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marcus_holmestoday at 4:43 AM1 replyview on HN

Search is great when you know what you're looking for.

I want a "how do I?" function alongside search that will explain their product to me. Especially since so many SaaS products have absolutely terrible UX - it looks lovely, but you cannot discover anything, and you cannot intuit how to do something. Menus auto-hide, scroll bars don't work so you don't realise there's another half of the page you're looking at, buttons don't have tooltips or any explanation of what they do, icons are lovely but don't actually describe the thing they do, colours are lovely but I'm colourblind so aren't helpful, there's no useful help page for "this is how to do the really obvious thing you're trying to do...", or at least not one that I can find using the search terms that make sense to me.

I think I'm at 1 success out of 15 attempts for Gemini to explain how to do something in Google Sheets/Docs, though, so I'm not hopeful that anyone can actually implement this.


Replies

sincerelytoday at 6:39 AM

>I think I'm at 1 success out of 15 attempts for Gemini to explain how to do something in Google Sheets/Docs, though, so I'm not hopeful that anyone can actually implement this.

People love to talk about this as one of the helpful features of AI (knowledge extraction from documents/summarizing), but I'm really not convinced. The last generation of models seem to have 70-90% accuracy on tasks like this, which is way below what i'd consider a reliable tool

e.g. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/digital-health/articles...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11197181/

I don't know if there are any benchmarks for this sort of task, maybe the new ones are improved but I also doubt that people are using GPT5.5 pro ultrathink for these tasks anyways