CallJoy – A cloud-based phone agent for small businesses | Hacker News Reader

CallJoy – A cloud-based phone agent for small businesses

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161 pointsel_duderino139 comments

>Then, when the phone rings, the automated CallJoy agent answers, greets callers with a custom message and provides basic business information (like hours of operation).

Just what the world needs. More jabber before I can speak to a human. No, I don't want your hours of operation, unless you are closed. If you are open then I want (a) a human to answer; or (b) a message that says "Happy and Healthy Foods Here. Sorry we are on the phone at the moment. We estimate a wait time of 3 minutes. Please hold on, or press 1 to leave us a message."

Usually the amount of robo-chatter I get is so excessive that I have tuned out anyway.

I mean, I do want hours of operation in one specific case—to know whether those hours have changed (i.e. are shorter) given that it's currently a holiday. Your regular hours probably show up when Googling your business name, but any holiday-specific hours won't.

Sadly, you probably won't update your IVR system with your holiday hours either. You always end up having to talk to a real person to find out. It's kind of ridiculous.

> Your regular hours probably show up when Googling your business name, but any holiday-specific hours won't.

they often do. Google is quite insistent on getting businesses to update their holiday hours for any common holidays, and when you look up business hours on a holiday you see the result of this - many businesses do update their holiday hours, and the business listing tells you whether the business owner has confirmed that the hours are correct for the holiday, or they have not updated the page for the holiday.

They do but it's worse than useless. For every time they have accurate holiday hours, they 10 times show me a bullshit warning that the hours may vary due to the holidays when a) I already know that and b) the business is open regular hours on some religious holiday that I don't observe.

You're mad that an interface shows a warning when the data isn't known to be accurate? What do you propose would be better?

simplicity would be better IMO. open source would be better. not changing up an app I already like would be better.

In many ways Gopher was better than the web, because a gopher client could make more decisions about how to present the data than the web, for which the presentation is mostly prescribed by the content provider.

what are you talking about? how does gopher or open source have any relation to the hours of operation that a business lists on their google maps page?

It’s about how the page is being overly helpful instead of giving me just the information I asked for.

A dynamic response IVR message would be fantastic. When I call, I usually care about today's hours. A shortened response such as "Thanks for calling Foo Café, open until 6pm today" or "Thanks for calling Foo Café, we open today at 10am" if the call is before opening hours, would be fantastic. Not so long that it's tedious and infuriating to sit through, but still prevents employees from having to handle such a repetitive task.

I wonder how often that's the case.

I noticed recently that the Target app does this.

When you launch it the phone geolocates and shows you a message at the top of the screen like "Target at Xyzzy opens today at 10am!" or "Target at Xyzzy is open now and closes at 9pm!" Super useful, and unobtrusive.

>For example, a hair salon owner can search how many times a day callers ask about “men’s haircut pricing” or “wedding hairstyles.”

Don't forget the obligatory creepiness that every single phone call is recorded & translated to text. CallJoy seems as much an AI training program as anything.

"2 to leave your number and receive a call back."

I tried that with T-Mobile one time. They called me back and asked me for my SSN, date of birth, ... . this was after I went through this process when I tried to call them and yes they were calling a T-Mobile number.

In 2011!

I said just think about what you're asking for and the representative pretended to not understand.

What is this madness? I will never use call back unless something changes.

> "Happy and Healthy Foods Here. Sorry we are on the phone at the moment. We estimate a wait time of 3 minutes. Please hold on, or press 1 to leave us a message."

You could even tighten that up a little more, depending on the politeness manner callers expect (e.g., maybe callers expect you to be all-business, and appreciate concise over apology).

And there should be something in every corporate charter that says any voice response system will never say two things that most organizations I phone always say: "Please listen carefully, as our menu items have recently changed", and "We're experiencing unusually high call volumes".

Nor do periodic jolting interruption of on-hold music, interrupting whatever you were thinking as you waited, making you think someone might be picking up, so you have to be ready to speak on-task, but then it says "Your call is important to us. Please remain on the line for the next available representative."

(Please. I and many others absolutely hate calling under even the best of conditions, and we wouldn't do it unless it was necessary. Don't try to get us to hang up, and don't make it more frustrating than it has to be.)

You'd be surprised how many people call to ask for location and time you close or open. It's significant.

Then it should state "Press 1 for hours of operation and location information."

