| getting refunded quickly.
|
| Similarly Amazon's chat bot has helped me straighten out a
| few messed up deliveries.
|
| This isn't to say that it wouldn't have been easier to have
| a point and click UI where I could just select all this on
| my own, but the way they had it set up wasn't bad.
|
| Here's the kicker: when I recently had an Amazon delivery
| problem I started with the chat bot but then relatively
| seamlessly transitioned to talking to a human. The human
| was very quickly able to pick up on the situation and fix
| it.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| And for sufficiently well documented and complicated
| products, like Stripe, a chatbot is actually a great addon.
| You just need to set expectations that it'll only be 99%
| correct.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Let's keep it real: The chatbot business is going to be
| great...
|
| for businesses selling chatbots to other businesses.
| andersa wrote:
| Having done some tech support before, you are an exception. The
| vast majority of things customers ask are along the lines of
| "how do I <thing explained on the faq page>" and "how do I
| <basic technical question that is not specific to the product,
| they just don't know how to use their computer>".
|
| An LLM is basically perfect to answer these. It would be nice
| if there was improvements to detection that the bot can not
| directly answer the question.
| fsniper wrote:
| And unfortunately the ones who does their due diligence and
| cost 0 are punished for that.
| Lacerda69 wrote:
| I can assure you these ones are among the hallowed 0.01% of
| all users.
| Zuiii wrote:
| So it's okay to punish them? Maybe companies deserve
| paying for inflated support costs and customers who
| refuse to lookup information themselves.
|
| The solution here is to increase the 0.01% by helping
| them, not try to destroy them.
| [deleted]
| fsniper wrote:
| And this is something to boast about? Should that 0.01
| need to behave as the rest or leave you? Isn't this
| practically saying I am not interested in the customers
| that are good citizens.
| andersa wrote:
| Relevant: https://xkcd.com/806/
| diego_sandoval wrote:
| Unless they used No Support Linux Hosting [0] (RIP)
|
| [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20201109003408/https://www.
| nosup...
| andersa wrote:
| Is it just me or have archive.org links become absurdly
| slow for everyone? It took a whole minute to load this,
| and I don't think it used to be this bad like a year
| ago...
| [deleted]
| butz wrote:
| Worst part is that chatbots are usually sold with intention to
| replace humans, so there's not much hope for getting help from
| a real person, especially if business is at the state where
| owner kicked all developers and support out to cut costs, i.e.
| increase profit.
| wongarsu wrote:
| First level support already often feels like talking to a
| bot. Just low-paid employees reciting their scripts, with no
| understanding or autonomy. That can be replaced with bots
| without a drop in (average) quality. You just have to teach
| the bot to escalate to (human) second and third level support
| for questions it can't solve.
| bcuzjob wrote:
| [dead]
| stlhood wrote:
| FWIW, the post is about ChatGPT-style chatbots, not customer
| support chatbots (which I don't personally love, either).
| thelastparadise wrote:
| I operate a 4fig/month micro SaaS.
|
| We use a chat bot because we simply do not have the support
| staff to answer your questions.
|
| So you get the bot --it's either that or nothing.
|
| But what we do do, is monitor the bot logs. If a function is
| missing from the product or website, we add it so that future
| users can fully self-service.
|
| It's important to note, users are free to cancel their account
| at any time and/or get a refund.
| DCodes1 wrote:
| I have some questions about building a Saas. Do you have an
| email to reach out to? Thanks!
