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> I have negative desire to get a phone billing itself around AI and LLM features Google has been tastefully integrating AI into phones for a while now using o

> I have negative desire to get a phone billing itself around AI and LLM features Google has been tastefully integrating AI into phones for a while now using opt-ins. The now-many-years old phone screening feature ensures the fear of spam won't lead to unintentionally missing calls from the doctor/dentist who call from unknown numbers. Screening suspicious calls instead of declining them is a massive quality of life improvement, and having an AI assistant answer your phone and do a live transcription is straight from the Jetsons.

avidiax 2y ago
There is also "hold for me", where the phone listens to hold music for you, then rings when the operator arrives. And there is a feature now to show you how busy a customer service line is at a particular time, and to give you a text transcript with clickable buttons for the phone tree.
- londons_explore 2y ago
  Am I the only one who thinks these features really don't add much to the experience? If an annoying phone tree is going to take 3 minutes to navigate by listening to the prompts, then it will also take 3 minutes to navigate by letting the AI listen and write little buttons for me. I didn't really save any time. If on the other hand it could say "other users have seen this phone tree before, so here is the whole searchable tree with no waiting", that would be a noteworthy feature.
  - colimbarna 2y ago
    Hold for me is pretty good. I've never used the phonetree feature, but I think it's often the case that I don't know which button I need to press: I have to listen to them all first, then decide which one. Commonly I have to listen to the tree twice: once to decide, and once to find out what to click. I'll probably look for the phonetree next time, so I can just read over it and find what I want. I agree it would be much better to preload it, but that might not be plausible due to privacy concerns or legal reasons.
    - londons_explore 2y ago
      > due to privacy concerns or legal reasons. There are probably only ~10,000 phone trees that cover the vast majority of calls in the USA. If a phone tree is seen by many users and is identical, there is probably no privacy reason not to publish it. Even moreso if the total number of digits typed in quick succession is < 4 (ie. user hasn't entered some password to get in). A human operator could be the final check.
    - xur17 2y ago
      I recently discovered that you can Google "{company} phone number", and in a number of cases it will offer to call, navigate the phone tree, wait on hold, and call you when a customer service agent is on the line. Delta, Allegiant, etc all seem to work.
      - dogsledsleddog 2y ago
        What does it do if the company is Google?
  - fbrchps 2y ago
    It can do that with previously-known phone trees.
    - linsomniac 2y ago
      Correct, I've had it show all the phone tree options as soon as the phone tree starts playing. So, yes, it will reduce time to navigate the tree in that way. Also, it often prevents me from having to listen to the tree twice, if I am looking for a better option and then decide a previous one was actually the better fit.
  - sieabahlpark 2y ago
    > If an annoying phone tree is going to take 3 minutes to navigate by listening to the prompts, then it will also take 3 minutes to navigate by letting the AI listen and write little buttons for me. If it's a common number for a support line it actually shows you the options before they're stated by the robot. Say for example if I call bank of america's support line, it will show the not-yet-said options as greyed out, but selectable. If the call robot accepts early inputs you can actually navigate a phone menu quite rapidly. Pair that with the estimated wait times or "hold for me" you can save yourself the headache of "actively" waiting.
  - fuzztester 2y ago
    >phone tree i Googled that term looks like it's another name for an IVR menu.
    - sethaurus 2y ago
      > IVR menu i googled this; looks like it means "Interactive Voice Response" menu, describing automated phone systems where the user navigates a series of options using either their phone buttons or their voice.
      - fuzztester 2y ago
        Yes, exactly. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_voice_response https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_voice_response That's what they are called in India, at least, where I live, and where I am from, although the term would not have originated in India, since it would have been brought in by mobile phone companies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_voice_response https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_voice_response Although I have a good amount of exposure to, and familiarity, with US terms and slang, due to older relatives up to grandfather level having visited the US for more than short periods, having visited the US myself, and having worked in US-based companies (but in India), the exposure is not complete, that's why I was not familiar with the term phone tree. That should not be surprising to anyone.
    - WHYLEE1991 2y ago
      I've worked at call centers and contact centers whatever the hell you wanna call them places for 15+ years. have you legit never heard the term phone tree before? I'm on the east coast in case its a regional thing, that's like literally what my dad who wasn't an uneducated person called them. totally just curious here!
      - fuzztester 2y ago
        yes, legit, dude, why else would I mention it in this thread? >I'm on the east coast in case its a regional thing, everyone does not live in the US. see another reply by me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41251430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41251430
