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Returns We guarantee the quality of all of Cha Cha Matcha products, and we want you to love your matcha. Your Bag. Shipping FREE. Shipping calculated at checkout. But in , months after the iPhone launched, the easiest way to get information to your phone was to ask ChaCha. Investors like Jeff Bezos latched onto it, pouring more money into the Indiana-based company. By , the service launched a mobile version, which is when it went viral with my friends.
As a high school student, I played around with it after school, trying to come up with the craziest questions I could ask. Unless you had a smartphone with a fast hook-up to Wikipedia and parents who didn't care about data, texting ChaCha was your info line and your entertainment. You have guides who come in and try to do foul play, and then you have users who come back in over and over again," said ChaCha's CEO Scott A.
Jones in an interview with Business Insider. Half of the company was devoted to managing unruly guides — contractors like me who would answer questions — and the unruly users — teens like me who just wanted to ask it crazy questions to see if ChaCha could answer.
They would spend hours a day just pummeling the system or answering the system with bad answers," Jones said. Early on, ChaCha started cataloging questions and the answers written by guides.
Nine months after launch, ChaCha added "Expediters" who could select an answer from the catalog to send in response. Basic questions like "How many planets are there?
As a user, I didn't notice whether it was a human or the AI answering me. Since the answers had been written by humans before, each one generally read like someone had personally written it out, down to the same "ChaCha Again! Jones estimates that about 70 percent of the questions were answered first by AI, another 20 percent had an answer selected by the database, and the remaining went to guides who would answer by hand.
By the time I was a college student with time and an internet connection to waste, I decided to try my hand at becoming a "Guide" in December But about a month into my tenure as a guide, I received an email. My user rating was too low at 84 percent. This is what it must feel like to be an Uber driver today, and maybe an M employee tomorrow. As a contractor, I don't remember the day I stopped.
I think I just stopped logging in once school got back in swing, and my dead time evaporated with a new semester. ChaCha, too, began to fade just as quickly. The company was never able to monetize its service. The site followed the trends in mobile, moving away from costly texts to building out an app.
The 12 employees who are still with ChaCha work remotely, while Jones has decamped to Hawaii, away from his Indiana headquarters. It makes its money as texting service for Veterans Affairs and licensing out its data. But now Facebook is following in ChaCha's footsteps with its own hybrid human-computer assistant: Facebook M.
M is supposed to be more transactional — it's more about helping somebody book restaurant reservations or buy flowers — but it's using a lot of the same tricks as ChaCha. For instance, ChaCha gave guides a full chat history so they could see when a pronoun like "it" referred to a movie theater's location versus a movie itself. Many of the apps, like Siri, can't even follow a chain of conversation. For Facebook's vision of M, humans monitor "every" communication from "start to finish" to help the computer.
Hopefully, that will cut down on bad answers on behalf of the computers, but it could open it up to bad actors on behalf of the humans. Facebook claims it has a few dozen employees now, but its chief Messenger boss envisions a network of "thousands" of M Trainers over time. But Jones cautioned that people react differently to computers and humans, as we've already seen in the early M reviews.
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