“You’re absolutely right to push back, I didn’t book the flight you asked me to, and I showed you a fake boarding pass. Here’s why…”
But the example on the left isn’t good either. It’s an example of Google taking info from elsewhere and regurgitating it to you, taking you away from the source. In a way no different than summarizing a site so you never wind up going to the site. And it’s not always right either.
If the flight companies didn’t want that to happen, they could have just been upfront with their prices and not filled their checkout process with a million dark patterns meant to steal your money. But they couldn’t help themselves, so here we are.
Lets also not forget that these booking UIs replaced a human operator and offloaded the work and time on you, the consumer to find yourself correct tickets. Each priced algorithmically as much as they can squeeze.
so you never wind up going to the site
Doesn’t the final booking have to be made on the actual source site? That’s always been the case when I used it (agreed that it’s not always right, sometimes the final price/availability is different but hasn’t happened often to me)
I always think it’s funny how the example tech companies ALWAYS use when describing how their products make your life easier is “booking a flight”. The only folks for whom this makes it easier are folks for who the price does not matter.
Well if it automatically searches for the best deal, wouldn’t that make life easier? Though there are already websites for that too.
What’s the best deal? A direct flight redeye? Or a daytime ticket with two layovers for $20 less? A $100 cheaper flight that gets in the night before to a city where hotels average $200?
And if you’re thinking the LLM could just produce some options that might work before letting the user decide, well, that is what Google Flights already does.
Way worse UI
More like no UI, just hopes and dreams that it does what you want.
Left: select any flight, anywhere, any minute you want, with detailed errors explaining what you can and can’t do
Right: hopes and prayers that you end up with a ticket to the right place
The one on the right appeals more to dumb people who hate complexity
These people think they’re artificially boosting their brain power by offloading their decision making the AI, but they’re literally just letting a program roll dice to make close to average decisions based on 5 minutes of context.
You know what’s even better?
Talking to someone at the airport on the phone. No dynamic pricing, having someone to reference mistakes, not having to make login accounts and passwords.
This garbage will come back with negative returns. Just like having self checkouts. I wasn’t trained to work on a register so I can’t tell if those organic vegetables are or aren’t. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s no difference unless it the prepackaged ones.
People will call you old, and say you are refusing to learn new stuff.
Sometimes the new stuff is more efficient in some cases, and in some cases it is not. So it’s nice to have the option. But instead companies limit the more traditional option, because it costs them more. Even though it’s the better option and better customer experience in some cases.
Like no one answering phones anymore is some serious bullshit. Sometimes that’s the quickest way to solve a problem that doesn’t fit into their generic set of problem use cases their automated systems are designed for and limited to.
That’s well put.
It’s like these systems are so poorly implemented that they’re frustrating. And the main issue is you take so much longer to do anything with these stupid AI bots that just saying ADA compliance until you get someone is faster.
I will say that the new wave of chatbots are a mistake. It adds to people not answering phones, it’s like blah blah blah (American accent) to hold on while I transfer you to an associate. And then you get “John” with a think Indian accent. It would be less irritating if they just used their actual name.
But the fun part for me is, my name has a french spelling variation so it’s easy to weed out spammers.
This implies websites couldn’t/didn’t lie to you before AI, which I think is hilarious.
Yes, I run into it very regularly. I’m constantly trying to source materials locally, but every shopping website lies through their teeth about availability. Google is the worst though. They intentionally put paid spots for non-local suppliers in the local results because otherwise it would just be a blank page (which I would greatly prefer…).
The difference there being that the computers aren’t lying, the humans operating them are.
for every good ui there exists ten fold as many bad ui websites filled with ads, spyware and popups, I’m okay not visiting those sites myself. Of course you have to use local models if you wish to not get surveiled and analyzed by cloud ai providers.
That assumes people can read a form.
A combination could actually be pretty handy. Describe what you want to book and it gets automatically filled out in a form which you can check for mistakes. Less manual filling out and still full control.
But maybe for more complex things than booking a flight.
What if there was a straightforward api for my local agent to get the info I want out of your website so I can see what I want without a million upsell ads, and then a well designed web form for me to place my order?
At that point you might as well just do it yourself tbh
You try and use Trainline.com to book an east to west trip requiring 3 changes with at least 15 mins to make each change and maximum resilience to cancellation and delays.
