Indeed. I’m the project creator. That’s standard legal notice we must add to these kind of “large” repos. If not a dev team should maintain it full time with security incidents response managed within a SLA, which is not the case there. The same project is working in production for a few customers.

lmao

Interesting. Can you share a link to the AWS call center stack?

At least for Microsoft, having an AI voice reading from script would likely be an upgrade. I’ve called Windows support a couple times, and half of the time the Indian accent on the other side was so thick I couldn’t understand a thing (and the 4kbps audio quality and call center noise didn’t help either).

It already sank their revenues in the past decade as 'support bots' were a thing before chatgpt but now it's far better, for some definition of better. But all services I used before 2020 already had 'chat bots' and that killed very many call centers / revenue then already and that's accelerating now. Now you can (for some definition of 'can') instruct the llm to ONLY escalate when nothing else works which enables many companies to get their in house staff to handle those few.

As someone who has been literally involved in this business (AI support), not very successfully unfortunately, I wouldn't.

They're literally the best suited companies to take full advantage of this new technology!

They have existing customer relationships, training manuals, past call recordings (== training data), and enough humans for fallback / oversight (often legally required!)

But yeah, you have to continue being entrepreneurial or risk being replaced by being complacent

The solution to that problem is for an ISP or provider to have a better website with, attention now, less marketing spam that confuses their customers.

If the website had a clear priority on discoverable FAQs that wouldn't be an issue. But most of the time these types of websites don't care about these issues and tutorials on how to use their systems and services, at all.

Throwing an LLM onto a problem like this, which requires a good knowledgebase to begin with, is just a plain stupid idea. It will make things much worse, not better.

> If AI CS is done right, it would be mostly a filter for helping human CS folks only deal with real issues rather than "how do I log into my account? I'm on your blog page..."

You're right, but AI isn't needed to do this - just a competent call centre manager who watches the analytic and has control of the menus and messages.

The "real issues" that remain after the easy ones are filtered out probably aren't the issues any company would want to leave to AI anyway.

My ISP is xkcd806 compatible, although I’ve never had to invoke it.

If the AI had a similar mode that would be reasonable.

Funny because I written them myself at the time. Last year they were no really useful AI like CC!

If the internet didn't exist this would be incredibly useful. Call the cinema to find out when the movie is playing, call a company to find out their refund policy and get troubleshooting steps for their products, etc.

Now I prefer to get this information from websites. But there is still a chunk of the population (mostly the older half) who prefer calling over websites, and maybe that's true even for these chat bots

Yes. The alternative these days is often a maze of a phone menu. If I can just say my issue in complete sentences and the AI routes it appropriately and otherwise acts on it as I want, that's pretty good.

I work on building a support system right now at my job and this is the point I've been trying to make for the past few months. No, the AI chatbot should not have access to sensitive customer info. But our product manager is all-in on the hype and sees this as something that "deal with" later on.

Oh well, who cares if there's a breach, some idiot gets to put a shiny AI product on their CV and get that new promotion/job. Users be damned.

Plenty of people still want to keep their customer service jobs. I have some fond memories of my time doing customer support when people were genuinely grateful for my help.

The rage-beast problems are exacerbated by companies designing their support system so that human operators cannot take a lot of reasonable decisions and risk losing their job getting someone involved who might. You can easily end up frustrated and angry if you need to call five times a week to get a basic request handled because the four people before you couldn't get it done and had to rush to take the next call. Call center companies are placing down human shields around their probably-illegal pricing systems and profit margins.

Project creator there. The biggest challenge in marketing this project to potential customers is not the fact that it does not work well, but the unions and human problems. It really marked me.

In my experience, there are two types of customer service.

One is the type where people are working to actually help the customer and the rep is authorized to take whatever action necessary to accomplish that goal.

The other is the type where the rep has no authority to do anything. They'll endlessly transfer the caller to another rep, make them wait, transfer again, make up excuses for why nothing can be done, and just do what they can to goad the caller into consenting to giving up, absolving the company of having to pay anything or provide any sort of service.

I don't think number one will be replaced by AI. I think number two will be replaced by AI.

Having had to interact with it, AI customer support is about as horrific as you'd expect. Hallucinating policies, hallucinating that they've provided a refund without actually doing so, etc.

But it doesn't really matter what "people" think. Corporate sees a way to save money by employing less people, customers be damned. Sadly customer service does not seem to have any bearing on a company's success, considering Google is successful as it is when it literally does not offer any kind of customer service at all.

I was personally designing and building these systems for FAANG like companies a few years ago.

Lex was the state of the art for these sorts of systems at the time.

These newer LLM based systems won't be perfect, but they'll be 10x better at free form intent recognition, and significantly less repetitive and robotic for menus and similar. I suspect the agent experience when you get to a human will be far more comprehensive, enabling real human agents to be just a little bit more helpful sounding.

Realistically though, anything that could be used to improve agent or callers experience in these environments will be squeezed and stretched in the name of profit to the point where both parties suffer.

There will be none, people will be sick of AI Bots and would always prefer to speak to a human

Nowadays I make baby like noises until the AI gives up and routes me to a human, if I am lucky, there are services that just and simple hangup.

> Did we really let customer service get so bad that people think this will be an improvement?

Yes.

One of the things that I learned, early in my career, is that the best customer service, is good product design, obviating the need for customer service. That’s something within my control.

For many companies, post-sale customer service is a money sink. I remember being told that the margins on a product were so thin, that a single call from a user would wipe out the profit.

But I was also never given support to produce a decent UX, because that was expensive.

Damned if you do[n’t].

s/bad/unavailable

The already entrenched classes solidified with none ever having to interact with each other in realspace and hemmed into their places by terminators?