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Comment by WD-42 | Hacker News Reader

What is the application of this that makes anything better for anyone? All I can think of is more spammers, scammers, horrible customer support lines.

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My local dealership adopted one of these for their service department. Prior to the AI assistant, you would call and immediately be placed on hold because the same people serving customers at the desk were answering the phone. The AI picks up right away and can schedule an oil change. It's fantastic and I'd love to see more of this. Of course it also has the ability to escalate to a human for the things it doesn't have capabilities for.

For narrow use cases like this I personally don't mind these tools.

If they have the ability to hook an llm up to a system that can schedule an oil change why can’t they provide a form on their website to do the same thing and save everyone the hassle?

Just ask your LLM to call the dealership. The only downside is spoken word is a bit slow for computers. Maybe we can even work out a protocol where the LLM voices talk faster and faster until they can't hear tokens clearly

At that point we’ll have to convert the voices into a form more amenable to machine to machine communication. Perhaps a system based on high and low signals.

Seriously what is the point of all this.

Pretty sure rebelgecko was using [Sarcasm] in order to increase his [Satire] enjoyment

Some people just like to call over navigate to a site and fill out a form. Sometimes just speaking is easier.

Both can be true. They might have those web forms, while also having enough customers that prefer phone calls to justify it.

Not everyone wants to use a form on their website?

You and I certainly do, but a ton of people prefer calling on the phone.

In Brazil, multiple companies are offering a call and WhatsApp, both through automated messages with menus and in the end escalate to humans.

They do, via the manufacturer's app. It works fine as well.

Situational context matters though, sometimes you get in the vehicle and get the alert. Just say "Hey Siri, call dealership" and away you go hands free. No messing with apps.

They do offer the ability to schedule an oil change via the website and yet some people still prefer to call. User preference and multi-channel servicing options are nice to support

They do? How do you know?

Unsure about whether the specific dealership in question supports online booking, but there existing consumers whose preference is for a phone call over a web-based experience is definitely the case, at least in the US.

For example, even with the (digital-only) SAAS company I work at, we have a non-trivial amount of customers who with strong preferences to talk on the phone, ex to provide their credit card number, rather than enter it in the product. This is likely more pronounced if your product serves less tech-savvy niches.

That said, a strong preference for human call > website use doesn't necessarily imply even a weak preference for AI call > website use (likely customer-dependent, but I'd be surprised if the number with that preference was exactly 0)

how about the plainly obvious fact that every call tree system first spends 1-8 minutes going through all the things that you can actually do on the website instead of calling: do you really think they would bother with that if people aren’t calling about stuff that is easily done on the website? sure, we all agree that it is partly designed to get people to hang up in disgust and give up, but that is an obviously insufficient explanation compared to the simpler and more comprehensive explanation that people simply do, as a matter of fact, prefer to use the phone despite it being clearly less useful for easily-computer-able tasks.

>sure, we all agree that it is partly designed to get people to hang up in disgust and give up

actually, as someone who works in this area - no, it's not. it designed to help people to do things and metrics of success are closely monitored

fair enough. i totally believe that, and for the record i threw that bit in as an olive branch to the parent commenter… in retrospect, i shouldn’t have even included that rhetorical sludge. major chesterton’s fence area, that.

It is often both.

not in my experience and it will be more expensive to company

Have you never worked in customer service?

because a lot of people still prefer voice communication over navigating the internet and filling out a form

Good customer support lines? Is there a reason why it can't provide good support. I often use chatgpt's voice function.

How? Businesses will use this to justify removing what few actual human support staff they have left. Nobody, and I mean it, nobody calls customer support because they want to talk to a computer. It’s the last resort for problems that usually can’t be accomplished via the already existing technical flows available via computer.

That's not true. I recently called to make an appointment. I don't care if it's an AI. I would actually prefer it, because I wouldn't feel bad about taking a long time to pick the best time. Don't you think you're being a bit dogmatic about this?

I have to feel that an online booking system is substantially lower tech than an ai voice assitant chatbot, and makes it even easier to ruminate as you pick the time that works for you.

In my case, the business did have human support assistants, but didn't do reservations via the phone. I had to switch to the web app for that, which was annoying (I was driving?). I guess doing user identification over the phone and scheduling the appointment are time-consuming for the human assistant, while these are some of the few things an app can do well. I presume the logic is to preserve human assistants for actually complicated or dynamic assistance, for the sake of cost-efficiency. A voice llm can bring down the cost of these basic-but-time-consuming interactions.

Beyond true.

I wonder what Amazon's goals are, as an example. Currently, at least on the .ca website, there is no way to even get to chat to fix problems. All their spider text of help options, now always lead back to the return page.

So it's call them (which you can only find the number via Google.)

I suspect they're so disfunctional, that they don't understand why the massive uptick in calls, so then they slap AI in via phone too.

And so now that's slow and AI drivel. I guess soon I'll just have to do chargebacks!? Eg, if a package is missing or whatever.

Interesting, I regularly use chat-based support on amazon.ca to speak with (what I presume is) a real human after none of the control flow paths adequately resolve my issue. I've always found the support quick to reply and very helpful.

Granted, it's been 1-2 weeks since I had an issue, so it may have changed since then, or it could be only released to a subset of users.

Amazon is generally good at 1) resolving an issue in your favor and 2) getting you to a human if needed but gosh does it feel like I've taken a different path to do so every single time I'ever needed support.

I wonder if I'm stuck on the (A)wseome/(B)ad side of A/B testing.

The expectation of customer support lines is that customers want to speak to humans. It isn't just the fact that these are semantics that aren't written anywhere and are open to change, because by using a human-like voice agent on a customer support line, you are pretending that that is a human, which is a scam or fraud.

If you really believe that the support can be good, then use a robotic text to speech, don't pretend it's a human. And make it clear to users that they are talking to a human, phone is a protocol that has the semantic that you speak to a human. Use something else.

The bottom line is that you have clients that registered under the belief that they could call a phone number and speak to a human, businesses are performing a short-term switcheroo at the expense of their clients, it's a scam.

> The expectation of customer support lines is that customers want to speak to humans.

Not really. The expectation is to be able to express their need in a natural language, maybe because their issue is not covered by a fixed-form web form (pun not intended).

So yeah AI might be a good fit in that scenario.

It's a protocol and network that has backwards compatibility with 19th century telegram wire networks that later were voice lines for a full century.

If that isn't the channel to speak to a human, nothing is. You can speak to a bot with an app or whatever.

At least make it sound robotty instead of pretending to be a human.

This might be good for Back-office hands-free tool access, for employees who are on the road. (they shouldn't be looking at the screen, and they might be limited to voice calling due to coverage issues besides). Aka: really weird terminal.

> What is the application of this?

spammers, scammers and horrible customer support lines.

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