 original message from gary lawrence murphy garym canada com and the one thing i think we ve learned in all that time is that as a help desk it doesn t work i m not sure they are doing strictly help desk stuff but the whole who in their right mind would use that it doesn t have all these cool features isn t always a guarantee of failure maybe there is a strength in this approach agents and or im as ui than can find a nich application space in all the prolog based nl database query systems of the NUMBER s and other later chatterbot helpdesk projects like shallow red even simpler tries like ask jeeves people very quickly know they re talking to a robot and the queries anneal to short truncated and terse database like verb noun or just noun keyword requests kind of like a web query and with google someone else can turn them into a link so you don t even have to type anything people are just too quick to adapt and too impatient to forgive a clunky interface and for now especially when the average computer user still can t type more than maybe NUMBER NUMBERwpm nl is a painfully slow clunky interface yes true true put it this way would you login wake the bot and ask for the seattle weather or would you do as we all do and just click the weather icon sitting there on your desktop what about a situation where you don t directly ask talk to the bot but they listen in and advise correct interject etc example two people discussing trips etc may trigger a weather bot to mention what the forecast says without directly being asked 