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> Voice agents allow businesses to be available to their customers 24/7 to answer questions, schedule appointments, or complete purchases. Customer availability

by dougb5 2y ago

> Voice agents allow businesses to be available to their customers 24/7 to answer questions, schedule appointments, or complete purchases. Customer availability and business availability no longer have to match 1:1 (ever tried to call an East Coast bank after 3 p.m. PT?). With voice agents, every business can always be online. I don't get it -- textual support chatbots have been around for decades. Even if we accept the premise that people would rather speak to them by voice, how do voice agents represent some kind of sea change in availability? (And I personally find customer support chatbots deeply frustrating to use for reasons that have nothing to do with the modality or the quality of the AI model. I only ever need to use one when the question I have is not answered in the documentation, which is often the extent of the chatbot's business-specific training data. Inevitably I end up being led in circles, screaming for a human.)

scarface_74 2y ago
Before LLMs, chatbots and voice bots were dumb pattern matchers. You had to list every “utterance” that you wanted to match on. The only variance was in the “slots”. An utterance is something like “give me directions from $source to $destination”. LLMs mean that you don’t have to give the system every utterance in every supported language.
- mastazi 2y ago
  True, but I think parent meant to say that even the LLM-based ones have been around for quite a while and that just switching from text to voice doesn't really make much of a difference.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    I’m not aware of any call center implementation of a well known company that is backed by an LLM. I work in the cloud call center space (Amazon Connect) as projects come up. I spent 3 years working in the consulting department at AWS.
    - mastazi 2y ago
      > I’m not aware of any call center implementation of a well known company that is backed by an LLM. Maybe this proves GP's point that it's not a desirable development.
      - scarface_74 2y ago
        There are plenty of pre-LLM chatbot implementations. Amazon Lex (the AWS version of Alexa) has been around forever and is integrated with Connect. The platform support just isn’t there yet. Amazon Connect and Genysis are the two most popular cloud platforms for it. Besides that, enterprises are just really slow to move. This is a quick mockup I put together for an earlier HN comment https://chatgpt.com/share/67be86bc-4090-8010-8017-f3048fe32d27 https://chatgpt.com/share/67be86bc-4090-8010-8017-f3048fe32d... Compare this to actually listing out every utterance. You would need to build something like this using a custom Lambda integration with Connect and Lex. I’ve done it before as an MVP.
sehansen 2y ago
> answer questions The FAQ page of their website already does that. > schedule appointments I've been scheduling all my doctors appointment through their website for years already. > complete purchases PG himself sold a company making websites doing this to Yahoo in 1998. Just like all the people trying to reinvent the bus, they've reinvented the website...

by dougb5 2y ago

scarface_74 2y ago

Before LLMs, chatbots and voice bots were dumb pattern matchers. You had to list every “utterance” that you wanted to match on. The only variance was in the “slots”. An utterance is something like “give me directions from $source to $destination”. LLMs mean that you don’t have to give the system every utterance in every supported language.

mastazi 2y ago
True, but I think parent meant to say that even the LLM-based ones have been around for quite a while and that just switching from text to voice doesn't really make much of a difference.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  I’m not aware of any call center implementation of a well known company that is backed by an LLM. I work in the cloud call center space (Amazon Connect) as projects come up. I spent 3 years working in the consulting department at AWS.
  - mastazi 2y ago
    > I’m not aware of any call center implementation of a well known company that is backed by an LLM. Maybe this proves GP's point that it's not a desirable development.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      There are plenty of pre-LLM chatbot implementations. Amazon Lex (the AWS version of Alexa) has been around forever and is integrated with Connect. The platform support just isn’t there yet. Amazon Connect and Genysis are the two most popular cloud platforms for it. Besides that, enterprises are just really slow to move. This is a quick mockup I put together for an earlier HN comment https://chatgpt.com/share/67be86bc-4090-8010-8017-f3048fe32d27 https://chatgpt.com/share/67be86bc-4090-8010-8017-f3048fe32d... Compare this to actually listing out every utterance. You would need to build something like this using a custom Lambda integration with Connect and Lex. I’ve done it before as an MVP.

sehansen 2y ago

> answer questions The FAQ page of their website already does that. > schedule appointments I've been scheduling all my doctors appointment through their website for years already. > complete purchases PG himself sold a company making websites doing this to Yahoo in 1998. Just like all the people trying to reinvent the bus, they've reinvented the website...