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Intentions & Actions

Deep Dives

Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:

  • Speech act 18 min read

    Kent Beck's distinction between intentions and actions in chat interfaces directly relates to J.L. Austin's speech act theory, which analyzes how utterances perform actions (like 'I want to depart a day earlier' being both a statement and a request)

  • Human–computer interaction 11 min read

    The article discusses chat-based customer service interfaces and how they translate user intentions into system actions, which is a core concern of HCI research and design

Intentions & Actions

By Kent Beck

I had an amazing customer experience early in the experiments with chat-based interfaces. I had an international flight & I had to move it by a day. I opened a chat with KLM, clearly got an action person, said “I want to depart a day earlier,” answered a question about which departure time I wanted (“same time”), and that was it. Magic!

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