[brotchie]

You don't need quality or flexibility for an AI demo.

Hand crafting a voice agent to schedule simple appointments for a barber in San Francisco where the caller is in a quiet environment, is a one day exercise in prompt engineering.

Building a voice agent to schedule real appointments (on a real calendar of a working business) for real customers, for any business type, in any city: significantly more difficult. Real customers can be on a bad cell connection, have background noise, or worse, there's somebody in the background having another conversation.

Building a working agent isn't the hard part of building a real world agent. It's establishing human and offline evals, identifying loss patterns, hill climbing, capturing and processing user feedback, doing hacks to deal with model limitations, learning how an agent-driven conversation has to be subtly different from a real human conversation, and so on.