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    > Am I the only one who thinks these features really don't add much to the experience? Probably because it's just bolting more shit on the ends of a shitty, outdated relic of a system. Like, we have two different computers, one of which is playing back a pre-recorded voice, to a computer which is transcribing that voice into text and buttons, so it can play a generated voice back to the other computer, which will then interpret that voice into text, then perform an action based on that text. The action probably being repeating that process a few more times. This is remarkably bad. I'm remembering the last time I had to deal with Apple Support. I didn't sit on hold for hours, I told them I needed a call, told them what the issue was, gave a brief summary, and then their support person called me, I was immediately on the phone with a human, she sorted out my problem, and the entire thing took probably 10 minutes tops, including filling out the form. It feels like these legitimate challenges to businesses to manage their customer service lines, support lines, etc. have actual solutions that: a) don't require two different damn computers talking over a shitty low-baud connection to one another, and b) result in a better experience for all parties involved If they'd just be willing to spend a little goddamn money, like they actually care to provide good service, rather than just paying lip service to it while offering the same garbage system they've offered since the fucking 1970's.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      > It feels like these legitimate challenges to businesses to manage their customer service lines, support lines, etc. Wrong. These are not challenges. The customer service lines work exactly as designed: as cheap as possible to operate, as effective as possible in preventing majority of the callers from engaging support staff and starting any kind of support process. And the magic, most people who try and fail to get support believe it's their own fault - they're not being patient enough, or persistent enough, or maybe the problem isn't that big a deal, etc. The companies don't want you to work around the phone tree and hold time. And once most people have tools that are able to, the companies will adjust their support channels to compensate.
    - sangnoir 2y ago
      > result in a better experience for all parties involved Yu are mistaken in assuming businesses want better experiences for everyone, including workflows that may lose them revenue (like cancelations). The friction is intentional and part of a wider dark pattern strategy employed for "retention" - even Apple does this when one tries to get them to stop an unexpected recurring Apple Music subscription that only shows on ones credit card and nowhere else (apple.com or the Music app). The support number is not provided on amy of the support pages, and ine has to get their bank to stop the outgoing payments. Guess how I know this... In light of this, I'll gladly take any client-side agent assistance I can get to make to reduce my cognitive burden; the "hold for me" emulates the support agent calling you as you described. , and the experience is more important than implementation details.
  - piyush_soni 2y ago
    Really? I mean it 'saves your time' by not having you to keep waiting so that you can do something else in that time. I don't know how that is not useful. Even if I'm not doing anything world changing in those 3 minutes, it will save me some stress.
- nexxer 2y ago
  All of that would be great if it was actually available to me in the smaller country/market I live in, which is less of a priority for Google. I still paid for them as part of the phone.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
nacs 2y ago
> tastefully integrating AI Tastefully integrating AI involves not uploading all of my photos and speech and text to the cloud and doing who knows what with that personal data. The majority of this data should never leave my device and that's why on-device LLMs/AI are much more tasteful.
- blackoil 2y ago
  You can control that.
  - privacyking 2y ago
    To what extent? Google buries a lot of their privacy options deep within settings of individual apps and the settings menu
    - delfinom 2y ago
      Eh? Afai, it prompts you to enable it these days. Heck, Google is removing Location History storage from their side and making it device side only. Users in the past few weeks are getting notified to trigger the migration to device storage or all data is deleted.
      - justsomehnguy 2y ago
        eh? Two years ago they didn't allow MRU in GMaps if you weren't logged on.[0] And with every new phone I always power on it without an account, update, reset and only then add an account; I had my share of 'I did disable that thing' EDIT: [0] and they claimed what there is not enough storage for it. On a fresh phone with 128Gb on board. For the small array of ~30-100 letters. Fuckers.
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        Except Google Photos, which every couple days starts up telling me my phone is backing up (it isn't yet, not until I confirm it on the screen) and presenting an opt-out for uploading photos to Google. That's in Poland, EU, so I'm not sure how is that even legal. Next time, I'll ask my local DPA.
Sakos 2y ago
The AI editing tools in the Google Photos app (https://blog.google/products/photos/google-photos-editing-features-availability/ https://blog.google/products/photos/google-photos-editing-fe...) also feel like magic and have been very useful/convenient for me, so honestly I can't agree with all the negative comments. It feels like there are plenty of ways to incorporate AI that add value for users and don't require a weird ChatGPT-like interface.
gvurrdon 2y ago
Despite also having no desire to have an "AI" phone, this feature is incredibly useful; however hard I try to avoid it, there are organisations who will insist that they contact me by telephone. Luckily it's available on older devices so I can keep my 6a going for another year.