I hate the way Chase makes me listen to "You can check your balance on the app!" messages a minimum of six times before I get to a human. If I wanted to use the app, or I wanted to know the balance, I would have used the app.

Two weeks ago I was logged in on my computer watching my bank account being drained while waiting on hold for the fraud department. (Seriously? Three transfers to get to the fraud department, Chase?) The whole time I kept getting told to use the app to check my balance.

Amex has a human pick up immediately. Just saying.

That's nice, except that Amex terminated my account for non-payment, then two months later sent back the payment check they lost saying they had no account to go with it.

My Dad pays by check. He spends a couple of hours each month going through his bills... writing checks... licking stamps.. okay, maybe not licking stamps.

I pay through my bank's online interface. Less chance of mail getting lost. Faster payment.

I was kicked out of Amex before it had online bill paying. There was a world before the internet.

Fair enough. For what its worth I don't have an Amex card either =).

Reminds me of this: https://despair.com/collections/builder/products/apathy

Maybe if we make it burdensome for customers to get ahold of us, maybe they'll stop calling.

Usually the amount of robo-chatter I get is so excessive that I have tuned out anyway.

It works as intended, why would you think they want you to talk to them?

Gotta love those menus where you try all the combinations and find out NONE of them lead to an operator.

Google, renowned experts in dodging expenses like customer support, release a customer service tool for other businesses to use that they will subsequently shut down to save money.

"My team within Area 120, Google’s workshop for experimental projects, conducted testing and found that small businesses receive an average of 13 phone calls every day."

That's really not many phone calls. I'm not surprised they had to try and scale it up to suggest it's a big issue.

I have a refinement to suggest if someone is looking for a business.

How many contractors (lawn, roof, carpenter, whatever) have you ever dealt with that are wizards at what they do but don't have the cycles to return a phone call or keep you updated on your appointment to save their life? If you're lucky, their spouse/nephew/etc is a part time coordinator? Maybe they call you back at the end of the week when they do all their calls? Ick.

These guys need someone to keep track of their schedules and appointments and keep customers well communicated. THAT'S IT.

I've abandoned so many engagements because of not doing this one thing.

All of them. Including the three guys currently laying a new floor in my sitting room as I type this who were supposed to get back to me two days ago to let me know when they were going to come to do the work, but just showed up this morning ready to start.

This comment nearly floored me. Let me tell you why.

I nearly launched a startup to do exactly this because I realized the same thing you did. After leaving the US military, I started a handyman company with a friend and along with my GI Bill that paid for college, our little fix-it shop helped pay for other life expenses. Growing up, my dad was an electrician and carpenter, passed skills down to his boys, a high school friend I was in the marching band with was like me, except plumbing. He became my business partner.

You're 100% right, scheduling and communication among the trades is something I noticed many of my competitors at the time struggling with mightily-even when I went to work for an electrician's shop and ended up getting promoted to "project management" scheduling, coordination and resource management was something that I spent a lot of cycles trying to improve-and as I went from company to company through my career I began to notice how widespread the symptoms were. This was a cultural challenge as much as it was a technical challenge just finding the right systems for scheduling, planning and ultimately billing.

There's a lot of really powerful software out there that looks to at least solve the technical challenges behind scheduling and customer care, but in the handyman field-unless I've just overlooked it, there's a lot of room to bring some good practices regarding systems of work and flow from the tech world into scheduling, customer relations and project planning to the home services industry.

The idea of launching some kind of service that 'outsourced' such backoffice tasks for handyman type companies has forever been in the back of my mind having been in that world.

Your comment has motivated me to give it another look, so thanks for that.

How do I contact you ? We have a setup that might help you out.

Profile updated with an email address.

That's usually called an agent.

Honestly, I'm surprised "agents for sharing-economy freelancers" hasn't taken off yet.

Isn't that essentially the role that all the apps powering the "sharing economy" are providing?

Right, but I think the idea would be something where the person providing the actual useful service enlists the help of the app/agent and is in control of the relationship, rather than the other way around.

isn’t that basically a temp agency?

^ this 1000%! I've had to change repair crews because they won't call me back. I've had so many not follow up either. It's like you WANT to give them money but they can't squeeze in the time to manage the customer service aspect.

Most likely they're swamped with work. The problem isn't their time management, they're just crudely shedding jobs they don't need. You may want to give them money, they just don't need it. Another indicator would be a high outlier quote (which is less a quote and more a polite way to communicate they don't need the work).

