My first experience with an "AI"-ed call centre? | Hacker News Reader

My first experience with an "AI"-ed call centre?

27 pointschrisjj14 comments

I think I've just had my first experience with an "AI"-driven call centre.

I phoned up with a simple question about a UK Govt. service I use, and got a human being who repeatedly gave me wrong or non-answers in a wierd way I've never heard before. I reckon my voice was being put through voice-to-text feeding a chatbot which was replying in text on her screen and she was reading that text to me.

After a few "sorry, that doesn't answer my question at all" from me, she seemed to put her hands on the wheel to reply "You're not listening to me. I can't help you if you won't listen to me". I said "I'm listening but not hearing an answer." This must have been outside the chatbot's comprehension, because she then hung up the call.

I phoned back, got a different girl... who gave the same non-answers but with immaterial variations - ending with the same result. Total clincher.

This is the future, I guess. "AI"s operating human puppets.

Interesting. Marshall Brain’s (RIP) Manna story had fast food restaurant management automated in this fashion, but I can see how customer service call centers fit the model quite well. We will probably see the “puppets” eliminated in 12-18 months when the voice models improve enough to be indistinguishable.

Government is actually a surprising place to see this, since in theory they’re supposed to care about serving the citizens, as opposed to for instance, American health insurers, who in general would rather deflect and deny, which AI is perfect for.

I worked at AWS in the ProServe division during the height of Covid, every state was so swamped with calls about various government services we had to automate calls as much as possible and figure out other ways to “deflect” calls from call center agents. This was before AI when you had go use old school intents based systems like Alexa, Siri and Google did pre AI.

Manna, yes!

> We will probably see the “puppets” eliminated in 12-18 months when the voice models improve enough to be indistinguishable

> Government is actually a surprising place to see this, since in theory they’re supposed to care about serving the citizens

Well, it serves the citizens skilled only enough to work as puppets. The Govt. might say it also serves the users - cut cost per operator, increase number of operators, so reduce queue time. But then... Manna.

The giveaway is usually failure recovery. Good human support can restate your question in their own words; scripted AI loops keep rephrasing the same wrong branch until you give up.

And her give up translated to hang up. Which ensures I don't get to answer the automated end of call "Rate me".

The operator performance metrics must have fallen through the floor. Probably the target has been lowered to cover it.

So can an LLM based agent…

See my other replies. I know this space pretty well.

Please don't do this. Ask HN isn't your blogging platform. Per the guidelines its for asking questions of the community.

> Please don't do this. Ask HN isn't your blogging platform. Per the guidelines its for asking questions of the community.

Guidelines: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.

... which probably explains this post's +18 points.

To explain:

I posted that comment because your post was not actually asking (or telling) hn anything substantive. You encountered an entirely mundane piece of technology - an ineffective chatbot, which is hardly either new or novel - and basically used Ask to publish a low-effort blog post recounting the encounter. I dont see any attempt to draw anything deeper from what happened.

If this had been posted on a blog, or on x/mastodon/whatever, and submitted to hn in the normal way, then I'm sceptical that it would have been noticed.

But yeah, it got up-votes and my comment was down-voted. I just don't think that's what matters here.

> You encountered an entirely mundane piece of technology - an ineffective chatbot, which is hardly either new or novel

I doubt the basis for that dissenting assessmement, given (to my knowledge) you wern't present in the encounter.

> used Ask

I didn't use Ask.

> If this had been posted on a blog, or on x/mastodon/whatever, and submitted to hn in the normal way,

It was submitted to HN in the normal way.

Thanks for your explanation.

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