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Comment by heyitsguay | Hacker News Reader

This is really cool in terms of the tech, but what is this useful for as a consumer? I mean it's basically just a chatbot right? And nobody likes interacting with those. Forcing a conversational interaction seems like a step down in UX.

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This is a really good question. While you're right that a common use case would be chatbots for product support, it isn't the only one. Some examples:

- interactive experiences with historical figures - digital twins for celebrity/influencer fan interactions - "live" and/or personalized advertisements

Some of our users are already building these kinds of applications.

I don't even like video calls with real people in my real life. Texting works great. This is really neat but I'd much rather just have a text chat with a real customer service rep. I don't need to see a face, don't want to, and especially don't want to see a fake face.

That's actually a good question. For example, the technology is still currently at a level where the user can still cleary tell that it's a chatbot, but now with a face. Does this make their experience better? Or does it add a weird level of uncaninness to the experience?

I don't think the level of fidelity actually matters as much as authority or ability. What can the agent do that isn't accomplished by, for example, a landing page or an FAQ page? I've never encountered a (text) chatbot that did anything useful for me as a consumer, whether for sales or support.

totally agree! agentic capabilities are really important and can significantly elevate the experience. using LLM tools is a great way to get at least part of the way there. feel free to check out our docs for "bring your own LLM" here https://docs.tavus.io/sections/conversational-video-interfac...

The problem is I don't even like video calls with real people.

It is the same problem that in most context, the video has no purpose. The only use for video is to put a face to a name/voice.

I hope my company competitors switch to AI video for sales and support. I would absolutely pay for that!

It'll depend on the use case- but with customers that are using it today we're seeing higher engagement and satisfaction rates. It's a different interface to communicate that is more natural to humans (our bullish opinion).

Interesting! Guess I'll have to try this type of interface at some point. Up till now I've just been that silent programmer type who writes text to AI and gets text back so I'm not used to other alternatives.

Totally- as programmers we're so used to communicating via text and meeting computers where they are- it's easy for us. However, we're the minority in the world! I think most people who are not us want to communicate like they do with others.

The way we see it is that this brings us closer to communicating with computers the way we communicate with each other. It has vision and can (not perfectly) take into account your expressions, your surroundings, and can respond accordingly.

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