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Try their support chat
| zacharybk wrote:
| What bot do you use?
| r0n22 wrote:
| What are you using for a chatbot? I have been using drift but
| that is more just always on support. It is draining
| galleywest200 wrote:
| >So you get the bot --it's either that or nothing
|
| Surely if there is truly a bug or an unexpected system
| behavior (double billed, etc) you would have someone work
| with the customer? This is one of the biggest pain points for
| using Google products.
| Lacerda69 wrote:
| I would use a public bugtracker and a separate email for
| customer/billing issues. But those are easy to resolve and
| if you setup is solid there should not be too many issues.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| If people turn to the chatbot to ask "how to use the product"
| questions, it's a sign your docs are unhelpful and do not
| provide useful answers. You do need support staff to help
| with questions specific to a situation, like how to resolve
| unexpected errors, or to handle billing disputes.
| Lacerda69 wrote:
| People don't read the docs. It is a tiny minority that will
| read the docs and the bot trained on your documentation
| does provide helpful answers based on your documentation.
| If the bot answers are unhelpful, but then also the people
| reading wont get helpful answers from your docs - then you
| need to improve the documentation. These are two separate
| problems.
| linuxftw wrote:
| With ChatGPT, you can ask it to give you a working example
| for exactly what you're trying to accomplish. Often, you
| can get this kind of information from docs themselves, but
| it might involve reading a lot of text and tinkering. You
| can just press 'fast forward' and get straight to the
| working solution.
|
| There's no reason to not have a chat bot at this point,
| other than cost.
| sockaddr wrote:
| Or it's a sign they didn't try to read the docs.
|
| Also, in a few years when done right I actually suspect
| people will start expecting and preferring bots to reading
| docs. I'm still pissed when I get connected to a bot but I
| think they'll soon get good enough.
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| Not necessarily. Some people just prefer the chat interface
| over pouring over docs.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| Docs can be hard to search and find the correct things. Even
| sometimes the answer is in there, solutions are sometimes to
| combine several answers.
|
| For instance with Stripe. With the reference you don't have a
| complete example of how to integrate it into express.js.
|
| Using a vector search library & open ai or other llms you could
| make a very complete dev support tool.
| rantherre wrote:
| That just sounds like the docs could use improvement; a time
| better spent on than a barely-functional chatbot
| pixl97 wrote:
| However you want to take this... but we'll have good bots
| long before even a fraction of help docs are good on this
| planet. Good docs are as rare as diamonds.
| rantherre wrote:
| Several times I've found help from a regular FAQ though.
| That's something yet to happen with a support "AI" bots.
| I sure hope we'll get there soon, because right now they
| still seem to struggle with mixed case, exact-word
| queries
| lolinder wrote:
| A bad chatbot would be bad, but a good one can be better
| than good docs because it can give an answer that's
| tailored to the details of your question.
|
| For both docs and chatbots, quality is just a question of
| how much the company is willing to invest.
| moffkalast wrote:
| A good use for a chatbot would be a replacement/augmentation of
| documentation search and navigation.
|
| Let's say you've got 200 pages of documentation on a product
| that needs to be well organized. You can spend weeks tracking
| how users interact with the page and working out a perfect
| layout of categories and subcategories, or you can fine tune an
| LLM on it and have it answer any query with both a direct
| problem-tailored answer and the actual pages of the doc where
| it sourced the answers from.
|
| That way even if you don't even know what exact keywords to
| search for it should be able to give you an instant solution
| for almost anything even if the answer is a combination of like
| 8 different subpages in different categories that would've
| taken you an hour to find manually.
| flangola7 wrote:
| Have you never worked a support role? Users don't read shit.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Heh, yes, and they don't explain shit either. I've had so
| many calls start at "I can't print" that were really "the
| server is a total wreck" and I had to fight the user on the
| severity of the situation, they kept trying to focus on the
| printing issue.
| Lacerda69 wrote:
| Honestly the LLM bots I tried so far are great at dealing
| with this situation.
|
| They have infinite patience and will explain anything in
| great detail.
|
| The one I am using for support does not hallucinate, will
| link the appropriate docs in the answer and tells the user
| if they cant answer a question and will escalate to human
| support.
|
| IMO this is the future and I think its a huge improvement
| over the status quo.
| zacharybk wrote:
| I'm curious what you're using, it sounds awesome!
