New ways of interacting

I proposed the idea of a “docsbot” many years ago at a conference when the tech industry was deep in the last wave of “chat interfaces” in 2017/18. The chatbots at the time had very little actual intelligence and were typically large decision trees with a dash of NLP. They were basic and frustrating, but everywhere. In this context, I proposed that users could ask documentation questions instead of clicking through link after link or attempting to find what they were looking for through a search field.

Something like: “Tell me how to install Monito on Linux.”

Followed by: “And how do I run it?”

The bot maintains the context you’ve already provided – the name of the tool and the operating system – and keeps helping you with information relevant to you.

In those days of general frustration with the chatbots of the time, my ideas seemed ludicrous and basically unusable. A few...