avidiax 2y ago

There is also "hold for me", where the phone listens to hold music for you, then rings when the operator arrives. And there is a feature now to show you how busy a customer service line is at a particular time, and to give you a text transcript with clickable buttons for the phone tree.

londons_explore 2y ago
Am I the only one who thinks these features really don't add much to the experience? If an annoying phone tree is going to take 3 minutes to navigate by listening to the prompts, then it will also take 3 minutes to navigate by letting the AI listen and write little buttons for me. I didn't really save any time. If on the other hand it could say "other users have seen this phone tree before, so here is the whole searchable tree with no waiting", that would be a noteworthy feature.
- colimbarna 2y ago
  Hold for me is pretty good. I've never used the phonetree feature, but I think it's often the case that I don't know which button I need to press: I have to listen to them all first, then decide which one. Commonly I have to listen to the tree twice: once to decide, and once to find out what to click. I'll probably look for the phonetree next time, so I can just read over it and find what I want. I agree it would be much better to preload it, but that might not be plausible due to privacy concerns or legal reasons.
  - londons_explore 2y ago
    > due to privacy concerns or legal reasons. There are probably only ~10,000 phone trees that cover the vast majority of calls in the USA. If a phone tree is seen by many users and is identical, there is probably no privacy reason not to publish it. Even moreso if the total number of digits typed in quick succession is < 4 (ie. user hasn't entered some password to get in). A human operator could be the final check.
  - xur17 2y ago
    I recently discovered that you can Google "{company} phone number", and in a number of cases it will offer to call, navigate the phone tree, wait on hold, and call you when a customer service agent is on the line. Delta, Allegiant, etc all seem to work.
    - dogsledsleddog 2y ago
      What does it do if the company is Google?
- fbrchps 2y ago
  It can do that with previously-known phone trees.
  - linsomniac 2y ago
    Correct, I've had it show all the phone tree options as soon as the phone tree starts playing. So, yes, it will reduce time to navigate the tree in that way. Also, it often prevents me from having to listen to the tree twice, if I am looking for a better option and then decide a previous one was actually the better fit.
- sieabahlpark 2y ago
  > If an annoying phone tree is going to take 3 minutes to navigate by listening to the prompts, then it will also take 3 minutes to navigate by letting the AI listen and write little buttons for me. If it's a common number for a support line it actually shows you the options before they're stated by the robot. Say for example if I call bank of america's support line, it will show the not-yet-said options as greyed out, but selectable. If the call robot accepts early inputs you can actually navigate a phone menu quite rapidly. Pair that with the estimated wait times or "hold for me" you can save yourself the headache of "actively" waiting.
- fuzztester 2y ago
  >phone tree i Googled that term looks like it's another name for an IVR menu.
  - sethaurus 2y ago
    > IVR menu i googled this; looks like it means "Interactive Voice Response" menu, describing automated phone systems where the user navigates a series of options using either their phone buttons or their voice.
    - fuzztester 2y ago
      Yes, exactly. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_voice_response https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_voice_response That's what they are called in India, at least, where I live, and where I am from, although the term would not have originated in India, since it would have been brought in by mobile phone companies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_voice_response https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_voice_response Although I have a good amount of exposure to, and familiarity, with US terms and slang, due to older relatives up to grandfather level having visited the US for more than short periods, having visited the US myself, and having worked in US-based companies (but in India), the exposure is not complete, that's why I was not familiar with the term phone tree. That should not be surprising to anyone.
  - WHYLEE1991 2y ago
    I've worked at call centers and contact centers whatever the hell you wanna call them places for 15+ years. have you legit never heard the term phone tree before? I'm on the east coast in case its a regional thing, that's like literally what my dad who wasn't an uneducated person called them. totally just curious here!
    - fuzztester 2y ago
      yes, legit, dude, why else would I mention it in this thread? >I'm on the east coast in case its a regional thing, everyone does not live in the US. see another reply by me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41251430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41251430
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  > Am I the only one who thinks these features really don't add much to the experience? Probably because it's just bolting more shit on the ends of a shitty, outdated relic of a system. Like, we have two different computers, one of which is playing back a pre-recorded voice, to a computer which is transcribing that voice into text and buttons, so it can play a generated voice back to the other computer, which will then interpret that voice into text, then perform an action based on that text. The action probably being repeating that process a few more times. This is remarkably bad. I'm remembering the last time I had to deal with Apple Support. I didn't sit on hold for hours, I told them I needed a call, told them what the issue was, gave a brief summary, and then their support person called me, I was immediately on the phone with a human, she sorted out my problem, and the entire thing took probably 10 minutes tops, including filling out the form. It feels like these legitimate challenges to businesses to manage their customer service lines, support lines, etc. have actual solutions that: a) don't require two different damn computers talking over a shitty low-baud connection to one another, and b) result in a better experience for all parties involved If they'd just be willing to spend a little goddamn money, like they actually care to provide good service, rather than just paying lip service to it while offering the same garbage system they've offered since the fucking 1970's.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > It feels like these legitimate challenges to businesses to manage their customer service lines, support lines, etc. Wrong. These are not challenges. The customer service lines work exactly as designed: as cheap as possible to operate, as effective as possible in preventing majority of the callers from engaging support staff and starting any kind of support process. And the magic, most people who try and fail to get support believe it's their own fault - they're not being patient enough, or persistent enough, or maybe the problem isn't that big a deal, etc. The companies don't want you to work around the phone tree and hold time. And once most people have tools that are able to, the companies will adjust their support channels to compensate.
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    > result in a better experience for all parties involved Yu are mistaken in assuming businesses want better experiences for everyone, including workflows that may lose them revenue (like cancelations). The friction is intentional and part of a wider dark pattern strategy employed for "retention" - even Apple does this when one tries to get them to stop an unexpected recurring Apple Music subscription that only shows on ones credit card and nowhere else (apple.com or the Music app). The support number is not provided on amy of the support pages, and ine has to get their bank to stop the outgoing payments. Guess how I know this... In light of this, I'll gladly take any client-side agent assistance I can get to make to reduce my cognitive burden; the "hold for me" emulates the support agent calling you as you described. , and the experience is more important than implementation details.
- piyush_soni 2y ago
  Really? I mean it 'saves your time' by not having you to keep waiting so that you can do something else in that time. I don't know how that is not useful. Even if I'm not doing anything world changing in those 3 minutes, it will save me some stress.
nexxer 2y ago
All of that would be great if it was actually available to me in the smaller country/market I live in, which is less of a priority for Google. I still paid for them as part of the phone.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

