Nobody Wants To Talk To Your Robot
AI might be the future, but we humans aren’t going out without a fight.
I’m a big believer in messaging, both as a platform for people to connect and communicate with each other, and as a means for companies, publishers, or organizations to offer a service. That’s what led us to launch Text Rex, an SMS restaurant recommendations service as an extension of our restaurant discovery website and app, The Infatuation. We simply felt like we could use messaging to create value for our users by doing on demand search of our own content for them. You want a spot for date night in the East Village? Sure, here’s a restaurant that would be perfect and a link to our review of it. Simple, clean, and easy. Who wouldn’t want that?
But as things stand today, messaging as a service at scale is a challenging proposition. You basically have two options — automate it and hope the robots don’t send anyone to Bubba Gump’s, or run it with humans and face a long and costly road as you grow.
We opted for the latter, and I am incredibly glad we did.
Not that we had much of a choice — when we were kicking around the Text Rex idea back in May of 2015, you could have convinced me that AI was an acronym for aliens or something. And aliens are fucking scary, so we definitely weren’t doing that. Instead, we did the only thing I know how to do. I bought an iPhone, connected it to a few computers via iCloud, put up a splash page, and let it rip. We assumed a few hundred people would be interested, and that seemed like something we could handle. A few thousand people had signed up within the first two hours. Oops.
Luckily, we quickly found an excellent solution that helped us handle the volume and scale efficiently, but we also very quickly realized something else — people liked using Text Rex because it was personal. Yes, they were glad we were helping them find places to eat. But they were also glad to know they were communicating with another organism that requires food to survive. Score one for the humans.
Because that’s really the problem, isn’t it? Talking to a robot usually sucks. Even a smart robot, like Optimus Prime. The nuances of human conversation can be problematic for even the best AI solutions, especially when something like a follow up question is necessary. And even when AI is good, it never feels real. It feels cold. Or even worse, it feels way too friendly, like that person in your office that thinks exclamation points make their emails more fun.
Let me be clear that we are not anti automation or artificial intelligence. I hope that once that inevitable day arrives when our robot overlords assume power, they will read this post and decide to show me mercy. But that day has not yet come. And it might not come as soon as some people think.
As a result, our plan is to keep being as human as possible for as long as possible, even if it does take more time, energy, and money. What’s that we humans say? Sometimes the things that are the hardest are the things that are most worthwhile?
No wonder we’re about to become irrelevant.
