If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it
jeffgeerling.com
If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it
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Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it
#2AT&T would likely have provided the same quality service and responsiveness a couple years ago, before the chatbots.
Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it
#3I hate bad chatbots but when done right its a nice middleground between support and waiting in a huge queue.
What many here on HN don't realize is some significant portion of call center activity is people asking things like "Whats my balance?".
Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it
#4It's even worse when there is no ai, you just have a series of menus, none of which have the option you want and you just need to talk to someone to resolve your issue. Like, there's no option in your menus for "The reports I was given referred to me as both "he" and "she", sometimes in the same sentence", why can't I just explain this to someone?
Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it
#5I will say recently my Fidelity chatbot was able to change the default core allocation of my cash management account to SPAXX money market account to get ~5% interest. I was impressed I could do that with a chat bot because finding how to do it on the website was difficult and it saved me a call with a live human.
Other than that my experiences with AI chatbots has been pretty dismal. An expensive version of infuriating phone tree menus.
Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it
#6I will say recently my Fidelity chatbot was able to change the default core allocation of my cash management account to SPAXX money market account to get ~5% interest. I was impressed I could do that with a chat bot because finding how to do it on the website was difficult and it saved me a call with a live human. Other than that my experiences with AI chatbots has been pretty dismal. An expensive version of infuriat…
> it saved me a call with a live human
Because you prefer interacting with a machine, or because you feel like the live human should do better things?
Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it
#7I work for a company [0] in this space.
The fundamental problem is that a lot of customers will reach out on operationally expensive channels (chat, calls) about questions that are easily answered from a FAQ, knowledge base or on the website.
In-chat article lookups or AI chat bots with ability to offer some information are trying to divert otherwise unnecessary requests.
I do think AI chatbots are part of the future. Those powered by an LLM would do a better job than your example.
Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it
#8I find an odd sort of comfort in the fact, that ISP-support seemingly is bad everywhere and has been for centuries.
I remember that 20 years ago we had a problem with our self-bought router and a technician came, fixed the issue without telling us how (although it was our router, where he changed the config) and then just went off.
Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it
#9AT&T would likely have provided the same quality service and responsiveness a couple years ago, before the chatbots.
It was probably trained / fined tuned on existing support interactions :)
Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it
#10A few things stand out to me here.
* Most notably, the ai bot is repeating itself and serving very standard looking messages. I don't think this is an "AI" chatbot in the sense of an LLM. It's just a dialogue tree with some parsing.
* The author's communication is... bad. Don't say "connect to support rep". Say "talk to human".
* It's very silly to state the following to a dumb chat bot: > Hello! I just received and installed the new AT&T router/fiber modem, and ... the Internet speed is just as slow as before. I pay for 1 Gbps symmetric, and I'm getting 8 Mbps down and 6 Mbps up. On 6/28, the average connection speed went from 1 Gbps down to 100 Mbps. On 7/8 the average speed went from 100 Mbps to 8 Mbps. This is all measured both on the device at the fiber, and through a separate monitor I have wired into the 1 Gbps network.
I would recommend "slow internet".
Also saying "Slow internet, not slow wifi" is probably causing the bot to believe you're asking about wifi specifically because it's not an "AI" bot in the trendy sense of the word and it just sees the word wifi.