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Comment by seeknotfind | Hacker News Reader

~"because the chatbots aren't good enough"

Chat bots are annoying due to potential inconsistency, having to guess the types of things you ask for, due to their latency, but they've made major advancements recently, and we are only beginning to see what's possible.

If those companies using chat bots are failing to provide value, then they won't be competitive and they will go away. Why do we want to discourage them from exploring this new area? Experimentation is critical to understanding what will work and to the development of our society.

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> If those companies using chat bots are failing to provide value, then they won't be competitive and they will go away.

The difficulty is, this is obscured to the customer.

Let's say I have a broadband account in a country with competitors I can choose between (eg the UK, where I can have BT or Virgin). I've already chosen the best package for me. I'm ringing up after six months of good service to fix my intermittent line drop.

The chat bot is terrible and I have to wait until the problem goes away on its own.

Unfortunately for me, I can't just guarantee that switching to the other service will make a difference, because chat bots are not core service. I can compare broadband options and pick the best, and I'm already on that. Now I have to gamble that some combination of:

(broadband option) + (customer service) is higher than the one I'm on.

Unfortunately for me, I have no way of checking this. There's every chance that I'll end up on a worse broadband option and a worse customer service option.

If you want decent support as part of the core offering you can pay a bit more for Andrews and Arnold, their support staff are in the UK, all technically capable rather than KB parrots, and available by IRC. Lower customer contention for their shared bandwidth so it doesn’t slow down at night is another thing worth paying a bit more for. And they have a decently technical control panel web page.

https://www.aa.net.uk/

(Satisfied customer for years).

I have heard good things about their customer service. But I put in my postcode to their site and the response was:

> For your location, forecast download sync speed is 27-37Mb/s and forecast upload sync speed is 4.2-6.9Mb/s.

I’m currently on ten times that and was considering going higher next time. Unfortunately that’s not currently competitive with Virgin.

Most importantly, the chatbot cannot actually solve anything, it is not plugged into any functionality.

That's my feeling too, but maybe it's outdated? There's no real reason why they can't be.

there is plenty of reason why it shouldn't be. Generally speaking functionality is gated behind support (as opposed to being something you can just click a button on a website to do) because it requires at least some level of human judgement on whether a given action should be done (and there's still a whole class of attacks which are aimed against this process). Chat-bots will be even worse, because there will be an extremely consistent script than can be used for any given purpose.

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