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Don't make me talk to your chatbot

raymyers.org

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Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#181

Post by TZubiri »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #95
com2kid wrote: post #13

People 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…

This mentality is how you get

"Hi, thank you for your message, please take a look at our following FAQ guides:

- I forgot my password

Was this answer useful to you, or would you like more links to our FAQ? Before we give you a link to what used to be a talk to a human line, but which has been replaced by another chatbot in a sort of Matryoshka"

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#182

Post by TZubiri »

hatthew wrote: post #97

Writing is fundamentally the transfer of information from your brain to my brain. If you have 1000 bits of information you want to transfer, you can't give 300 bits of information to an LLM and have it fill in the remaining 700, because it doesn't know what those 700 bits are. If it's able to guess those 700 bits correctly, then they aren't true information, and you really only have 300 bits you want to transfer. You…

Remember when LLMs were entering the mainstream, and everyone shared tips on how to superprompt, and one of the hot tips was to tell the AI to write a prompt itself?

Like:

BAD: "Write the specs for a system that does X Y and Z"

GOOD: "Write me a prompt to write the specs for a system that does X Y and Z."

As if the LLM magically knew all about itself and the best tips and tricks to prompt itself even if it had just came out and there was no scraped information on how to use them yet.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#183

Post by ori_b »

ericd wrote: post #136
ori_b wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm happy that LLMs are encouraging people to add discoverable APIs to their products. Do you think you can make the endpoints public, so they can be used for automation without the LLM in the way? If you need an LLM spin to convince management, maybe you can say something about "bring your own agent" and "openclaw", or something else along those lines?

Yep, I’m developing the direct agent access api in parallel as a first class option, seems like the human ui isn’t going to be so necessary going forward, though a little curation/thought on how to use it is still helpful, rather than an agent having to come up with all the ideas itself. I’ve spun off one of the datasets I’ve pulled as an independent x402 api already, plan to do more of those.

What I mean is that I want to be able to build my own UIs and CLIs against open, published APIs. I don't care about the agent, it's an annoyance. The main use of it is convincing people who want to keep the API proprietary that they should instead open it.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#185

Post by Terr_ »

wtallis wrote: post #100
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Half his calls are resolved by just power cycling the modem/router. People shouldn't need a human to tell them to do that. Comcast deserves every penny of customer service expenses they're incurring if their own purpose-built modem/routers are so flaky they're responsible for half the problems people experience with their service. Customers should not be expected to endure shitty products without even seeking help…

> their own purpose-built modem/routers

Which, last I knew, were leased-out with their line-item on the monthly bill. So it's not as if they aren't choosing (and charging-for) the situation.

My own modem and router paid for themselves very quickly.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#186

Post by kcatskcolbdi »

com2kid wrote: post #13

People 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…

The article isn't about customer support.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#187

Post by kcatskcolbdi »

dmd wrote: post #114
com2kid wrote: post #13

People 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…

You wrote all of that in response to the title, without reading even one paragraph of the article? Wild. The article is not about support chatbots.

And all these replies spilled ink over an argument that had..... absolutely nothing to do with the article. So wild to see how many people refuse to read something they want to discuss.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#188

Post by charcircuit »

hatthew wrote: post #97

Writing is fundamentally the transfer of information from your brain to my brain. If you have 1000 bits of information you want to transfer, you can't give 300 bits of information to an LLM and have it fill in the remaining 700, because it doesn't know what those 700 bits are. If it's able to guess those 700 bits correctly, then they aren't true information, and you really only have 300 bits you want to transfer. You…

It's not possible to directly transfer 300 bits of information as that would require a form of telepathy. If it takes 1000 bits of English to distribute something that represents your idea properly it is useful to have a tool to create those 1000s bits instead of doing it manually character by character.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#189

Post by godelski »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #131

This submission might be an HN record for highest % of commenters who skipped reading the article. I'm sure it's always high but so far there are 125 comments and maybe 3 or 4 referencing what was in the actual article.

Do us all a favor and down vote those posts. I do, because I agree with the author and it doesn't matter if the text was human or AI generated. And if you're reading this and confused by my comment, try to RTFA, it's not long

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#190

Post by godelski »

Mikhail_Edoshin wrote: post #176
godelski wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've called for password resets before. Sometimes the email doesn't come in or can take like an hour (fuck "Magic links" and email OTPs...). I've even had support reset it and a day later get the half dozen reset requests I made. Just because something appears simple and obvious doesn't mean it is. There's a lot of ways for those systems to fail. Might be the user's connection or might be the server the user is conne…

I just remembered my password reset battle with an online store. Yes, the email or the SMS took too long to arrive and when the code came, it was already expired. And I knew the password, by the way; it was just a "new browser" and they wanted a second authentication. Marvelous.

I once had a credit card company not let me add my card to my Google wallet because I didn't have the physical card, even though they sent me the virtual one... it had been 3 weeks and for their rewards I needed to spend X amount in 3 months. I had to call to verify my identity. Though I think that friction was on purpose
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