For others, it's going to create customer hell. I can't imagine dealing with Google, Amazon, banks, etc. after these become widespread.

Who handles the support for Outside?

In other words, by implicitly paying with “attention” you agreed to the contract which has no support, you cannot then complain about having no support.

You are welcome to not use a Google product.

Also: I would argue that there is support for "Outside", as you put it. Fire dept/ambulance/police for emergencies, government at various levels for some things, utility companies (e.g. if a water line broke or whatever), etc, etc.

I suppose you could argue for some sort of tracking system that would give Google data to prove that you do in fact buy what you buy, so Google would know that you aren't a penniless hermit, customer of noone and source of no money. I can see some disadvantages to such a system though, and I think you can too.

I think each of us has to make a choice: Either be a paying customer or accept that you're not a paying customer and aren't going to be treated like one.

IDK about you, but I went from "die-hard Nexus lover/Pixel preorder" to ungoogling everything in my life (including every piece of "family tech support" hardware for which I do tech support and periodic maintenance).

For the uninitiated: The Google Pixel had a factory defect in soldering that made the chip housing the audio codec flat-out fall off. For me, the issue manifested at month 13 into a 12-month warranty, with the symptom that I could receive phone calls or play music, but no audio in/out of any kind was actually reaching the device, no matter whether I used 3rd party peripherals, wired headphones, native speaker, the works.

Google's "solution" for the factory defect --which they acknowledged in a thousand-person google group dedicated to debugging the issue-- was the following inane reasoning: "Well, these are cell phones, which means that we have your cell phone number... so how about we just call you?"

Keep in mind, this required me to keep my SIM parked in a non-functional device for the prospect of receiving a phone call which I would not be able to hear or respond to.

I still remember that bug nearly a decade later and will NEVER use a Google Pixel, Google Fiber subscription, or Waymo vehicle unless I see substantial convincing evidence to suggest that anyone at the company understands that "reliability engineering" includes building a support and repair model for paying customers.

Until then, Goodbye, Google.

So you use a voice memo to capture your words and email them, but it seems almost as silly as calling up and chatting to an LLM, which has the added benefit of being able to confirm it has understood your request and maybe even begin actioning it.

However, this is silly talk, the real future is just gonna be your agent who you talk to directly, who then talks to the contractors' agent, who passes the info on to them in the exact format they like.

In other words, a singularly noisy pipe. (yeah, I know, it's going to be great as soon as it starts being great)

For example, calling 0800-TEXT-HN and narrating this comment back-and-forth to an machine would be pretty nutty.

I bet 95% of calls to a plumber are the same ten or so issues— leaky faucet, toilet won't flush or is clogged, laundry machine overflowed, omg there's water everywhere, etc. If the bot is able to suss out the situation and also get a sense what kind of solution the customer is looking for and on what timeframe (cleanup now because I'm having a party tomorrow, install a $3000 sump pump in two weeks, etc) that can skip over a lot of exhausting email back and forth and get to something much more like what GP experienced, where they had one brief, synchronous interaction, followed by a single followup with the proposed actions that was exactly what he knew he wanted.

looks like a GUI with 5 buttons. Which is faster?

Can't you already do that without calling anyone ? It's not like your local plumber trained its own LLM on local plumbing issues, it's most likely yet another wrapper of chatgpt

The agents might communicate over a voice line, or some other type of pipe. In such a future, applications become obsolete. It's LLM APIs all the way done.

I don't need to go to hrblock dot com to do my taxes. I tell my assistant "do my taxes". It communicates with the IRS for me, with no humans on either end, and submits my taxes.

No more websites, and we have a truly universally interoperable standard. Human on the other end? No problem. You don't even know what company you want? Also not a problem - the LLM can choose. No google maps entry? No problem.

and doesn't grow to want to murder you

We'll probably not get there, maybe ever, because we have to consider cost and risk. But, my point is moreso that if you have infinite agents with high competence than applications become worthless.

Applications were always a stop-gap. A middle man between human, computer, and human.

Any call center systematically asks to repeat all information, any administration asks for papers and all its dependencies. (For example in France in order to get married you need both the birth certificate, pacs certificate and pacs non-dissolution certificate. All of these contain the same information)

This is not a problem that needs LLMs to be solved. It’s a data entry and retrieval with consent problem.

Yes, better customer service is not bounded by physics but it might be bounded by competence or maybe even malice if companies simply want to make the experience horrible so no one ever calls back (suggest starting with Hanlon's razor first however). Regardless, having an agent on our side, fighting against these two forces would be great.

I don't know if there is anything to back up the hypothesis that they indeed want their systems to be horrible. It is possible, but sometimes, I want to pay more (buy more insurance coverage, etc), so sometimes our goals are actually aligned yet it is still a painful process. Therefore, I think it is more likely that the problem is competence.