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In 2018, I founded a startup specializing in chatbot for events. At the time the platforms were Alexa Skills, Actions on Google, and Messenger Platform (and LINE Bot, for people in Asia). I guess what's old is new again, but with fancier tech.

This time will be different?

5 comments

We've actually got systems that can understand English now. Chatbots don't have to be glorified regular expression matches or based on inferior NLP. I've thought more than once that the true value of LLMs could well be that they essentially solve the language comprehension problem and that their ability to consume language is relatively underutilized compared to our attempts to get them to produce language. Under all the generative bling their language comprehension and ability to package that into something that conventional computing can understand is pretty impressive. They've even got a certain amount of common sense built in.

Yeah this seems accurate to me. All the talk of a bubble etc, but LLMs see genuinely useful at tasks like this and I'm sure we'll find more uses as time goes on.

Chatbots with and without GPT is like comparing a car with round vs triangular wheels

Sure absolutely NO difference this time. Say it 100 times and maybe reality will change.

You can’t think of anything that’s changed in the Chatbot space since 2018?

Do people even want chatbots for events?

I personally prefer well curated information.

"I personally prefer well curated information."

The LLM will do the curation.