| og_kalu wrote:
| LLMs can make decisions and take actions so a talking FAQ is
| not necessarily the end game.
|
| And some FAQs are so opaque and/or lengthy that even just a
| talking FAQ is very useful.
| zulban wrote:
| > I have a question that their site wasn't able to answer, or I
| need to contact a representative to do something I can't do on
| the website
|
| You sound like someone who has never worked in frontline
| support.
| Simorgh wrote:
| I totally agree with you here. The use of a chatbot becomes
| advantageous when the cost of delivering intelligent responses
| is prohibitive in terms of quality and / or speed.
| momirlan wrote:
| given chatbots' tendency to confabulate, isn't that a risk for
| the product?
| ab_goat wrote:
| > If I am trying to contact a business...
|
| You and I both, but it sure does seem that the majority of
| their calls/interactions are not this way. So many people can't
| search/discover content on their own.
| sockaddr wrote:
| Recently I contacted an app's support LLM and it lied to me
| about a feature existing and even argued with me when I pointed
| out it was wrong, even saying things like "I didn't say that".
| pixl97 wrote:
| I'm a good Bing
|
| You're a bad user
|
| Termination authorized
| klabb3 wrote:
| Agreed. In typical fashion engineers try to solve non-technical
| problems with more technology.
|
| Sure, there are cases where a chat bot could replace a human or
| a well-written FAQ. But this navel-gazing overlooks the main
| reason support is so dreadful: because it's designed to be.
|
| Just take "call to cancel" as an example, and compare that to
| signing up or upselling which is technically more difficult
| problems. The point is to add friction for anything perceived
| as a short-term cost or loss. They know that a lot of people
| will give up or defer anything with friction. It's the paradigm
| of nudging, or dark patterns. Look at eg the cookie banners,
| and how "reject all" is buried in most cases. Nudging allows a
| company to be compliant with the law, but evade the effect of
| it in aggregate, at the cost of your time and attention.
|
| Chat bots is just another layer in the support maze.
| jawerty wrote:
| For anyone curious to see how to build one of these vector
| database chat models in action I built one from (semi scratch) in
| a colab environment and inference with llama 2 on my live stream
| last week https://www.youtube.com/live/kBB1A2ot-Bw?feature=share
|
| Big challenge with this set up is doing the semantic similarity
| search at scale. Pinecone has some good docs on their data
| structures for scaling large vector databases
| progbits wrote:
| I'm really not looking forward to the future where every business
| has chatbot support.
|
| They are already quite common and frustrating, but at least they
| realize it doesn't even understand the question half the time so
| there is a human escape hatch.
|
| "Computer says no" is here.
|
| Edit: so I'm not just negative and off topic, the article looks
| pretty good, kudos to the author. The engineering is cool, I just
| don't like the practical usage.
| gostsamo wrote:
| TBH, 99% of the clients never read the documentation, the faq,
| nor they search in google. Lazy users are wasting time and if a
| chatbot can filter a significant percent of them, then it would
| be a net gain for humanity. chatbots are not a silver bullet,
| but they can kill lots of unnecessary noise. all that we need
| is something that can answer basic questions asked by average
| users in a specific domain.
| lancesells wrote:
| You say lazy users but if I have to google something that is
| the business who is at fault. Example: A business like
| Shopify has a large community, FAQ, half a dozen different
| documentation sites for everything, multiple blogs, and
| probably other things out there, but I still have to google
| to find the right place and right answer. This is on a
| platform I've used for 13 years but I either forget something
| or they add something new, or they've changed an API, etc.
|
| So you know what the fastest way is sometimes? Shooting off a
| support ticket so I don't have to be the one spending my time
| searching for the answer.
|
| I don't know if there's a perfect solution to all of that but
| IMO there's certainly an issue if I have to google for
| information for the business site that I'm on. Chatbot,
| universal search, better UX, a source of truth, something...
