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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

My last experience with a support chatbot was actually pretty decent. It collected all the information, asked followup details, and then fired that whole thing off to a human to deal with. It was perfectly fine.

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"smart answering machine" seems like a very apt use case for LLMs, provided the rest of the system works - that a human actually received and acts on the feedback.

Yeah. I recently had to deal with Amazon's robot. Definitely bird-brained but close enough that the right objective was accomplished even though I don't think it ever understood what happened (but woe to the non-native speaker!) The problem is not chatbot customer support, the problem is bird-brained managers that think a system that solves 99% of issues doesn't need a fallback for that 1%.

This is the thing that drives me crazy. Most of these phone calls should just be emails; I can usually stand to wait a week or two for the company to get back to me. General support funnels like support@example.com have been dead for most consumer-facing technologies for close to a decade at this point. I’m not installing an app for every company I’m forced to interact with when there are already existing, universal technologies available that they could implement if they just priced their products appropriately.

It would be nice if more businesses embraced email instead of requiring phone calls for basic tasks. Imagine how much more productive we could be if we could just send off a quick email with the information and questions.

Instead, what we're likely going to get are "voice agents" calling each other when we could have just used email instead...

Businesses likely don't know a better way because the person selling them software doesn't want them to use an open and federated technology. They want the business to use Slack, with a SalesForce CRM, and then add a JIRA workflow to top it off.

Most of the time it's simply not being aware of what's out there or just showing them a different work flow.

my only experiences with chatbots so far have been as instruments for companies to avoid their contractual obligations and just not provide the options that I would have asked a person directly for

obviously not a problem with the technology itself, it was like that with more primitive answering machines as well, often there only to either answer the obvious things, or stonewall people with real problems with the product or service hoping they'd just give up and take the loss

I mean that is also the job of existing call handlers.

"We are experiencing an greater than usual call volume, please wait while an agent becomes available" only to be randomly disconnected has been a thing for most of my life.

Everyone seems to be hyping open claw at the moment soon its just going to be LLMs talking to LLMs.... I wonder if they will develop a short hand and start talking in wingdings.

Whenever I interact with them I get asked to describe my issue then regardless of what I write I get asked a battery of questions you would expect are getting fed into a form and then on the off-chance I get connected to a human operator (which was my goal to begin with) they end up asking me for all the same information again.

Do you remember what product they used?

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