I phoned up with a simple question about a UK Govt. service I use, and got a human being who repeatedly gave me wrong or non-answers in a wierd way I've never heard before. I reckon my voice was being put through voice-to-text feeding a chatbot which was replying in text on her screen and she was reading that text to me.
After a few "sorry, that doesn't answer my question at all" from me, she seemed to put her hands on the wheel to reply "You're not listening to me. I can't help you if you won't listen to me". I said "I'm listening but not hearing an answer." This must have been outside the chatbot's comprehension, because she then hung up the call.
I phoned back, got a different girl... who gave the same non-answers but with immaterial variations - ending with the same result. Total clincher.
This is the future, I guess. "AI"s operating human puppets.
Government is actually a surprising place to see this, since in theory they’re supposed to care about serving the citizens, as opposed to for instance, American health insurers, who in general would rather deflect and deny, which AI is perfect for.
> We will probably see the “puppets” eliminated in 12-18 months when the voice models improve enough to be indistinguishable
> Government is actually a surprising place to see this, since in theory they’re supposed to care about serving the citizens
Well, it serves the citizens skilled only enough to work as puppets. The Govt. might say it also serves the users - cut cost per operator, increase number of operators, so reduce queue time. But then... Manna.
Difference is, before, the human used domain knowledge to convert customer question into KB query. Now, that's done by "AI", so human needs no domain knowledge, nothing but the ability to perform the text-to-speech.
Besides struggling with speech to text more than you are use to even with Siri because of the inherent limitation of the bandwidth that is used to delivery your voice over phone lines, there is no reason a well designed LLM based system couldn’t do as well.
But in my experience, there are a lot of people who specialize in call centers that don’t have a development background.
... extending calls and thereby deteriorating queue wait time ... driving more puppet hires and raising costs!
The operator performance metrics must have fallen through the floor. Probably the target has been lowered to cover it.
See my other replies. I know this space pretty well.
Guidelines: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
... which probably explains this post's +18 points.