Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don't make me talk to your chatbot

raymyers.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 221 posts

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#31

Post by ericd »

anonymous_sorry wrote: post #27
ericd wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like that ship sailed long ago with phone trees and hour-long support wait times becoming normal. Not that it's an ideal state of affairs, but I'd much rather talk to a chatbot than wait for an hour for a human who doesn't want to talk to anyone, as long as that chatbot is empowered to solve my problem.

Have you ever had a chatbot solve your problem? I don't think this has ever happened to me. As a reasonably technical user capable of using search, the only way this could really happen is if there was no web/app interface for something I wanted to do, but there was a chatbot/AI interface for it. Perhaps companies will decide to go chatbot-first for these things, and perhaps customers will prefer that. But I doubt it…

Actually, I have, Amazon has an excellent one. I had a few exchanges with it, and it initiated a refund for me, it was much quicker than a normal customer service call.

Outside of customer service, I'm working on a website that has a huge amount of complexity to it, and would require a much larger interface than normal people would have patience for. So instead, those complex facets are exposed to an LLM as tools it can call, as appropriate based on a discussion with the user, and it can discuss the options with the user to help solve the UI discoverability problem.

I don't know yet if it's a good idea, but it does potentially solve one of the big issues with complex products - they can provide a simple interface to extreme complexity without overwhelming the user with an incredibly complex interface and demanding that they spend the time to learn it. Normally, designers handled this instead by just dumbing down every consumer facing product, and I'd love to see how users respond to this other setup.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#33

Post by chrysoprace »

pizzathyme wrote: post #15

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. 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…

I disagree. If my colleague can't be bothered to write a PR comment themselves then I can't be bothered to read it. If I can gain the same insights from interfacing an LLM directly then there's no point in this intermediary dance.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#34

Post by crabmusket »

wvenable wrote: post #19
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…

My last experience with a support chatbot was actually pretty decent. It collected all the information, asked followup details, and then fired that whole thing off to a human to deal with. It was perfectly fine.

"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.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#35

Post by jmyeet »

I'm reminded of the Air Canada customer service chatbot. It completely made up a refund policy (and there are still people on HN who insist LLMs don't hallucinate) and a court ruled the company had to honor it [1].

The only way to deal with this is to make the implentation not worth it by constantly bypassing it to speak to a human and/or making it cost money by getting it to give you things you're not otherwise entitled to.

I really wonder how these things will handle prompt injection and similar things. I have no confidence any of this is secure.

Wait until this comes to healthcare and it'll be chatbots handling appeals to prior authorization denials, wasting even more physician time.

[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/air-canada-chatbot-refund-policy...

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#36

Post by WD-42 »

onion2k wrote: post #18

There'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.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#37

Post by tombert »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #17
tombert wrote: post #9

I guess part of the advantage of being an extremely long-winded writer who makes lots of typos is that people know that what I'm writing is probably written by a human. Though maybe people will start supplying context like "no em dashes, and occasionally misspell a word or two", and soon you won't even be able to tell that.

Typos and EM-dashes are not just obvious. They are avoidable. Here's the kicker: Even if you remove those, other AI smells don't just exist. They are obvious.

Maybe, though maybe we're only noticing it when it's obvious? Sort of a survivorship bias thing?

Who knows how much of the comments on any website are written by humans now; yeah there are plenty of tells so it can be obvious, but that might only be for the exceptionally bad posts.

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#38

Post by pants2 »

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…

Curious, why was it $20?

I would think that's close to an hourly rate for first level support and calls are mostly resolved in ~10 mins?

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#39

Post by daft_pink »

I just signed up with Gusto for one of my companies. They charged me for premium support automatically and when I tried to dispute it I had to talk in circles with their AI named Gus. Why am I paying through the nose for premium support just to chat with an AI?

Re: Don't make me talk to your chatbot

#40

Post by com2kid »

pants2 wrote: post #38
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…

Curious, why was it $20? I would think that's close to an hourly rate for first level support and calls are mostly resolved in ~10 mins?

I edited my comment above and explained, that $20 is an amortized cost representing everything that goes into picking up that phone call.
Post reply on HN