Chat is a forgiving interface for quality.
- Chat is a forgiving interface for quality.
- If it gets the answer wrong or doesn't do what you wanted, you can easily ask follow up questions.
- One-shot UIs that have to give a perfect answer every time with no second tries are very hard to get to the bar of viability and then improve.
- Compare Google Search and (spoken) Google Assistant interactions.
- With Google Search, as long as the answer is in the top 10, it's fine.
- Formulating a query is fast, and text results are a broad channel, easy to skim through quickly.
- Then, if users are consistently clicking on the third result, the system can twiddle its ranking to be to the top.
- This gives a clear gradient to hill climb.
- With Google Assistant, formulating the query and getting the response over audio are a narrow channel.
- It's impossible to speed up the readout, so you get one answer, not several.
- If the answer isn't right, users give up.