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Comment by crabmusket | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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.

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%.

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