Disclaimer: I own properties in high growth geographies and face these issues with subcontractors.

Agreed, they're load shedding, but human nature says the first time you call them they'll say "yeah we'll fit you in next week." And THEN they string you along with phone tag for six months until you go away.

Some people just don't have it in them to say "no." I don't mean that they feel bad about turning a customer away. I mean that culturally, they simply don't say "no" and would rather just not show up than deliver a negative response.

I've experienced this in both Austria and Thailand. You'll get a lie before you get a "no." It's just a quirk of the culture, which is nice and all, but not helpful when you're at VIE looking for a ride that never shows.

A friend of mine was working on software for large building contractors that would assist with this, with the goals being to get the right contractors to the right project at the right time. Turns out the complexity is pretty daunting due to the difficulty of estimating when a job will be complete, unforeseen additional work, contractors working with an existing backlog of clients and interdependencies between teams.

All in all it reminded me of exactly shy its so hard to get a specific date when a piece of software will launch!

Yeah if you get into PM it's a big hole.

I was suggesting stay within the narrow confines of customer comms. Just a shared calendar, some phone/sms/email integrations, and some kind of "den mother" supervisor to make sure comms are in sync with reality.

Most younger people I know don’t want to call anyone in the first place. They have a smartphone but they use it almost entirely to chat/social stuff etc. Calling is what old folks do

> Calling is what old folks do

One might think this is why calling has become unpopular, but that's just an excuse people use when they don't want to reveal the real reason: huge numbers of people in the younger generations who have social anxiety that makes itself known—among other times—when they realize they have to talk on the phone.

As soon as it was an option, these people switched to asynchronous communications media, and never looked back. Everyone else in their social circles got pulled along, if they didn't want to give up talking to these people.

Side note, your comment probably sounds ridiculous to some readers here, but I can vouch that, as a young engineer, I absolutely loathed, was borderline terrified, at having to pick up the phone and call someone, whether its a client, consultant, or even a coworker. Basically I was terrified of not knowing answers and people knowing that I was a fresh-out-of-college engineer and get mad, or I was scared of. I'm not antisocial and not even afraid of public speaking, but for some reason, I had a thing about the phone. It was a personal shortcoming that I've worked through and thankfully overcome (the hard way, I might add, via hard knocks).

I think there is a high probability that your explanation is true. People often chose the easiest path (in this case the one with least psychological strain)

Yeah. I stopped calling businesses years ago unless I knew I'd only ever get a robot on the other side. This is particularly unfortunate because there is (usually) value in calls, but the idea of having to talk to a human is so offputting it's enough to lose that value. (As an aside: for whatever reason it's way more common to go from machine --> human on calls, but asking to go from human --> machine is often 1. impossible, and 2. "rude").

Likewise, I also stopped answering my phone for calls other than my own contacts shortly after starting a company. Everyone else can leave a voicemail, and I will either text or email back.

It's only $40/month, though. $40 to avoid (up to) 260 phone calls seems like a bargain. Sure, most phone calls are quick, but it's also an interruption to at least one worker, who might have to ask a customer to hold, or interrupt cleaning/restocking. I wouldn't be surprised if $1 per avoided call was a reasonable price to pay for a busy restaurant.

It is if you have a small team and each call can be upwards of 30 mins.

How would this solve that problem? I can't see anything in what they've suggested that will actually reduce the amount of time spent on the phone, other than eliminating a small class of short simple phone calls, e.g. "what are your opening hours".

It's also weird they're presenting this as if it's innovative and offering a product in a space to which solutions don't already exist, when they do.

A 30 minute call will not be dealt with or even shortened with this product though.

Maybe not a big issue, but every phone call takes your attention away from what you’re doing. For some small businesses, this can be a problem.

I'm curious how they determined this? Surveys?

We at Ozonetel have been in the cloud business phone system business for sometime now. A couple of quick observations:

1. Surprisingly, the Calljoy website does not have a call in number or a demo number. This is supposed to be a disruptive technology, put a demo number that people can call in and test.

2. The Google brand is not there anywhere on the Calljoy website(except at the very bottom).

3. Rather than release a free beta product, which is the norm, Google has launched a paid commercial product.

4. Haven't tested the call quality yet. I think they maybe launching this on the Google voice platform.

5. Not sure why it should be a separate product, would have made more sense as a Gsuite add on.

6. Businesses need support. The success of this product will depend on the 24/7 support that Google can provide to business owners.

