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Comment by bronco21016 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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

It is often both.

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

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.

Have you never worked in customer service?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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