Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

I would say most command and control voice interactions are going to be like buying a coffee — the parameters of the transaction are well known, so it’s just about fine tuning the match between what the user wants and what the robot has to do.

A small minority of these interactions are going to be like a restaurant server — chit chat, pleasantries, some information gathering, followed by issuing direct orders.

The truly conversational interactions, while impressive, seem to be focused on… having a conversation. When am I going to want to have a conversation with an artificial person?

It’s precisely this kind of boundary violation of DMV clerks being chatty and friendly and asking about my kids that feels so uncanny, imho, when I’m clearly there for, literally, a one hundred percent transactional purpose. Do people really want to be asked how their day is going when sizing up an M5 bolt order?

In fact the humanising of robots like this makes it feel very uncomfortable when I have to interrupt their patter, ask them to be quiet, and insist they stay on topic.

The most immediate application for this might be in replacing call centers in various roles. And most of those are very conversational.

For example tech support is in large parts about making the caller feel heard and getting them to do trouble shooting steps without feeling stupid. Sales is in large parts about getting the right person to talk to you and to keep them talking to you.

That's a good point, and one that aligns with scenarios where I don't know what I want (traditional search, or research) or don't know why something has happened (calling a contact center to debug a business issue). I'm sure the implementations of these tools will be able to figure out, from my tone and language, whether I do or do not want to be asked about the weather while unblocking my credit card.

As is fake tech support.

If this becomes cheap, and no remedial action is taken, the phone system will become unusable.

In many places tier one tech support is "fake" tech support. The kind where you ask users "what color is are the contacts if your power plug" because rebooting may solve the issue but most callers will lie about performing or having performed that step.

It's much better for specialized products. But products and services with a large and broad customer base spend the early stages of tech support filtering out the routine issues, and that lends itself to automaton

Roleplaying with robots is currently one of the bigger use-cases for LLMs, esp. across younger generations. Look at the usage stats for something like character.ai. So that is a very clear case where people want to have conversations with computers.

I think an important application will be enabling the robots to have these conversations with each other, in order to replace actors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com