Don't make me talk to your chatbot

Power cycling is not a solution. It's a crappy workaround, and you still had downtime because of it. The device should never get stuck in the first place, and the solution for that is fixing whatever bug is in the firmware.

If they want to reduce support calls, then have more reliable gear.

The thing is a YOU don't get to decide this. Maybe the PW reset flow is significantly more complex for some people who don't have an actual human walk them though it; maybe Xfinity routers shouldn't need to be power cycled to fix problems. Maybe corporations should make their products better to avoid do many support calls or price that into the purchase price. At least let's be honest that the entire exercise is an attempt to externalize costs on their customers.

> Half his calls are resolved by just power cycling the modem/router. People shouldn't need a human to tell them to do that.

Comcast deserves every penny of customer service expenses they're incurring if their own purpose-built modem/routers are so flaky they're responsible for half the problems people experience with their service. Customers should not be expected to endure shitty products without even seeking help from the service provider that owes them better.

By contrast, I've seen Google Fiber proactively issue a partial refund in response to a service outage that was so short I didn't even notice it.

This mentality is how you get

"Hi, thank you for your message, please take a look at our following FAQ guides:

- I forgot my password

Was this answer useful to you, or would you like more links to our FAQ? Before we give you a link to what used to be a talk to a human line, but which has been replaced by another chatbot in a sort of Matryoshka"

Password reset emails are a real bane. Because email is unreliable, they often don't work, so I end up with customers contacting me wondering why it's not working for them.

One of our software suppliers has particularly bad software for password resets, so there's a steady stream of people needing help for one reason or another. This company seems unable to fix these problems, unfortunately. Ughh.

I had a friend who worked for a company that built AI call centres. I naively thought that customers would use it to do "password reset" type workflows and have an escape hatch for customers to talk to a human if the AI couldnt handle what they needed.

Surprisingly few of them wanted that. If the AI couldnt handle their issue they mostly wanted customers to just fuck off.

It takes less brainpower to talk to a person. I often just call companies instead of trying to fight through their stupid FAQs and websites and all that crap. No I'm not going to install your stupid app just to do one thing once ever. I don't want to learn anything or remember anything. We're at a stage in technology where there's no excuse for crap software in simple devices.

Recently the ventilation fan in my house wasn't measuring temperature correctly so I called the company. Their tech came round, got me to enter my wifi password, updated the firmware, and viola - it started working properly. I'm sure they had a FAQ or manual explaining that but I'm not wasting my mental energy on such rubbish.

[dead]

> They'd save themselves a fortune if they stopped releasing bad software

I doubt it. I suspect the number one tech support call is "I forgot my password" and everything else is a long way below that.

I'll slag on Microslop all day, but users are dumber than dumb.

Amazon, for example, charges us for cloud resources and then charges us again (handsomely) for the privilege of submitting bug reports to them. And then sometimes, even with a clear, deterministic repro for a bug with no plausible workaround (besides "stop using the feature"), where the fix is probably as simple as "pull a fix from upstream open source repo" or "sic Claude on it for 10 minutes", the bug remains open for literally years.

This is very different from "I didn't read the instructions on the screen and now I'm calling support". Both scenarios exist. I have some sympathy for businesses facing the latter, and much less for businesses facing the former.

This is an oversimplification.

When people talk about wanting "free support", they mean that they want support included with the price of the product (no extra charges), but you're still going to get what you paid for, and expecting too much might not get you what you want.

If you pay $20/month for a software subscription for your small business, you're going to get a different kind of support than the enterprise customer paying $100k/month. The small business customer will get support via email with multi-day SLAs, and the enterprise customer will get priority support via screen-share with same-day SLAs.

And there are free-tier services that offer limited support, where users that don't pay anything expect to be treated like they're full-fledged customers.

There a limited scenario here, where a paying customer has so many problems with the product that the cost of support exceeds the revenue the customer provides, and when one can confidently say that this is not the result of an overly-needy customer, you spend the money figuring out the problem and making sure that the solution is available to help any customer that follows. The cost of support my exceed revenue for one customer, but once the solution is in the knowledge base, you don't have to repeat those costs again for the next customer.

But there are also small customers who fumble the product and put too much strain on support until a decision is made not to prioritize them over other customers. I have seen small customers with unreasonable expectations get "fired" simply because their revenue wasn't worth it.

If a company routinely sees support costs exceed revenue, that's usually the company's fault for having a faulty and/or hard-to-support product. If a single customer's support costs exceed the revenue they provide, that's usually the customer's fault for leaning too heavily on support to be their personal I.T. provider.

Corporations have really hammered in the propaganda haven't they? They idea that a trillion dollar corporation can't have good support because they're just greedy and don't want to hire workers needs to be reinstated every moment.

You might be talking to a chatbot!!

One could almost imagine the article was intentional self-parody. Almost.

And all these replies spilled ink over an argument that had..... absolutely nothing to do with the article. So wild to see how many people refuse to read something they want to discuss.

Support chatbots are pretty much the only scenario where "don't make me talk to your chatbot" is a problem in practice. If someone tries to use a chatbot to engage with me in a personal or professional discussion, I don't lose anything of value by simply ignoring them permanently. It's only when the party using the chatbot has something I want that I have any incentive to even consider playing along.

"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.

my only experiences with chatbots so far have been as instruments for companies to avoid their contractual obligations and just not provide the options that I would have asked a person directly for

obviously not a problem with the technology itself, it was like that with more primitive answering machines as well, often there only to either answer the obvious things, or stonewall people with real problems with the product or service hoping they'd just give up and take the loss

Whenever I interact with them I get asked to describe my issue then regardless of what I write I get asked a battery of questions you would expect are getting fed into a form and then on the off-chance I get connected to a human operator (which was my goal to begin with) they end up asking me for all the same information again.

