Evans: Chatbots work for customer support, not browsing product catalogs
Benedict Evans · a16z Podcast | Bots and Beyond · Jan 2, 2019 · at 6:05
a16z Partner Benedict Evans delineates where conversational bot interfaces succeed versus where standard Web UI pages are superior.
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“Well, there's some interaction patterns where that's going to work really well. Like if you want, if you placed an order online and you want to change the order or you want to see if it's available and you want to ask like an actual question, there's an actual question you want to ask. Right. What do you have available is not a question. What are the headlines today is not a question. What shirts do you sell is actually not a question. What you want is a page that lists, shows you all the headlines or a page that shows you all the shirts. When is my order going to arrive? That is a question. Can I change it for something else? That's a question. And so to Connie's point, it's like where you actually would be, it's almost like where you would be emailing. Yeah. Then it works. Where you would be going to the website and looking for the support email or the phone number, or maybe opening a support chat on the website, then a bot is a much better way of doing that.”
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