Re part 6, surely there’s some irony in providing customer support for a product that avoids providing actual customer support by making me listen to robots for its best guess of what I’m looking for.

True that :)

The death of the phone call has been heralded for many years now. I am guessing it's gonna stick on for some more time, at least for business use cases.

Do we intentionally not summarise things? I'm not quite sure of the norm. Here's an early paragraph that seems useful:

With CallJoy, small businesses have access to the same customer service options that have historically only been available to larger corporations. If you’re associated with small business using CallJoy, here’s how it works: After a quick setup, you’ll receive a local phone number. CallJoy will immediately begin blocking unwanted spam calls so you receive the calls that matter—the ones from customers. Then, when the phone rings, the automated CallJoy agent answers, greets callers with a custom message and provides basic business information (like hours of operation).

i do appreciate seeing tldrs in the comments, thanks :)

I see a lot of folks focusing on the negatives (because it's from Google) but my experience is small businesses are AWFUL at answering the phone. My barber for example has no online booking, and rarely answers the phone. I stopped going to him even if he's by far the best in the area, having a service like this will definitely make small businesses more reachable.

My barber doesn’t have online booking or phone booking. You walk in and take a seat, or wait in the line if it’s busy.

I asked him why not. He told me that he used to take bookings, and stopped for a few reasons:

1. A lot of people book appointments and don’t show up, or show up late, causing him down time and reduces his income. If a regular client shows up late for his 30 minute appointment does he make another customer - also booked - wait?

2. He can cut some people’s hair in 15 minutes while others it might take 40. By having booking it limits this flexibility. He can also charge more or less depending on how long it takes.

3. Walk ins are self regulating. People know when it’s likely to be busy and when it’s likely to be quieter. If they don’t mind waiting they come at a busy time. If they want to be in and out quickly they go off peak.

As a counterpoint, this is only a problem for barbershops that aren't very busy. The barber I used to go to is insanely busy. No matter when you show up the wait is at least 30 min, usually 1-2 hours.

I switched to a place that's more expensive but has appointments. Not wasting 1-2h is worth an extra $10.

Yeah, no-shows and late-arrivals are a huge problem for small businesses. My barber told me the same thing back in 2010. I launched Apptoto.com as a side project back then, went full-time with it in 2014 and it's still my full-time gig.

The fact he's too busy to answer the phone means he probably has just enough work - I have a few friends who have businesses like this and when I talk to them about streamlining their systems they balk because they can't take on extra work.

Perhaps if your barber is that busy (because I assume he's that good), you could stop by and make an appointment in person?

>you could stop by and make an appointment in person

sure, you could. but that also means interrupting him while he's working - if he doesn't have time to answer the phone, he also doesn't have time to deal with you in person. it's just ruder to ignore you when you show up in person.

Also means I have to get out of work just to make an appointment, then get out again to actually go to it. Don't know where you live but in Bay Area traffic that's not something I can do often.

I think your lifestyle and your barber's lifestyle aren't necessarily a good match. Also, a good barber is a friendly barber (one who gets work) and in all my life experience you can walk into any hair salon/barber and make an appointment and the person working will take a moment to help you. It's not like a dental surgery where the doctor can't be interrupted in the middle of a root canal!

the reverse business idea of calljoy! the customer enters a tentative appointment in an app and a bike courier goes make the appointment in person :)

Or you get a homeless person to do it - who is then gainfully employed, if temporarily. It's a win-win!

Anecdotally, I have heard that some people will get a homeless person to hold their spot in line at a locally popular BBQ spot.

Although I run a software company - not a traditional, "small business," - phone spam is such a gigantic annoyance on our office line that I stopped listing the number. Yet sometimes people find us who are legitimate. I look forward to having Google screen the calls and provide some basic information to people who are calling for some higher purpose like to obtain pricing information.

"Screening" potential customers is a notoriously bad idea. Spam calls are their own animal but you don't want to pre-qualify or screen people who might become customers because you really don't know anything about them or the business value they might represent.

You're screening calls, not potential customers. Presumably, interested parties still get through, while people who just want some tidbit don't.

So there's a robot who can tell before it answers the phone if the person is a potential customer or not? Cool! :-(

When people ask for startup ideas they shout just clone new google services and then once it is cancelled you will get many more users .