Do you remember what product they used?

>customers calling for support on things they shpuld be capable of figuring out themselves in is probably where AI is going to shine as first line support.

It certainly won't be cheap to run real-time AI voice chat, or any real-time AI chat. The AI costs that you currently see are heavily subsidized, just like OP's example of "VC backed competitors who are OK burning $$ to gain market share", it's the same. These AI companies are far from profitable, burning billions to insert themselves into customer support pipelines and everywhere else they can, and then the other foot will drop. Uber and Lyft are far more expensive today than when they started, and the price to run "AI" will also inflate when these companies have to pay off all the billions they've spent but didn't earn. I doubt it will end up costing much less if less at all than human support, with worse results.

>Isn't part of why Apple's iPhone can be so expensive is because it's very easy to get actual human support for it when something goes wrong?

Yeah, Apple has best in class support. They tried monetising it through Applecare but thats largely broken down.

I cant stand Apple for a lot of reasons, but their phone support, and everything behind that like training, is about as good as you can possibly hope to achieve.

> If I'm contacting a company for help from a human, it's because I haven't found the solution in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth.

You'd be amazed at how not normal that is though. The number of people willing to throw up their hands to ask for help rather than researching anything is pretty damn high.

I agree that's why I would prefer to have AI if it does the job better and if it can be further trained to understand when to escalate in the case of a more technical user which I have found humans rarely do.

I wouldn't mind, if it ended up getting me a human at the end of the process.

It's not quite at the level of the "shibboleet" XKCD, but I did once manage to get a much higher support tier at Comcast who was able to verify that 1) I had a problem that was their fault and 2) fix it. Even that guy was halfway on a script. Y'know, after I've read you a ping timeout three times from the Windows command line, I probably shouldn't have to read it verbatim to you again. It hasn't changed.

I understand the article is actually not about support chatbots specifically but seeing the conversation here talked about that it's not out of place to join in that discussion. Attempting to shame people by accusing them of not reading is hardly constructive. This isn't Reddit.

Honestly I pretty much never actually read the articles and I don't see anything wrong with that. HN is more like discussion club, and the article is just a starting point for the discussion. If the discussion stays on topic that's great, if it moves onto better topics that's even better.

"Don't make me read your blog"

Sorry I wasn't very clear. TFA is talking about using LLMs to write things from scratch, not just to clean up grammar for example. In that context, I was talking about bits of semantic information, not bits of English text information. You might have 300 bits of semantic information in your mind, and then you have to expand that to, say, 600 bits of English text to give to the LLM. If you're using the LLM purely to turn bullet points into prose, it'll add more bits of English, but not more bits of (useful) semantic information.

I prompted Claude with "(information theory) difference between semantic information and english text information in the context of using LLMs for writing": https://claude.ai/share/5925245a-0893-46ba-bca9-30627d4facbc

If you're familiar with LLMs and information theory, the LLM isn't giving you any semantic information that you don't already know. If you aren't familiar with LLMs and information theory, you can learn about them from google and/or your own LLM, using that prompt for keywords. In either case, the LLM's response isn't very helpful, because it's not my ideas that you are reading, it's random information pulled from the internet (directly or indirectly), and it's not actually the semantic information I wanted to convey.

This comment is more useful than the LLM's, because every word is chosen to convey the ideas in my mind as clearly as possible in the context of this article and conversation. It's also half as many words to read.

Related: https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/just-send-me-the-prompt/

(I could have sworn there was a popular HN submission a while back of this or a similar blog post, but damned if I can find it now.)

That does somewhat depend on the size of the context.

LLMs won't add information to context, so if the output is larger than the input then it's slop. They're much better at picking information out of context. If I have a corpus of information and prompt an extraction, the result may well contain more information than the prompt. It's not necessarily feasible to transfer the entire context, and also I've curated that specific result as suitably conveying the message I intend to convey.

This does all take effort.

My take is also that I am interested in what people say: I have priors for how worthwhile I expect it to be to read stuff written by various people, and I will update my priors when they give me things to read. If they give me slop, that's going to affect what I think of them, and I expect the same in return. I'm willing to work quite hard to avoid asking my colleagues to read or review slop.

If all you care about is the facts, and not the other’s relationship to them, why engage with a person at all? You could query a LLM for whatever subject, argument or counterpoint you wish.

Besides, your hypothetical summaries chock full of facts don’t exist, at least not yet. Most LLM summaries are chock full of filler, thus the name slop, thus why us “ignorant” people hate reading it.

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 to be honest - do people really want to use a fuzzy-logic CLI instead of a graphical interface? If not, why won't companies just get AI to implement the functionality in their other UIs?

Yeah as long as the chatbot is empowered to fix a bunch of basic problems I'm okay with them as the first line of support. The way support is setup nowadays humans are basically forced to be robots anyway, given a set of canned responses for each scenario and almost no latitude of their own. At least the robot responds instantly.

CSRs are abused by call center managers far more often than they are by the people on the other end of the phone line. The endless push for "better" metrics, the terrible pay, the dehumanizing scripts, bad (or zero) training, optimizing to make every employee interchangeable and expendable, unforgiving attendance policies, treating workers like children, etc. Call centers are brutal environments and the reason churn is often so high has very little to do with abuse from the people calling for help. In fact, the last two call centers I had any insight into (to their credit) had strict policies about not taking abuse from customers and would flag abusive customer's accounts.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/retell-ai

The different accents and call center background noise are features in their product.

For me it was a Maryland contracting company, FH Furr, that does electrical, plumbing, etc.

If you haven't experienced it yet, you will soon.

Listen to the podcast Shell Game.