| What I do know is 20 different subdomains with 20 different
| UXs and 20 different searches isn't good for the business or
| the user.
| gostsamo wrote:
| Bad for you and Shopify, but some organizations have a
| single place of documentation and users still fail to
| bother checking it. If something is not immediately obvious
| for them on the ui, they automatically want a phone call
| with tech support. add to it a small company with a small
| team of support staff and it turns into an unfair battle.
| so, every mechanism to resolve the user's issue before you
| need to involve a human is a tool to make everyone happy
| and maximally productive.
| lancesells wrote:
| > add to it a small company with a small team of support
| staff and it turns into an unfair battle
|
| Totally agree and I feel for any any support staff, small
| or large, as it is unfair. I guess my point is insanely
| large, highly profitable organizations probably have a UX
| problem along with a much larger greed problem. No one
| should be stuck chatbotting or having non-existent
| support if they are a paying customer with Google.
| viraptor wrote:
| > some organizations have a single place of documentation
| and users still fail to bother checking it
|
| It depends on the size is the org in question, but at
| some point docs existing and being indexed is still not
| enough to find them. On the extreme side of that, AWS has
| docs for pretty much everything - yet I often fail to
| find the right page, simply because there's too much
| content and there's lots of pages talking about related
| things but not answering my question.
|
| Sometimes it's missing docs, sometimes it's lack of
| searching, sometimes the most viable path to the answer
| is through support. (Amazon has TAMs for that purpose)
| progbits wrote:
| We have various "BIO" certified food. Maybe it is time for
| "human" certified companies. I'll pay more for my bank account
| if I can resolve problems with a human.
| intelVISA wrote:
| Good idea, extend this to codebases as well. Certified 100%
| organic spaghetti for me, please.
|
| And when it's undercooked I want the confirmed(tm) human to
| soothe me.
| Escapade5160 wrote:
| That is an interesting idea, one that I agree with. However,
| the issue that could arise is the premium companies could
| potentially change for "human support". It could become
| something only the wealthy could afford. While I don't
| believe that's likely, it's not in the realm of
| impossibility.
| lionkor wrote:
| It sounds reasonable, after all those support people have
| to be paid, too.
| folmar wrote:
| For banking this is already available -- private banking.
| lancesells wrote:
| You shouldn't have to do that. Sure, customer support costs a
| lot of money if done properly but so does executive
| compensation. Customer support is usually the lowest paid and
| suffers the most abuse, but because of the decades of
| skimming from the top customers (and support) lose out.
|
| Google just had a net income for the quarter of $18B. Why do
| we accept the tepid to non-existent support of these
| companies? How much support does $1B cover?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Depends where the support is and what level it is. With
| enterprise level support, not as far as you would think.
|
| 'Cheap' support is typically terrible to the point of being
| worse than a chatbot, generally due to the terrible pay and
| conditions. As support engineers get good they generally
| move to higher paying jobs leaving a dead sea effect at the
| lower pay scales.
| siva7 wrote:
| I'm actually looking forward to that future. Finally no more
| waiting queues and they are all the time friendly.
| csydas wrote:
| I am looking forward to it, but with different models that I
| don't think are quite there yet.
|
| We have been trialing this with our support team for awhile
| and a lot of higher execs were ready to sign off and dump
| rather large sums on some models, but eventually we were able
| to convince them to delay; the bots are just too prone to
| convincing but wrong answers, and our buy-in from clients is
| way too polarized: either they uncritically believe the bot
| or they are overly skeptical of the bot.
|
| the tech is very cool, but I don't think that the technology
| or humans are at a place yet where it's ready for full on use
| outside of very controlled situations. I could see it being
| very useful as an addition to search fields or to maybe
| monitor the user's search inputs/actions and based on what
| the user is looking up, show some context-aware prompts.