Maybe even competing with them would work.

I'm sure GrubHub, delivery.com, and all of the other takeout startups are already working to clone this technology. Once an established partner of these small businesses can do the job, this will be sold for spare parts.

It makes me wonder why Google didn't just offer this as a service to other SaaS startups. Don't they have some type of cloud platform for that? /s

It is surprising why Google just didn't offer this as a service. You could already build something like this using platforms like Twilio, KOOKOO(in India) etc. We at Ozonetel, already provide a business phone service similar to this for our customers using Google speech as one speech engine, though spam detection is not yet inbuilt. After looking at the launch, I just quickly put together a bot page if someone wants to try it out, https://ering.me/ozonetel/spa/

Note:I am a co founder of KOOKOO.

Strange in this case that they are charging for it right out of the gate. Google hasn't really done that with other experimental projects, right?

Google App Engine was charged out of the gate and then they increased the price on it. Does that count ?

The marketing pitch can be "we sell our service, not ads".

Or how to give small upstarting companies the same tedious automated phone robots of big corporations.

Never forget: when being a startup having a "talk directly to someone important" spirit is a big plus and a usp big corporations can never have.

Just what consumers have been clamoring to do: talk to more customer service robots.

Phone robots are awful. Just this morning I had to call Fidelity, and their phone robot made me type out my 50 character randomly-generated password on a 10 key. It then asked me to state my question, it guessed wrong, and the support agent had to re-ID me anyway just to transfer me to _another_ phone robot that again requested me to enter my password on a 10 key phone.

If GOOG can actually make this process better (like in their example, if they could have texted me the buried link on fidelity.com that I could do what I wanted to do) than I'm stoked. Less stoked since this seems like a weird product for Google to build, and a prime product for them to try & shut down 18 months from now.

They don't have to be awful; most of them are just poorly designed. Another Area 120 startup, Chatbase, is a service for designing voice bots that are much smarter and versatile than the norm by anticipating what questions people ask based on precedent (and all the different ways they ask them). Most voice bots can't do that.

[Disclaimer: I work on the Chatbase team]

A feature that I've yet seen implemented: white-listing numbers to bypass the robot

Disclaimer: I'm a telephony engineer, and while I understand and will below present the motivations and logic of enterprise-level companies, I don't always agree with it.

On the enterprise level, this is actually pretty common. I've personally implemented this several dozen times for VIP lines. For enterprises, though, it's important to understand that almost anything that happens in a call center is a cost to the company and rarely makes revenue. The company sees the call center, often, as a necessary evil. Having customers that could potentially have figured it out themselves talk to a human is really just taking time away from agents helping someone who couldn't "self-serve". You only really see this feature in cases where is almost always worth it for the company to have someone talking to an agent immediately.

Bank of America seems to do this somewhat.

If I call from the phone that's connected to my Bank of America account, I can access my account with just a four-digit number. If I call from another phone, I have to go through the full user verification.

Can it tell the difference between calling from your phone as opposed to calling from your Amazon Alexa device if you have one? I mean how does it handle spoofing?

Delta (and presumably most airlines) do this for you once you have elite status. You no longer have to go through the prompts and are just routed to a human.

> If the customer calling would like to complete a task which can be done online, like place a to-go order or book an appointment, CallJoy’s virtual agent will send the customer an SMS text message containing a URL.

I don't think many people who call, with the intent to talk to a human, want to be directed to a website. I'm sure this will appeal to the businesses though.

I understand the feeling of people about not wanting this. So far, calling meant you really wanted to speak to an human.

But let's be honest : this is an awesome opportunity to gather more data and to get closer to more natural human interface with computers, through voices and conversation.

I support this initiative.

This sounds like a variation of hell for specialist retail. You want the sale and that call from the customer making an enquiry is your chance to make sure you are going to be ready for them. You want to have them arrive to ask for you by name to continue the sale.

Small businesses, e.g. the hair salon, should have a student or someone on the desk who can take the calls so the working staff don't have to.

There are ways to be succinct on the phone and to wind things up without wasting customer time.

I don't believe Google have a clue about customer service and I don't believe any ultra clever AI robot solution can help. Nobody phones up their local supermarket to 'see if they are open' or if the 'stock tinned peas'. In specialist retail you want to take the call and convert it into a sale. I don't believe this product really helps with that.

