[kolinko]

Aside from a cost? It's also managing the actual human being, and making sure they have enough work. If the place has 5-10 calls a day, then it's pointless to hire receptionist that will do nothing for 1 hour, and then get 2 minutes chat. It used to be pointless to build software to do that, but since claude code it's cheap enough to make sense.

[skeeter2020]

receptionist as a service has been a thing for like... forever. You are never going to solve the problem of accurately estimating and quoting with AI or an answering service, so pay for someone to answer the phone and take down the details; have a mechanic or trained service rep review and estimate. Cheap code that doesn't solve the problem is not cheap.

[eucyclos]

Couldn't an ai take down the details and pass it to a mechanic or trained service rep?

[ssl-3]

Yes, of course. The bot can request information and the customer can provide it if they feel like it, and then someone qualified can call them back when they have their hands free.

But there's no bot, per se, needed at all. An answering machine from 1993 can do this same information-gathering job. :)

[camillomiller]

I can see a useful simple case of structuring a good answering system and then using AI to do STT then using Claude to structure the callback data

[ssl-3]

Good point.

So update the device from 1993's new-fangled digital answering machine to 2009's Google Voice, and have it do the transcription from voicemail to text.

Someone will still have to call Bill back about his Honda (which is actually the Kia he bought for his daughter -- Bill is not a very technical guy these days[1] and he confuses such concepts regularly) in order to get any trading of money for services done.

It doesn't take an LLM to get there, and Bill would probably prefer to avoid being frustrated by the bot's insistent nature.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47356166

[camillomiller]

Look, you‘re kicking an open door. I think LLMs applied like this are just a layer of complexity that os mostly replacing lower level programming solutions that could do the same thing

[Mrngl1991]

The transcription + callback loop is honestly underrated. Most of the value here is just capturing intent accurately ("Honda" vs "Kia" aside) so the mechanic can prioritize callbacks. A dumb voicemail-to-text pipeline handles that fine. The LLM layer adds complexity without solving the actual bottleneck, which is someone qualified picking up the phone.

[deanputney]

If someone put on their website and voicemail that they were available for calls only from 8-10am (for example), or that they would return my call at that time, I'd make a point to call them then. It's reasonable that people are busy too.