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Asterisk AI Voice Agent

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Re: Asterisk AI Voice Agent

#81

Post by nextworddev »

kwindla wrote: post #68
nextworddev wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is good stuff. In your opinion, how close is Pipecat + OSS to replacing proprietary infra from Vapi, Retell, Sierra, etc?

It depends on what you mean by replacing. The integrated developer experience is much better on Vapi, etc. The goal of the Pipecat project is to provide state of the art building blocks if you want to control every part of the multimodal, realtime agent processing flow and tech stack. There are thousands of companies with Pipecat voice agents deployed at scale in production, including some of the world's largest e-co…

Is there a simple, serverless version of deploying Pipecat stack, without: - me having to self host on my infra

I just want to provide: - business logic - tools - configuration metadata (e.g. which voice to use)

I don't like Vapi due to 1) extensive GUI driven experience, 2) cost

Re: Asterisk AI Voice Agent

#82

Post by bronco21016 »

WD-42 wrote: post #71
bronco21016 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My local dealership adopted one of these for their service department. Prior to the AI assistant, you would call and immediately be placed on hold because the same people serving customers at the desk were answering the phone. The AI picks up right away and can schedule an oil change. It's fantastic and I'd love to see more of this. Of course it also has the ability to escalate to a human for the things it doesn't ha…

If they have the ability to hook an llm up to a system that can schedule an oil change why can’t they provide a form on their website to do the same thing and save everyone the hassle?

They do, via the manufacturer's app. It works fine as well.

Situational context matters though, sometimes you get in the vehicle and get the alert. Just say "Hey Siri, call dealership" and away you go hands free. No messing with apps.

Re: Asterisk AI Voice Agent

#83

Post by Antoniocl »

WD-42 wrote: post #80
quaheezle wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do offer the ability to schedule an oil change via the website and yet some people still prefer to call. User preference and multi-channel servicing options are nice to support

They do? How do you know?

Unsure about whether the specific dealership in question supports online booking, but there existing consumers whose preference is for a phone call over a web-based experience is definitely the case, at least in the US.

For example, even with the (digital-only) SAAS company I work at, we have a non-trivial amount of customers who with strong preferences to talk on the phone, ex to provide their credit card number, rather than enter it in the product. This is likely more pronounced if your product serves less tech-savvy niches.

That said, a strong preference for human call > website use doesn't necessarily imply even a weak preference for AI call > website use (likely customer-dependent, but I'd be surprised if the number with that preference was exactly 0)

Re: Asterisk AI Voice Agent

#84

Post by Antoniocl »

b112 wrote: post #62
WD-42 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? Businesses will use this to justify removing what few actual human support staff they have left. Nobody, and I mean it, nobody calls customer support because they want to talk to a computer. It’s the last resort for problems that usually can’t be accomplished via the already existing technical flows available via computer.

Beyond true. I wonder what Amazon's goals are, as an example. Currently, at least on the .ca website, there is no way to even get to chat to fix problems. All their spider text of help options, now always lead back to the return page. So it's call them (which you can only find the number via Google.) I suspect they're so disfunctional, that they don't understand why the massive uptick in calls, so then they slap AI i…

Interesting, I regularly use chat-based support on amazon.ca to speak with (what I presume is) a real human after none of the control flow paths adequately resolve my issue. I've always found the support quick to reply and very helpful.

Granted, it's been 1-2 weeks since I had an issue, so it may have changed since then, or it could be only released to a subset of users.

Re: Asterisk AI Voice Agent

#85

Post by RockRobotRock »

Long shot, if anyone here is an Asterisk wizard. I would like to correlate CDRs to voicemail recording locations. I am building an integrated dashboard for call recordings, and want voicemails to be included, but that's been surprisingly difficult.

Re: Asterisk AI Voice Agent

#86

Post by znpy »

TZubiri wrote: post #57
dmos62 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good customer support lines? Is there a reason why it can't provide good support. I often use chatgpt's voice function.

The expectation of customer support lines is that customers want to speak to humans. It isn't just the fact that these are semantics that aren't written anywhere and are open to change, because by using a human-like voice agent on a customer support line, you are pretending that that is a human, which is a scam or fraud. If you really believe that the support can be good, then use a robotic text to speech, don't pret…

> The expectation of customer support lines is that customers want to speak to humans.

Not really. The expectation is to be able to express their need in a natural language, maybe because their issue is not covered by a fixed-form web form (pun not intended).

So yeah AI might be a good fit in that scenario.

Re: Asterisk AI Voice Agent

#87

Post by brunoarueira »

mh- wrote: post #74
WD-42 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they have the ability to hook an llm up to a system that can schedule an oil change why can’t they provide a form on their website to do the same thing and save everyone the hassle?

Not everyone wants to use a form on their website? You and I certainly do, but a ton of people prefer calling on the phone.

In Brazil, multiple companies are offering a call and WhatsApp, both through automated messages with menus and in the end escalate to humans.

Re: Asterisk AI Voice Agent

#88

Post by keeganpoppen »

WD-42 wrote: post #80
quaheezle wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do offer the ability to schedule an oil change via the website and yet some people still prefer to call. User preference and multi-channel servicing options are nice to support

They do? How do you know?

how about the plainly obvious fact that every call tree system first spends 1-8 minutes going through all the things that you can actually do on the website instead of calling: do you really think they would bother with that if people aren’t calling about stuff that is easily done on the website? sure, we all agree that it is partly designed to get people to hang up in disgust and give up, but that is an obviously insufficient explanation compared to the simpler and more comprehensive explanation that people simply do, as a matter of fact, prefer to use the phone despite it being clearly less useful for easily-computer-able tasks.

Re: Asterisk AI Voice Agent

#90

Post by ghurtado »

Tikrong wrote: post #89

Looked at a repo and it seems this project was heavily AI generated. Would be interesting to hear from the author of the project how it was built.

> Looked at a repo and it seems this project was heavily AI generated

That's the first thing that I noticed too.

It's gotten to the point that my body subconsciously rejects bullet lists and headings that start with emojis.

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