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Comment by duckkg5 | Hacker News Reader

I don't like selling. I wanted a way to practice cold calling in a realistic way. I set up a phone number you can call and talk to an AI that simulates sales calls.

I ended up using it for more general purpose things because being able to have a hands-free phone call with an AI turned out to be pretty useful.

It's offline now, but here's the code with all the stack and deployment info: https://github.com/kevingduck/ChatGPT-phone/

Edit: forgot to mention this was all running off a $35 raspberry pi.

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So the AI tries to sell to you, or you try to sell to the AI? This sounds very intriguing but I can tell by your README that you're an engineer and not a sales guy - there are no distinct value propositions.

But it sounds damn creative as a project.

The AI answers the call and acts as a potential customer. They take on personas to simulate behaviors like difficult or reluctant customers. You then do your pitch, handle objections, etc. At the end you get a transcript that's 'graded' to show you where you could improve your sales approach.

And you're right, I'm not a sales guy. This project is for people like me who want a risk-free place to learn the basics of sales so that when I do talk to an actual human, I won't panic and freeze up like I always do.

I absolutely love this idea.

Most high-level sales people rely on role play partners but that requires a pretty a big commitment. This would make a great product, imo.

Also (tip): Study, memorize and internalize a sales script for your product/service...along with the objection handlers and closing questions. Practice every single day. You'll gain massive confidence because you know exactly what you are going to say, every time.

> a risk-free place to learn

That's turning out to be a valuable feature of LLMs in many areas. You can practice complex interactions with them without worrying about boring or annoying them. Even the most patient human teacher gets tired eventually. LLMs don't.

I'd buy that. I'd buy that for interview preparation as well. Maybe 5$ per hour, up to 15$. I wouldn't buy a subscription, only actual consumption of the service.

Please consider putting it in online.

Love the idea of AI grading the answers, hopefully this can be extended to marking/evaluating/grading subjective manuscripts.

For me there's none is more boring than marking/evaluating/grading manuscripts. I prefer hard labor like gardening or farming than doing that activities although I'm quite good at evaluating stuffs I think.

Can you please elaborate how you do this and based on what metrics/scheme/etc the answers are being evaluated?

This, for some reason, reminds me of Nathan Fielder rehearsal skits.

This would be amazing to do practice code/tech interviews for software engineering roles

It could work both for practice and for automating interviews as well

do you have any reason to believe the phone calls are realistic?

This could be a product. AI sales training.

Now you can turn this into an AI sales cold caller based on the data you could collect from how the AI reacts to your selling. That is to say, the entire system becomes a generative adversarial network.

Like exposure therapy for people afraid of sales. Very nice idea.

nice term this, exposure therapy"

Yes exactly!

I like the idea very much! Using an LLM as a "sparring partner" for training in various areas. LLMs tend to hallucinate, so I find it harder to use them reliably in the context of decision making. Training however is a nice idea indeed: mistakes are not as critical, just as in real life any peer can make a mistake.

Very cool, sounds like a saleable product. I feel like there's already half a dozen landing pages with people trying to sell what you just made in the 18 hours since you've shared it here. That should however be a red flag to those same people, a demonstration in just how easily commoditized LLM products are.

Are you finding response time to be an issue? I can imagine some very long pauses might kill the flow of conversation.

It's not perfect, but it's tolerable, and not unlike some real-world calls where there's a slight delay. There are some "Hmm ..." and "well ..." scripted in as well to make it feels natural if there is a long response.

I love the scripted filler words, that’s smart

To that point, I would love to hear an audio file of it in action since I see from GitHub the phone number is down.

That's cool. Thanks for sharing the source. What else has it been good at for you?

The cold call sales part can be replaced to suit any need. I had another version that was just a generic AI (no sales stuff). I found myself on walks frequently ringing up the chatbot ("Hey siri, call ChatGPT") and just asking it whatever is on my mind. "Tell me about Ghengis Khan" or "where's a good place to catch trout in north Georgia" or "how do I make baked ziti". Makes the walks go by super quickly.

Would you be willing provide a live demo (via web interface) - as a preludebto providing a similar training bot as a consultant?

Now do it for dating practice - great for nerds ;)

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