I also am aware that 98.3% of customers have Googled a business before they step inside the store (in the realm of specialist retail or services). So you really want to markup your web homepage with the required JSON-LD for the opening hours, address details and other basics that would be a meaningless interruption. In that way people don't even have to call. If people are calling up about these things, e.g. holiday opening hours, it is not a phone solution that is needed, it is basic information on the website.

We have created these amazing ways for people to contact us, with it people create more remarkable ways of hiding. Not answering the phone, not answering emails is the norm, businesses should not be hiding this way out of courtesy.

You know what word doesn't exist in this, that really confuses me is missing? Duplex.

They've got this super advanced human-like AI feature for making voice calls... and they're introducing a rudimentary automated call system like every other company out there. (With the added part that Google records all of the voice data for themselves, of course.)

I'd imagine they probably want to collect a good sample of data from their prospective customers to ensure it works across a broad range of businesses before going fully automated.

They could do this by going round loads of small businesses and asking for call recordings to test against, but launching with a manual offering first to collect the data seems so much easier.

Possibly, but this is also coming from that Area 120 internal startup incubator... rather than the team behind Duplex.

So if one part of Google is working on the automation of making the calls [1] and another part of Google is automating the answering of calls, does that mean that Google will be on the phone with itself all day?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/08/google-du...

So they say that they will be blocking unwanted calls. Google is eating our mail[0], and now they will eat our calls too? Thinking again, I guess it's not a huge deal as average person won't (and can't) be operating their own phone service anytime soon.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19756125

"After a quick setup, you’ll receive a local phone number. CallJoy will immediately begin blocking unwanted spam calls so you receive the calls that matter—the ones from customers"

Would really like to know how they implement the spam call blocking. Spam calls especially to businesses are a huge problem in the United States and anyone who solves that problem will make billions.

Listen to a couple seconds of audio, compare to known spam calls (they just have a database of billions at this point), profit.

The name seems kind of odd for a google product.

The anti-spam feature and voice analytics sound cool. I'm curious how they decide what's spam though - I know there's a few services that claim to do this, but since a lot of times local numbers are the ones being spoofed, can they guarantee a legitimate call won't be filtered out?

Almost all of the robocalls I get come through my Google Voice number, not my real phone number, so I have zero faith in Google's ability to recognize voice call spam.

(What's really amazing, is I could block all of them with a single manual rule, but Google Voice doesn't allow you to do anything like that. In my case, my Voice area code is not local: All spoofed robocalls use the area code of my Voice number, all legitimate calls do not. A normal human can see this plainly, Google's spam detection is unable to understand this.)

Project Fi (I think maybe it is google fi now..) does a pretty good identifying spam callers for me.

I think the difference is, CallJoy will listen to your calls and transcribe them as part of its features. So they can do pattern matching in the actual content of the call (similar to the way an email spam filter works) rather than relying on metadata alone.

That probably works if there's anything to transcribe, although the goal of the robocallers is probably to get transferred to a human being as soon as possible (i.e. pressing 0, or just doing nothing and waiting for the call to be transferred to a human, which I see happening a lot on my own small business phone system). Unfortunately those are also behaviors that legitimate callers might exhibit.

I'm guessing google is reasonably happy with how it works though

Hire Scottish people to make all your appointment calls and watch the Google transcription centers melt.

The world does not need another service where people are expected to talk to (argue with?) robots.

In all the time that I worked at IBM, a company that certainly could have implemented automated call responses, we never did. When customers called IBM, a human answered the phone. Always.

Good point. If I'm going to bother to call, the company should be bothered to answer.

I hate talking to people on the phone, but it's unavoidable. So if I call someone, it really takes a bit of mental effort. Plus, I don't work in a place where it's customary for people to just make personal phone calls in the office. Doing so would be very conspicuous and uncomfortable.

(Disclaimer: Currently sipping from an IBM coffee mug.)

But IBM probably has a small army of customer support agents, while your average mom-and-pop shop doesn't.

How come this looks like a completely separate product with no Google branding? Why is this not part of G Suite or GCP? People like single, simple pricing models, not an additional bill.

Excited to see if it gains traction. I've been waiting for Google to release a product like this after they released their Duplex demo last year.

Interested in trying this but given Google’s history of launching and subsequently shutting down non-core businesses I’m very hesitant.

Number of Call Center workers in the US: 3 million

Guess at average salary: $25000?

That's a $75bn market eventually if Google keeps improving this technology, just in the US.

