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Comment by tenaciousDaniel | Hacker News Reader

I do think that eventually these technologies will supersede trivial human transactions like customer service calls. The problem is that no one seems to understand the sheer difficulty of the problem. You have to create a machine that can realistically speak to a person, with all the nuance that entails. We're far further from that than AI marketers would lead us to believe.

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I'd take issue that it needs to realistically speak like a person.

In a sense, the Google search bar is a type of chatbot, but we don't converse with it in grammatical English. It doesn't present as a human, so there's no uncanny valley effect. What gets typed into Google is a sort of lingua franca that we've all collectively learned through 20+ years of increasingly capable search engines. What we need is that level of lingua franca, but for a full, state-change-driving conversation, instead of just a one-step search.

It's not the machines that need to learn, it's us.

Except now Google are trying to make their search engine respond to more natural language and so the established search methods like "domain keyword specific-keyword" are often less successful than trying to think of a more human, but not complex, question that might be commonly asked.

Particularly, of course, they no longer care whether results include your required words.

One has to learn and re-learn how to get the best from these systems.

Aside, I'm impressed with Alexa on FireTV, but until it enters data in to the apps, and searches within media libraries, it remains a novelty.

Ah, good point. I remember working with some chatbot tech a few years ago, and came to the conclusion that realistic speaking is not just unnecessary, it's directly undesirable.

The uncanny valley effect, in my opinion, is due to the fact that 99% of our speech and writing is not dictated by content or necessity, but instead driven by social tendencies.

If I ask my friend to lunch, I'll text him "lunch?". But if I ask my boss out to lunch, it's going to be something like a paragraph, explaining what I'd like to cover during the lunch.

Most of what we say is a kind of dance to ensure other people that we aren't stupid. We don't need this formality when dealing with non-human entities, so speaking in grammatical language when chatting with a bot feels incredibly stupid.

I strongly disagree that customer service calls are trivial.

I didn't mean trivial in the sense you mean. I mean trivial in that, in comparison to other human interactions, the variables are more limited and therefore lower hanging fruit for automation.

I agree but really only to a certain extent. Coaxing out of humans what thier actual issue is, is more of an art than a science. IMHO and from antecdotal experience this problem seems easier to automate than I think it really is which is why I don’t personally think anyone is crushing it in this space.

Exactly. I did tech support in college, and there's often a huge gulf between what people ask for and what they want. Especially with the rise of the web and apps, we've shifted plenty of power into the hands of users and customers already.

Voice-based systems currently combine all of the limitations of human conversation (e.g., low bandwidth, strongly linear, possibilities hidden) with all the limitations of computers (e.g., not very bright, highly literal, inflexible).

I think the main reason they're so popular for support is that people are bad at accounting. If I install an IVR system, I see that calls to human agents go down, saving me easily measured cash money. But I probably haven't measured the time and cognitive load burden shifted to customers, or the value lost by suboptimal use of whatever they're supporting.

Particularly that last point stands out to me. Lots of automations I’ve seen assume the customer knows the problem. Which they may not they are contacting with a symptom to which they may not know the problem. They aren’t necessarily going to say billing issue/expired credit card when contacting about why they can’t access thier premium features on your app anymore.

But this aligns precisely with what I said. I didn't say it was easy. In fact, I said that the industry vastly underestimates the technical challenge of the problem. My point in mentioning customer service calls was that when we finally are able to generate viable AI (which seems like a long ways out), short and limited interactions will likely be the first inroads. I stand by what I originally said, which was that in comparison to all other human interactions, these are likely the lowest hanging fruit. Not that they are, in absolute terms, low hanging fruit.

Given all the recordings I hear when I call a customer service line, I suspect that most customer service calls are from the kind of people who can't help themselves.

I think customer service departments find them boring and want to automate them away.

Probably, a good AI could get me to the proper representative or solve my problem a lot faster than a tree menu... But I don't think we're really close to doing that.

If the flowchart is so good, they should expose it in clickable form online.

The chatbot graph is secret because its purpose is to discourage certain actions, by making you sit through a humiliating hold period with brain-melting repeated announcements, until you reach a person who has strict orders to not be reasonable.

They already have those online, in the form of FAQs and knowledge bases that don't tell you anything new.

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