Grim? There's a company out there using AI voice modification to make south Asian call center workers sound American on the phone. It's just depressing any way you look at it.
What you described is pretty much how I feel all AI/ML is at this point. A decent website with a large humans operating in the background. Not impressed. At. All.
Well, sure, the software is training on the human conversations it mediates to do that next. Now I’ll just need my own chatbot representative optimized for solving my problems instead of the company I’m calling.
More likely, you instruct your chat bot to call their chat bot to figure out the problem. Because they're bots, they can communicate at a much higher speed, thus bringing in a new era of High Frequency Support Calls.
Companies will build data centers close to the call centers, connected to them by line of sight satellite dishes, such that you can host your bot close to the support bot and shave off some ms connecting to them. This gets you closer to the front of the queue. This will be sold as a Good Thing, because it increases call frequency and allows calls to be priced by the market instead of the pesky phone companies.
"ALERT! The customer just mentioned how long it takes to download files. Recommend a faster internet package."
I'd say it's less about what, and more about how. AI can't simulate the emotional layer of the conversation in real-time just yet. Selecting the right words, tone, cadence, knowing when to pause and when to interrupt - it's all intuitive to us, and it's the core tool for the scammers[0] on the phone.
The companies are still trying to save on labor costs, hence outsourcing. The voice modification allows them to have their cake and eat it too - to move their call centers to countries with low labor costs, far away from their targets, while defeating the main heuristic people have to detect scammers: the caller sounding like a foreigner from a far-away country, despite claiming to represent a local company.
Until someone develops an AI for the emotional/manipulation layer, there's no point in adding AI for conversation here: the scripts the scam callers use are cheap, scalable, and work well enough.
> Have the AI hear the human voice, decide what to say that is relevant and useful, then generate a voice to deliver that information, then I'd almost be impressed.
That's actually what's been done for years now. Try calling the helpdesk of any large company, you'll most likely be greeted by a bot that tries to converse with you. It works as well as you can expect a chatbot attached to voice recognition to work - about the only thing it's good at is delaying and denying requests to connect you with a human.
In this case, the company can actually replace most of the support workers with a shitty chatbot because it's you who is calling them - they have no reason to care or make it easy for you to achieve anything.
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[0] - I classify first-party and third-party telemarketing, cold calls and tech support scams as just different flavors of the same thing: preying on the vulnerable.
The term you want is "equivocation." I don't think the gp is equivocating.
Also, "has use for society" is not a meaning of "value."
The issue is that the financial capital required to action these things rests in the hands of people who would much rather have this technology used for more profitable ad delivery services.
That said, I don't think forcing older rural folks to wrangle with a southeast Asian accent is going to solve any societal problems, and I imagine the call center workers in Asia would be big fans this tech if it reduces irate interactions and actually works well.
This expresses itself in other aspects than just location, and often the people working there have no product knowledge and just follow scripts. Because knowledgeable workers cost more. Works ok for 80% of the interactions but it really sucks if you're the 20% not covered by a script.
This gives Asian callcenters and the associated accent a bad name and leads to a kneejerk reaction from customers as the accent brings up memories of previous frustrating experiences.
Of course companies try to avoid this already with the mentioned software and also by moving to regions with more American-sounding people like the Philippines.
I worked in contact center management before and I've seen this effect a lot.
I'm sure there's excellent contact centers in the region too, but they have an uphill battle to prove themselves as most simply aren't.