[Animats]

Is their product good enough to back their hype? Probably not. Most of these "customer service" systems are only slightly smarter than "Press 1 to pay your bill, press 2 if your item hasn't arrived..." menu systems.

Edit: It's worse than I thought. It's a spamming system.

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Ava operates within Artisan Sales, our platform that has everything you need for cold outbound. B2B data, warmup, automated lead research, bounce testing, deliverability checks and so much more.

Like most chatbot companies, their own sales effort does not use their own chatbot. When you go to their site, you don't get to talk to their chatbot about their product.

[jameslk]

There’s so many of these sales engagement products that the only way to stand out it seems is to be the loudest. Many of these companies also spam a lot of Reddits with fake reviews. Not a novel concept, here’s a bunch more:

Reply.io Lemlist Apollo.io Smartlead Instantly Saleshandy Quickmail Salesforge Snov Outreach

There’s a new one every day because the last one got banned/isn’t effective anymore. There’s a ton of leads agencies that gobble these up sending out tens of thousands of emails every day using the latest incarnation of this spamware, creating new domains and warming them up with fake emails to each other and now using LLMs to “personalize” the emails (i.e. the “AI”) all in the attempt to evade spam filters. I get several of such emails every other day shilling their agency.

If you've gotten cold or recruiter emails in the last few years where it looks like the person is just talking to themselves in your inbox with 6 different follow ups, it's probably thanks to one of these tools.