Buy GOOG.

And this is to go to pitch of almost every startup.

“You should invest in us because if we just get a small percentage of $large_market we will be extremely valuable.”

Bingo.

Take CallJoy, then add their new Duplex phone AI and this is where this is going. Perhaps not today, but definitely in a couple of years.

Is the size of a market only defined by how much the workers are payed in that market?

Just trying to give people a potential amount Google could be making from this type of technology as it improves. I just found it interesting when I did that maths, maybe the market is bigger or smaller - what do you think?

I think there are two problems with this:

1) call centers already have software to record calls and quantify results

2) Google have only ever provided the minimum support mandated by consumer protection laws, none at all wherever they're not compelled to provide it, it's a huge leap to go from that to improving call centers...

Interesting that Google isn't mentioned in the name of the product or anywhere in the ad. That seems like a break from tradition.

"for a flat monthly fee of $39" I would expect a lower price from google... But it seems free or cheap services era from google is finished. They now started to aggressively monetize. This movement started with google maps pricing increase...

> But it seems free or cheap services era from google is finished. They now started to aggressively monetize.

Or in other words, behave like a rational business. I would also say that the era where the user IS the product is (hopefully) coming to an end, and this is how Google moves forward in that world.

How does this fit into Google's broader strategy? ie. why is this a thing?

Training their AI to understand human conversation (see Google Duplex). Press fastforward a couple of years and you have a system that can automate call centers.

Model training for non dictionary/industry specific terms of guess?

I have never understood what the point of having an automated phone line is in today's world. If I call a number, I expect to speak to a human. Otherwise I'm always going to your website anyways.

Shuttered in 3,2,1.

Seriously, this has the revenue potential of a nice SaaS app. Not bad, but not Google level. There is no way Google doesn't close this business, probably in less than a year.

It's not about revenue, it's about data:

> Whether the customer speaks with you, talks to an employee, or just interacts directly with the CallJoy agent, the call will be recorded and transcribed for quality purposes.

This is a play to get the content of conversations between customers and small businesses.

This also integrates small businesses with an ordering API.

Imagine if Google Maps (inc. via Search/Assistant) could replace all the industry specific apps like UberEats/Grubhub... there's an app for that https://developers.google.com/maps-booking/

There have been a great many sunsetted products from Google that could, in theory, generate some data points.

Indeed. Just like "free" Google Voice only existed in order to train their speech recognition module.

A content play that costs SMBs $39 a month makes no sense. It has to be free to get to Google data scale.

If we take CallJoy and add their Duplex service, it's easy to see where this is going: call centers and IVR.

Companies like Avaya and Cisco are making banks selling solutions for call centers, but what if this could be automated? Perhaps not today, but say around 2025, 2030? I doubt Cisco and Avaya have the expertise to pull this off, but Google (or Amazon) certainly could.

>Then, when the phone rings, the automated CallJoy agent answers, greets callers with a custom message and provides basic business information (like hours of operation). --

>If the customer calling would like to complete a task which can be done online, like place a to-go order or book an appointment, CallJoy’s virtual agent will send the customer an SMS text message containing a URL.

That sounds kinda handy.

Side note: That damn status bar that falls from the top on the blog is a pain, if you read anywhere near the top of your screen it falls down to cover the text.

So even more numbers that we can all immediately start pressing "0" the second the line picks up.

“For all the ways technology has improved your life, please press one…”

So, is this like Google voice but more for small businesses?

Which telecom providers are they using under the hood?

Google should include this kind of projects under the Google Cloud Platform. Google has too many products, and they can't integrate well with each other because of this.

The real reason Google's products don't work very well is that they are an advertising business. They make upwards of 94% of their revenue from advertising -- not technology, not software, and certainly not customer service, an area in which they are severely lacking.

The idea of Google defining customer service standards represents a step backwards, not forward.

FWIW, when I've been buying ads, Google not only has customer service, the customer service is damn good. I guess that's why it's called customer service.

Hardware support has also been amazing over the years, as far back as the original Nexus 7 (2012) to replacing a broken Nexus 5X in Ireland last year. Probably the best customer service I've encountered from any company that I can think of.

I've had a Google-branded phone since the original Nexus and I used to agree with you, but their support on the Pixel 2's extended warranty (which they offered because of early problems) has been a game of passing the buck with Verizon.

Google needs to print expiry dates on its products before launching.

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