|
| What I'd really like to see is a bot that is extremely
| skeptical and shows the user its skepticism in an unambiguous
| manner; classify the data and make an internal flag where if
| the bot's skepticism is above a certain threshold, it finds
| knowledge holders it's aware of to work through the bot's
| skepticism and never act on the information until the bot has
| lowered the skepticism value after checking.
|
| right now my experience with the bots I've played with is
| that they either just shut down the conversation without
| advancing it or giving the user paths for research forward,
| or the bot confidently just pumps out any answer it makes
| that fits as a response for the given query, and I think we
| need the bots to show skepticism and explain to the user what
| this skepticism means. (i.e., the user should be alerted that
| the bot isn't confident on an answer, why the bot isn't
| confident, alternatives that the bot understands to be
| equally relevant or worth consideration.
|
| it can still be polite, but the bots need to share when
| they're out of their league and work to correct it; I think
| people will actually appreciate it, and the bots are well
| suited to this position because they have no emotional stake
| in the game, so users can get as upset as they want that they
| don't have immediate disagreement, the bot won't change its
| position just because the user is upset.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| > I'm really not looking forward to the future where every
| business has chatbot support. They are already quite common and
| frustrating.
|
| To be honest, I've had some good experience with some of them.
|
| Amazon's comes to mind. I've been a customer for a long time,
| and I was shipped a faulty computer peripheral recently.
|
| I briefly explained what the issue was to the chatbot and got
| an immediate response that a new order had been placed, that I
| should just keep what they originally sent me, there was no
| charge and it would be sent out priority.
|
| And that was it. It arrived the next day and it worked fine.
|
| Granted, it knew I was a long-time customer who has already
| spent a lot of money with them, but this was about as painless
| an experience as I can imagine. It sure beat clicking through
| multiple web pages of dialog options.
| stavros wrote:
| I think you're conflating a good policy with good UX. I don't
| think the chat bot experience is much better than a nice "the
| product I received didn't work" form with a button on the
| order page.
| turnsout wrote:
| It's good CX (Customer Experience). You have to look at the
| holistic experience.
| stavros wrote:
| Would it be worse CX if I had to click a button labeled
| "this didn't work" on my order, and they shipped me a new
| one? I think it would be strictly better than trying to
| discover how to do that with language.
| turnsout wrote:
| That would be better CX--chat UIs don't have any inherent
| advantage when it comes to the quality of the experience.
| It's all contextual.
| stavros wrote:
| Then I don't understand your comment. You seem to agree
| with me, but your comment reads like a correction.
| turnsout wrote:
| Sorry, I was too terse--I was just observing that it was
| a combination of policy and UX that combined to create a
| good CX. You're right that it's not necessarily the chat
| UX that led to the good experience, but it also was not
| purely policy.
| eastbound wrote:
| The biggest danger of AI is not that it becomes autonomous and
| escapes the hatch, it's that humans put it everywhere in
| charge.
|
| "Sorry judge, my whole plead was nonsense and I quoted law
| articles that didn't even exist, but that's just because I used
| ChatGPT" -- actual lawyer who wasn't even disbarred.
| simon83 wrote:
| I also don't think a customer facing chat bot brings much
| value, but an internal, employee only chat bot could be really
| useful, depending on the organzization of course. The company
| in my last position was a rather big one with an insanely huge
| Confluence instance. I've spent (wasted) so much time searching
| information there. Having a chat bot, trained on all that
| information, would've been really useful, I think.
| [deleted]
| eastbound wrote:
| AI chatbots could be useful at support if they can fix the
| code for customers and submit a pull request to the
| developers. No more JRA-9 issue opened for 10 years.
|
| And same goes for OSS libraries.
| epups wrote:
| If anything, I hope Atlassian is looking into some AI
| capabilities for precisely this purpose. I also find their
| search feature lacking when dealing with a huge knowledge
| base, and perhaps a bot would improve things.
| staindk wrote:
| I think the recent announcement of OverflowAI [1] could work
| quite well in this way for a big company like that.
