[palmotea]

> And you don't think that this won't improve with better bots?

Actually, now that I think about it, yeah.

The whole purpose of the bots is to deflect you from talking to a human. For instance: Amazon's chatbot. It's gotten "better": now when I need assistance, it tries three times to deflect me from a person after it's already agreed to connect me to one.

Anything they'll allow the bot to do can probably can be done better by a customer facing webpage.

[spongebobstoes]

Maybe for you, but not for most people. Most people have problems that are answered online, but knowledge sites are hard to navigate, and they can't solve their own problems.

A high quality bot to guide people through their poorly worded questions will be hugely helpful for a lot of people. AI is quickly getting to the point that a very high quality experience is possible.

The premise is also that the bots are what enable the people to exist. The status quo is no interactive customer service at all.

[safety1st]

This sounds to me like something that's better solved by RAG than by an AI manned call center.

Let's use Zuck's example, the lost password. Surely that's better solved with a form where you type things, such as your email address. If the problem is navigation, all we need to do is hook up a generative chat bot to the search function of the already existing knowledge site. Then you can ask it how to reset your password, and it'll send you to the form and write up instructions. The equivalent over a phone call sounds worse than this to me.

I think Zuck is wrong that 90% of the problems people would call in for can easily be solved by an AI. I was stuck in a limbo with Instagram for about 18 months, where I was banned for no clear reason, there was no obvious way to contact them about it, and once I did find a way, we proceeded with a weird dance where I provided ID verification, they unbanned me, and then they rebanned me, and this happened a total of 4 times before the unban process actually worked. I don't see any AI agent solving this; the cause was obviously process and/or technical problems at Meta. This is the only thing I ever wanted to call Meta for.

And there is another big class of issue that people want to call any consumer-facing business for, which AI can't solve: loneliness. The person is retired and lives alone and just wants to talk to someone for 20 minutes, and uses a minor customer service request as a justification. This happens all the time. Actually an AI can address this problem, but it's probably not the same agent we would build for solving customer requests, and I say address rather than solve as AI will not solve society's loneliness epidemic.

[spongebobstoes]

Respectfully, I think your reply assumes that I am suggesting the only AI interface must be on the phone.

It should be everywhere, as a first line of customer service. Even once talking to a person, real-time translation is necessary -- it's not possible to staff enough skilled employees in every language on earth.

I'd like to call out that "I can't log in" is the most common problem with Facebook, by a wide margin. HN user anecdotes are just not useful when assessing the scope of this problem.

I'd also like to call out that many people (usually not English speaking) nearly exclusively use voice memos and phone calls, and rarely type anything at all.

I think it is clear that AI will enable better customer service from Facebook. Without AI, a FB call center is clearly impossible. With AI, perhaps it begins to look feasible.