If you're going to be communicating with a machine for later review by humans, why bother with a voice-based phone at all?
I bet 95% of calls to a plumber are the same ten or so issues— leaky faucet, toilet won't flush or is clogged, laundry machine overflowed, omg there's water everywhere, etc. If the bot is able to suss out the situation and also get a sense what kind of solution the customer is looking for and on what timeframe (cleanup now because I'm having a party tomorrow, install a $3000 sump pump in two weeks, etc) that can skip over a lot of exhausting email back and forth and get to something much more like what GP experienced, where they had one brief, synchronous interaction, followed by a single followup with the proposed actions that was exactly what he knew he wanted.
looks like a GUI with 5 buttons. Which is faster?
Can't you already do that without calling anyone ? It's not like your local plumber trained its own LLM on local plumbing issues, it's most likely yet another wrapper of chatgpt
The agents might communicate over a voice line, or some other type of pipe. In such a future, applications become obsolete. It's LLM APIs all the way done.
I don't need to go to hrblock dot com to do my taxes. I tell my assistant "do my taxes". It communicates with the IRS for me, with no humans on either end, and submits my taxes.
No more websites, and we have a truly universally interoperable standard. Human on the other end? No problem. You don't even know what company you want? Also not a problem - the LLM can choose. No google maps entry? No problem.
and doesn't grow to want to murder you
We'll probably not get there, maybe ever, because we have to consider cost and risk. But, my point is moreso that if you have infinite agents with high competence than applications become worthless.
Applications were always a stop-gap. A middle man between human, computer, and human.
So you use a voice memo to capture your words and email them, but it seems almost as silly as calling up and chatting to an LLM, which has the added benefit of being able to confirm it has understood your request and maybe even begin actioning it.
However, this is silly talk, the real future is just gonna be your agent who you talk to directly, who then talks to the contractors' agent, who passes the info on to them in the exact format they like.
In other words, a singularly noisy pipe. (yeah, I know, it's going to be great as soon as it starts being great)
For example, calling 0800-TEXT-HN and narrating this comment back-and-forth to an machine would be pretty nutty.