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Comment by planb | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that this is not an AI chatbot, at least not in the sense the term AI is thrown around right now. Chatbots like this have been wasting people's time for a few years now. A modern LLM should not have any problem to detect whether the user has a problem with the connection or their wifi. I'm still optimistic that support chats are a field that may actually see improvements through (otherise overhyped IMHO) LLMs.

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I had a decent experience with a service recently that used a ChatGPT powered support agent, it couldn't deal with my situation but I was surprised by how quickly it knew its own limitations and handed me to an actual human who helped me out.

Edit: The chatbot in question was not powered by ChatGPT a few months ago and it was pretty bad, a few canned QAs and really weird loops to get to a human agent. Before that the same service had direct human support. But as someone who has worked in a support capacity myself I will take the nice middle ground with a decent LLM that can quickly dispatch me to a human agent should it not be able to solve the issue.

I feel that's the best case, a smart conversational system that knows its limit and can off-ramp you to a human if need be. In addition, I don't _want_ to talk to a human, via phone or otherwise. We all had horrendous CS experiences ("are the lights on you router blinking?" - "yes! I just told you that there is packet loss, arghhh" so I actually prefer a smart non-human system in the vast majority of cases.

This should become the normal case. With the automated chatbots handling all the common or known problems and solutions, fewer humans are needed and can then be better trained to handle the more complex cases (with an AI assistant at their disposal). This improvement in support could possibly be achieved at lower cost (to the company).

AI chatbots aren't the future, AI everything is. I'm far more concerned about some parts of the everything else, starting with automated warfare.

> This should become the normal case.

But it won't. I'd bet big on that prediction.

True, and it should also be pointed out that after finally getting connected to a human, they fared no better than the bot. Probably because they were both droids reading from a script, but alas.

It's also not the AIs fault that the CS rep was terrible. Had there been no AI bot, Jeff would've just gotten the bad solution right away (read 20 minutes) – success?

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