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Comment by tenaciousDaniel | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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