One of the main ways I’ve seen LLMs deployed is by embedding a chat of some kind into an existing app. You can now “talk” to your spreadsheets, your email, your notes — the question being asked is “how can this app be augmented by an LLM?” I suspect that you may want to explore the inverse: “which app-like features could make this chat experience better?” Why doesn’t ChatGPT have its sign-up process take place inside the chat interface? The sign-in form could appear inside the chat and you could interact with it there. The only difference would be that now, when you’re having trouble signing in, the chat would see what you’re doing and be there to help. This is probably a bad example.
Browser in the chat
What if you embedded your entire browser into a chat window such that the chat could see and interact with everything you’re doing?
Transient vs non-transient interface elements
One reason that embedding non-chat functionality into chats doesn’t make sense has to do with the way we interact with chat content. Messages are mostly transient; we read them and move on. We don’t spend time interacting with the same message over and over. This property is generally shared by all messages in a chat history which makes it quite natural for the entire chat to move up and into the distance as new messages appear at the bottom. If you try to embed something that you might want to return to, you encounter a problem: what if you’re not done interacting with the element but you want to send a new message? Doing so will push your element up and off the screen, requiring you to scroll back to it. In fact, this problem already occurs with messages which we do want to reference again; the experience of using a chat as reference material can be annoying.
Separate pages as a form of pinning
Any part of an interface that is not embedded in the chat can be thought of as “pinned” with respect to the chat. The settings button in a chat app is “pinned” because it doesn’t flow away in the stream of messages. But one downside of having separate pages for pinned items is that you become isolated from the chat in those environments. Ideally, you’d always be able to access the chat (and be able to, for example, drop references to different UI elements into it), but you’d also have some elements be pinned so that they remain accessible too.