nacs 2y ago

> tastefully integrating AI Tastefully integrating AI involves not uploading all of my photos and speech and text to the cloud and doing who knows what with that personal data. The majority of this data should never leave my device and that's why on-device LLMs/AI are much more tasteful.

blackoil 2y ago
You can control that.
- privacyking 2y ago
  To what extent? Google buries a lot of their privacy options deep within settings of individual apps and the settings menu
  - delfinom 2y ago
    Eh? Afai, it prompts you to enable it these days. Heck, Google is removing Location History storage from their side and making it device side only. Users in the past few weeks are getting notified to trigger the migration to device storage or all data is deleted.
    - justsomehnguy 2y ago
      eh? Two years ago they didn't allow MRU in GMaps if you weren't logged on.[0] And with every new phone I always power on it without an account, update, reset and only then add an account; I had my share of 'I did disable that thing' EDIT: [0] and they claimed what there is not enough storage for it. On a fresh phone with 128Gb on board. For the small array of ~30-100 letters. Fuckers.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Except Google Photos, which every couple days starts up telling me my phone is backing up (it isn't yet, not until I confirm it on the screen) and presenting an opt-out for uploading photos to Google. That's in Poland, EU, so I'm not sure how is that even legal. Next time, I'll ask my local DPA.

Sakos 2y ago

The AI editing tools in the Google Photos app (https://blog.google/products/photos/google-photos-editing-features-availability/ https://blog.google/products/photos/google-photos-editing-fe...) also feel like magic and have been very useful/convenient for me, so honestly I can't agree with all the negative comments. It feels like there are plenty of ways to incorporate AI that add value for users and don't require a weird ChatGPT-like interface.

gvurrdon 2y ago

Despite also having no desire to have an "AI" phone, this feature is incredibly useful; however hard I try to avoid it, there are organisations who will insist that they contact me by telephone. Luckily it's available on older devices so I can keep my 6a going for another year.