Day by day i'm starting to lean towards this take https://anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/haterdom/2025/08/2...
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Don't make me talk to your chatbot
101–110 of 221 posts
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
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…
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...
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#103People demand free support. When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some. Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial…
Why not charge for support? And if it turns out to be your mistake (faulty product or missing documentation) as opposed to something the user could have reasonably solved by themselves, refund the charge and possibly provide compensation for the inconvenience.
Companies used to charge for support.
But if one company stops doing it, eventually everyone has to stop doing it.
Then the race to the bottom begins...
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#104People demand free support. When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some. Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial…
> Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth. My brother used to work at tech support for XBox Live. He said that 80% of his calls were for password resets, something users can easily self-service. There's literally an option on the login form for "Forgot Password", and people would rather spend time ca…
Power cycling is not a solution. It's a crappy workaround, and you still had downtime because of it. The device should never get stuck in the first place, and the solution for that is fixing whatever bug is in the firmware.
If they want to reduce support calls, then have more reliable gear.
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#105The key thing here is not whether it's AI. The key thing is quality and signal. No one wants to read to a low quality human comment either. If the AI output was actually better than talking to a real human, more useful, more concise, serving the job to be done, then no one would have a problem with it. In fact they would appreciate it. That future is not here in many areas. The problem is people are wielding AI right…
> The key thing here is not whether it's AI. The key thing is quality and signal. No one wants to read to a low quality human comment either. This is so obviously true to intelligent people (and is even a point made in the article) ... it's sad that you're getting downvoted. The OP wrote > When I talk to a person, I expect that they are telling me things out of their head — that they have developed a belief and are t…
If all you care about is the facts, and not the other’s relationship to them, why engage with a person at all? You could query a LLM for whatever subject, argument or counterpoint you wish.
Besides, your hypothetical summaries chock full of facts don’t exist, at least not yet. Most LLM summaries are chock full of filler, thus the name slop, thus why us “ignorant” people hate reading it.
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#106There's been a lot of "the world doesn't work the way I want it to" on HN recently. I suspect this is a function of an aging readership more than anything particularly groundbreaking about hot takes on the up and coming tech. "Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things." Douglas Adams
Do you enjoy reading slop? I fail to see how this is a controversial take.
You act as if the internet was like a high society book club - all the previous articles were written by ivy league grads.
I recall geocities, angelfire, all the chans.
The internet has always been a cesspool with little islands of quality floating in a proverbial sewage of human output. In theory AI slop will improve.
A racist, sexist, ignorant online community of humans 20 years ago, if it is still active, is almost certainly still a racist, sexist, and ignorant community today.
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#107It matters less to me that the helper is an AI/human than the kind of help I'm getting. The bigger problem to me is "help" is always framed as my needing to be educated, not a problem with the service. This is especially prevalent for technical customers who are legitimately trying to draw attention to a bug in the platform only to get how-to help articles pasted back to them.
> "help" is always framed as my needing to be educated
For many users, this is often the case, and front line AI support like this can handle that pretty effectively while giving your case faster live support. Would you rather sit behind 4 people in the queue trying to figure out why their device doesn't work without batteries when it's not plugged in or have them deal with AI to solve the problem while you get your real issue sorted out quickly after dealing with a handful of basic prompts?
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't part of why Apple's iPhone can be so expensive is because it's very easy to get actual human support for it when something goes wrong? You probably didn't make the mistake at Microsoft, but I've seen people look at the localized spreadsheet and miss the long term company wide spreadsheet completely. Often because the sales and support departments are so far from each other that they're basically two different c…
>customers calling for support on things they shpuld be capable of figuring out themselves in is probably where AI is going to shine as first line support. It certainly won't be cheap to run real-time AI voice chat, or any real-time AI chat. The AI costs that you currently see are heavily subsidized, just like OP's example of "VC backed competitors who are OK burning $$ to gain market share", it's the same. These AI…
AI voice chat can be done for cheap.
Lots of it is RAG and knowledge base lookups, you don't need large fancy models. Indeed you want fast responses, so low parameter models are better.
TTS and ASR models are tiny now days, like a handful of GB tiny.
Last time I priced this all out the VOIP fees cost more than self hosting all the models.
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#109It matters less to me that the helper is an AI/human than the kind of help I'm getting. The bigger problem to me is "help" is always framed as my needing to be educated, not a problem with the service. This is especially prevalent for technical customers who are legitimately trying to draw attention to a bug in the platform only to get how-to help articles pasted back to them.
> "help" is always framed as my needing to be educated For many users, this is often the case, and front line AI support like this can handle that pretty effectively while giving your case faster live support. Would you rather sit behind 4 people in the queue trying to figure out why their device doesn't work without batteries when it's not plugged in or have them deal with AI to solve the problem while you get your…
I agree that's why I would prefer to have AI if it does the job better and if it can be further trained to understand when to escalate in the case of a more technical user which I have found humans rarely do.
Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot
#110People demand free support. When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some. Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial…
>Did we have actual support issues that needed fixing, yes of course. And the insanely high cost of customer support drove us to improve our first use experience. But holy cow people don't realize how expensive support calls are.
Same in the ISP space. ISP's with low margins often lose multiple months of revenue on a single support call.