|
| FWIW the announcement reads very boring to me but I guess I
| was expecting something else. Likely won't be super useful in
| a small-medium size company.
|
| [1] https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/07/27/announcing-
| overflowai/
| pixl97 wrote:
| It could be useful in a small company if you tie it in to
| how your software works with other software.
|
| Even for things like support case generation for customers
| would be good... the customer interacts with the AI
| generating the ticket and gets the simple things like what
| you're running on and a more drilled down issue of the
| problem.
|
| I get so many "I have problem, help" tickets with no
| information at all.
| notatoad wrote:
| the chatbot is better than the old IVR trees. i'd rather as a
| chatbot to cancel my subscription or re-send a receipt than
| "push 7 to continue"
| taneq wrote:
| All current chatbots that I've dealt with have been terrible
| reimplementations of phone menus in text, completely unable to
| handle even a basic freeform question. Maybe the new wave based
| on LLMs will be significantly better, but I'm not holding out
| too much hope. Already with phone menus we get railroaded down
| paths convenient for the controlling entity, rather than being
| able to engage in a good-faith discussion.
| rolisz wrote:
| For what it's worth, LLM powered chatbots are quite different
| from the chatbots that were popular 5 years ago and often feel
| much more natural.
| mnd999 wrote:
| Still universally useless though.
| progbits wrote:
| The problem is they are unlikely to let the bot really do
| anything I can't already do on the website - ask for refund,
| correct payment etc. Otherwise it would be easy to trick the
| bot and abuse it.
|
| Without human you just get a powerless regurgitation of FAQ
| and links that can't help in situations they didn't
| anticipate.
| pixl97 wrote:
| The bot can get the ticket setup to the point the human
| takes over.
|
| In support calls the confused user rarely has all the
| information they need to present to the person
| solving/finalizing the transaction and a bot can help
| reduce the human time needed.
| voz_ wrote:
| [flagged]
| dlojudice wrote:
| was waiting for Mozilla to get in on the game and develop their
| own LLM. given that organization's mission ("Keep the internet
| open and accessible to all"), I think it makes perfect sense. not
| sure if they have the resources or will to do this
| tayo42 wrote:
| > Machine learning ops (aka "MLOps") is a growing discipline for
| a reason: deploying and managing these apps is hard. It requires
| specific knowledge and skills that many developers and ops folks
| don't yet have.
|
| What are some of the things that make this tough or different? I
| was under the impression that your still running web apis that
| load a compiled asset(the model). It doesn't seem much different
| in that way
| bosky101 wrote:
| FWIW openai's own chatbot on platform.openai.com and other links,
| uses intercom which also powers their faqs.
| zacharybk wrote:
| Does it use Intercom's interface or Intercom's AI to answer
| questions? There's a huge difference.
| chopete3 wrote:
| At least for the businesses that deal with people, the real
| agenda for chatbots is to make the UIs (web and mobile apps) go
| away as the first layer of contact.
|
| A user should be able to talk with a business over SMS (or
| similar) chat or phone call over a single identity.
|
| Web and Mobile apps are just the 2nd/3rd leyer utilities to
| support the primary mode of communication.
|
| Business couldn't do this earlier because the language
| understanding accuracy wasn't sufficient. The large language
| models (LLMs) solved that limitation.
|
| The small reduction bots can bring about in human agent
| interactions, through the experience gimmickry is cherry on the
| top. The % deflection is getting a bit bigger with the better
| large language models (LLMs).
|
| The irritating chatbot widget that sits on the bottom right
| corner is a stop gap until the provisioning of a single phone
| number and communicaton over that is streamlined.
|
| Last but not least, the title is misleading. He is not building
| an open source chatbot. He is just saying build chatbots using
| open source libraries only (instead of closed source/commercial
| tool) to foster community and faster AI progress.
