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Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

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Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#161

Post by purplemoonx »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #31
exizt88 wrote: post #16

As someone who's been doing AI call centres for a while, I'm not surprised. It's really, really hard to build voice AI that works. There are no open source solutions that work out of the box. But the biggest problem is ASR. WER is still atrocious even with SOTA models. When you add drug names and regional accents, it's a recipe for disaster.

Just curious, why are drug names such a disaster? Do LLMs not understand pronunciation keys?

Feeling depressed? Ask your doctor about Glumaway

Noooo come on We're not saying "Gloom" that's just the chemical.

Glumiphosphoroxate It treats mild whimsies.

Have one??????

YOU GOT ONE?

Come on in. Oh yeah. You have it. You definitely fucking have it LOL. Here take 2 of these.

Glumaway

You're one of us now.

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#162

Post by Scoundreller »

wolvoleo wrote: post #158
jonathan-adly wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very much clueless commentary. Retail pharmacies in the US are dying dozens a day. They don't have margin to support people answering the phone like tech companies with 80% margin do. Welcome to the real world where it is survival for these pharmacies not greed or shareholder value. They literally lose money filling your branded prescription even with no labor baked in. We are their lifeline. I know because I am not…

I wonder why? My pharmacy in Spain is owned by this older lady who's had this shop for life. Not too many customers but she manages and even has a few part time staff. It pays enough to make a living. And she always knows what I need and pings me on WhatsApp if something is ready for pickup. And there's 4 such neighborhood pharmacies within 200 metre walk. No kidding. All are viable. I wonder, what changed in America…

> I wonder, what changed in America? Why is the mom and pop pharmacy not viable anymore

Deregulation at every level = small/low leverage players get squeeeeezed.

Most likely in Spain (and much of the world), you have controlled pricing of drugs and fixed markups/fees at pharmacies. Quite possibly it’s illegal there for a non-pharmacist to own a pharmacy and they can’t own a bunch as a silent/relatively inactive partner either.

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#163

Post by Scoundreller »

dqv wrote: post #66
jdw64 wrote: post #8

I think of this as the kiosk economy. It's like how businesses introduce kiosks even when having a human employee would be more convenient, just for the sake of greater profit. The biggest problem with AI customer service is that a human employee would've let a minor issue slide without escalating it. But a chatbot often inflames the situation, and by the time the customer reaches a human agent, they're already furio…

AI customer service doesn't fucking listen. A few years ago, I noticed that my bank had an old address on file for only one of my accounts. When I clicked edit next to the old address, it would bring me to a page that had the correct address. At the time, they had a real person handling their support. The real person told me this was just a glitch and that my correct address was on file and everything is fine. That w…

> That wasn't actually true. A new debit card to replace my expiring one ended up being sent to the old address a couple of months ago.

Oh, I’ve had this before. Apparently there was some background “registered address” and I had only updated my “mailing address”. They happily sent monthly statement to the mailing address for years but sent important notices about shutting down their entire small biz account service to my out-of-date “registered address”.

Fun times walking into a branch because you haven’t gotten a statement for a few months and they say “oh, your account has been closed, we sent a $$$ bank draft to $oldaddress”

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#164

Post by Scoundreller »

Polizeiposaune wrote: post #75
8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, why are drug names such a disaster? Do LLMs not understand pronunciation keys?

Trademarks. And the patients generally don't have a pronunciation key. Doctors prescribing might not, either.

Even in the industry… the names are sometimes pronounced in much different ways.

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#165

Post by Scoundreller »

SoftTalker wrote: post #109
recursive wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, those names are actually real. They sound like fly-by-night compliance "brand" names on amazon sellers. How did those get approved by a multi-billion dollar marketing team?

They need a name they can trademark, and common words can't be trademarked. It's sort of a .com domain name problem, all the good names are already taken so you just go for something you hope is pronouncable.

> They need a name they can trademark, and common words can't be trademarked

Iunno, pretty sure a car manufacturer will sue me for trademark infringement if I try to manufacture a Beetle under my brand name.

The bigger answer is regulations in some places against the drug name inferring what it treats.

If you want to do global marketing; you gotta go for lowest common denominator: something meaningless in every language/slang.

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#166

Post by wolvoleo »

Scoundreller wrote: post #162
wolvoleo wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why? My pharmacy in Spain is owned by this older lady who's had this shop for life. Not too many customers but she manages and even has a few part time staff. It pays enough to make a living. And she always knows what I need and pings me on WhatsApp if something is ready for pickup. And there's 4 such neighborhood pharmacies within 200 metre walk. No kidding. All are viable. I wonder, what changed in America…

> I wonder, what changed in America? Why is the mom and pop pharmacy not viable anymore Deregulation at every level = small/low leverage players get squeeeeezed. Most likely in Spain (and much of the world), you have controlled pricing of drugs and fixed markups/fees at pharmacies. Quite possibly it’s illegal there for a non-pharmacist to own a pharmacy and they can’t own a bunch as a silent/relatively inactive partn…

True all those yes. In fact the govt pays for the meds, I just pay an issuance fee of 2€ or so. You can get private health insurance but I didn't bother, the state one is fine.

And yes you need to be a licensed pharmacist obviously.

I think the pharmacists mainly make their money on value add stuff and non prescription drugs.

People here mainly pick their pharmacy by familiarity and service not price. They're all the same anyway. I've never been to the other ones close to my house :)

It's kinda weird there's so many but it works so why not. And it's nice that she knows my name and what I'm on in case of issues. I live only 5 doors down the street. I really like that about here.

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#167

Post by chrisjj »

dkarl wrote: post #99

Cases like this raise a question. As an engineer, the errors that coding AIs make are an annoyance, and reassuring in terms of my job prospect. As a consumer, the errors that AIs make are more than an annoyance. I have yet to meet an AI phone assistant that can do anything more than an explicitly programmed phone tree, and several, including the one for the pharmacy I use, that do far less. They are undoubtedly much…

The other win from obstructing people's access to healthcare is extending ill health and hence demand for the product. The trick is to not hasten end of the demand through death, but I'm sure that's within the ability of a simple "AI".

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#168

Post by pseudohadamard »

ericmcer wrote: post #153
dkarl wrote: post #99

Cases like this raise a question. As an engineer, the errors that coding AIs make are an annoyance, and reassuring in terms of my job prospect. As a consumer, the errors that AIs make are more than an annoyance. I have yet to meet an AI phone assistant that can do anything more than an explicitly programmed phone tree, and several, including the one for the pharmacy I use, that do far less. They are undoubtedly much…

All of these conversational AIs should either confidently detect a users intent or apologize and offer to forward call to a real person. LLMs perform pretty poorly when you start try to restrict them too much (e.g. detect intents and control responses based on intent detection), the replies gets disjointed and weird feeling. An open ended prompt and chat completion gives a much better feeling most of the time but can…

That's been my experience with AI "support" chatbots as well, in every single case it's been an optimistic attempt to get the bot to fix the problem I'm calling with followed almost immediately by an even longer attempt to get it to connect me to a human that can actually fix the problem. If the problem was simple enough that a fixed-program clanker can fix it then I wouldn't be having to call support in the first place.
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