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My only experience with chatbots outside of Chatgpt/Google was with comcast yesterday, in which it tried to convince me for hours that it was a human fixing my internet connection, and I just had to wait patiently. Comcast mixed together real humans with bots, so you never knew if you're just talking to a human helping you or a bot, just that you're in the seventh ring of hell for customer support.

I'm souring quickly on the concept

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SwissCom do this well. When you sign up you can get a discount if you agree that all your support requests have to go via a chatbot first. Or rephrased, you can agree to pay more to get priority access to human support. So the ISP cuts you in on their savings - fair.

I plopped for the chatbot, then I had a problem. My apartment is wired weirdly, long story. The chatbot was very clear that it was a bot, it worked well, and it only took a few minutes of chatting before it decided to escalate to human support. The human support called me, so I didn't have to pay any phone bill, and they did it within a few minutes of bot making the decision to escalate.

All in all it was pretty satisfying. Comcast's version sounds ... less satisfying. The arXiv paper is really the cherry on top.

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