The Sad Reality of Chatbotics

As I noted in my previous post on chatbotics Towards Chatbot Ethics (May 2019), the chatbot has sometimes been pitched as a kind of Holy Grail. Which prompts the question I discussed before - whom shall the chatbot serve?

Chatbots are designed to serve their master - and this is generally the organization that runs them, not necessarily the consumer, even if you have paid good money to have one of these curious cylinders in your home. For example, Amazon's Alexa is supposed to encourage consumers to access other Amazon services, including retail and entertainment -  and this is how Amazon expects to make a financial return on the sale and distribution of these devices.

But how well do they work even for them? The journalist Priya Anand (who tweets at @PriyasIdeas) has been following this question for a while. Back in 2018, she talked to digital marketing experts who warned that voice shopping was unlikely to take off quickly. Her latest article notes the attempts by Amazon Alexa to nudge consumers into shopping, which may simply cause some frustrated consumers to switch the thing off altogether. Does this explain the apparently high attrition rates?

If you are selling a device at a profit, it may not matter if people don't use it much. But if you are selling a device at an initial loss, expecting to recoup the money when the device is used, then you have to find ways of getting people to use the thing. 

Perhaps if Amazon can use its Machine Learning chops to guess what we want before we've even said anything, then the chatbots can cut out some of the annoying chatter. Apparently Alexa engineers think this would be more natural. Others might argue Natural's Not In It. (Coercion of the senses? We're not so gullible.)

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Priya Anand, The Reality Behind Voice Shopping Hype (The Information, 6 August 2018)

Priya Anand, Amazon’s Alexa Stalled With Users as Interest Faded, Documents Show (Bloomberg, 22 December 2021)

Daphne Leprince-Ringuet, Alexa can now guess what you want before you even ask for it (ZDNet, 13 November 2020)

Tom McKay, Report: Almost Nobody Is Using Amazon's Alexa to Actually Buy Stuff (Gizmodo, 6 August 2018)

Chris Matyszczyk, Amazon wants you to keep quiet, for a brilliantly sinister reason (ZDNet, 4 November 2021)

Related posts: Towards Chatbot Ethics (May 2019), Technology and the Discreet Cough (September 2019), Chatbiotics: Coercion of the Senses (April 2023)