My company gets a lot of incoming chats from customers (and potential customers)

The challenge of this side of the business is 98% of the questions asked over chat are already answered on the very website that person started the chat from. Like it's all written right there!

So real human chat agents are reduced to copy paste monkeys in most interactions.

But here's the rub. The people asking the questions fit into one of two groups: not smart or patient enough to read (unfortunate waste of our resources) or they are checking whether our business has real humans and is responsive before they buy.

It's that latter group for whom we must keep red blooded, educated and service minded humans on the job to respond, and this is where small companies can really kick ass next to behemoths like google who bring in over $1m per employee but still can't seem to afford a phone line to support your account with them.

It's just a tool, like a search engine or a guillotine

Goood thing there is no AGI

That’s good because they can’t do math anyway

How about governments?

I hope they all go under. I've no sympathy for them and I wish nothing but the worst for them.

You don't need "ai" to do any of that. That is something we've been able to do for a long time. Whether or not call centers or help desks implemented a digital assistant is a different story.

Whenever I call in to a service because it's not working, when I get stuck talking to a computer, I'm fucking furious. Every single AI implementation I've worked with has been absolute trash. I spam click zero and yell "operator" when it says it didn't hear me or asks for my problem, and I've 100% of the time made it through to a person. People also suck, but they at least understand what I'm saying and aren't as patronizing.

I disagree. the current IVR systems in place that only take a few valid voice prompts are insufficient for more advanced queries. I think transferring it to more of an AI style setup like how the chat bots were, but having it handle transferring to the proper area instead of doing everything is a much needed improvement.

I don't disagree with the statement that companies haven't implemented the right tech for their support though

Well yeah, when ai started to give people info so wrong it cost the companies money this was going to happen.

My counter is that if the question I ask the chat bot is too complicated to answer, then it should be redirected to a person that can.

Whenever I'm thinking of examples where I interface with these bots, it's usually because my internet is down or some other service. After the most basic of prompts, I expect actual customer service, not being pawned off in something else.

It really is a deal breaker in many cases for me. If I were to call in somewhere as a prospective customer, and if I were addressed my a computer, I will not do business there. It tells me everything I need to know about how a company views it's customers.

I do think "AI" as an internal tool for a lot of businesses makes sense in a lot of applications. Perhaps internal first contact for customer service or in code development as something that can work as a powerful linter or something that can generate robust unit testing. I feel it should almost never be customer facing.

I mainly disagree with you out of spite for AI, not because I disagree with the ideal vision that you have on the topic. It hasn't been super mainstream long enough for me to be burned as many times as I have been, and the marketing makes me want to do bad things.

Thank fucking god

Yeah, I always found it weird how chatbots were basically a less efficient and less reliable way to access data that's already on the website but all the companies were racing to get one. People kept telling me that I'm in the minority in being able to find information on a webpage, but I suspect the sort of people who are too dumb to do that aren't going to have much better luck dealing with the quirks and eccentricies of a chatbot either.

In the case of Air Canada, the thing the chatbot promised was actually pretty reasonable on its own terms, which is both why the customer believed it and why the judge said they had to honour it. I don't think it would have gone the same way if the bot offered to sell them a Boeing 777 for $10.

I don't deal with robots....

that is to say they did it and its not working.

“And call me daddy!”

Oh my God... The best/worst thing about the idea of AI porn is how AI tends to forget anything that isn't still on the screen. So now I'm imagining the camera zooming in on someone's jibblies, then zooming out and now it's someone else's jibblies, and the background is completely different.

Then they're smart. The technology is just not there yet.

I will note that AI customer service could be an improvement. Customer service helpline jobs are one of the worst jobs to get paid peanuts to do.

Of course, my preference is to upgrade the crap voice recognition system with an AI voice recognition system, which is way better at understanding words. The help desk jockeys can stay, as they do the real work.