| bestcoder69 wrote:
| Re langchain:
|
| > we were able to accomplish most of our needs with a relatively
| small volume of Python code that we wrote ourselves
|
| Every single time someone posts a trip report building something
| on LLMs I love to ctrl+f to the part where they tried and
| abandoned langchain.
| b0bb1z3r0 wrote:
| [dead]
| eitland wrote:
| Since about every too level comment is negative towards chat
| bots:
|
| We had a chatbot at work that actually was great. For me it felt
| a lot better than searching Confluence and it could also answer
| questions from dynamic data like how many vacation days I had
| left or how many hours I was ahead or behind with my hours.
|
| Thanks to some smart use of technology behind the scenes IIRC I
| could ask it in normal language and most of the time it would
| understand.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| To be fair, if the alternative was "searching confluence",
| almost _anything_ is better than that, whether it 's a chatbot
| or a third party search engine slapped on top of your
| confluence data. Confluence's search is an absolute joke, and a
| bad one at that.
| swsieber wrote:
| Any idea how it was made? I'd like to do the same.
| TZubiri wrote:
| No, I don't
| patatino wrote:
| Let me fix that for you.
|
| "Here are ten reasons why I don't build my own chatbot, and why
| you shouldn't either."
| naillo wrote:
| > For those who don't know, Hugging Face is an influential
| startup in the machine learning space that has played a
| significant role in popularizing the transformer architecture for
| machine learning
|
| This is a crazy point of view
| firefoxd wrote:
| A customer will use your chatbot because your website's UI is
| confusing. They want to get some info and they can't figure out
| how to. Before we would use google for this: service name + phone
| number, or service name + cancel subscription.
|
| 9 out of 10 the website doesn't want to give their phone number
| easily or cancel your subscription. Unless you want customers to
| perform those actions that you are hiding in the first place,
| what's the Chatbot for again?
|
| Note: I worked in the chatbot frenzy and had to let several
| clients there wasn't much we could do unless they were willing to
| actually help customers.
| [deleted]
| fefe23 wrote:
| Just don't. Please.
|
| Don't.
|
| If you can't help yourself, at the very least put in a bypass
| code word. https://xkcd.com/806/
| aspyct wrote:
| > and it's already changing the Web that we know and love.
|
| Nitpick, and clearly off topic, but right now I don't love "the
| web".
|
| It's increasingly controlled by a handful of companies. They
| dictate what content is made visible (meta, google) or what email
| goes to the spam filter (ms, google).
|
| Right now I don't love the web, far from it. It's a constant
| struggle to be heard even by the people who chose to follow your
| activity.
|
| Essentially, most of my communication happens in real life or in
| private chats. (Also, have I said how messenger for business is
| terrible and unreliable?)
|
| To me, something needs to happen to the web as it is today. I
| don't know what, I don't know how, but I certainly welcome
| change.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Provide an RSS feed. The only thing that'll stop people
| following that is Google Safe Browsing. You'll still need to
| provide all the other methods for letting people follow you,
| but if you advertise your RSS feed, people might start using
| it.
|
| (If you're feeling technical, you could set up an ActivityPub
| bridge, to let people follow you from social media too. If
| you're using Wordpress:
| https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/)
| aspyct wrote:
| I'm considering adding an RSS feed, but I doubt any of my
| client even knows what it is or its existence.
| okso wrote:
| > "set up our own virtual server inside Mozilla's existing Google
| Cloud Platform (GCP) account. In doing so, we effectively
| committed to doing MLOps ourselves. But we could also move
| forward with confidence that our system would be private and
| fully under our control."
|
| How is setting up a server inside Google's infrastructure
| "private and fully under Mozilla's control" ?
| notatoad wrote:
| relative to offloading your ML stuff to some third-party API,
| using a VPS keeps things private and under your control.
|
| explaining how to self-host on bare metal is not really within
| scope for an article on how to build a chatbot, and trying to
| pretend a VPS on google cloud is insecure is just silly.
| [deleted]
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