Re:Show HN: Companies use AI to take your calls. I built AI ...
by throwaway290 on Tuesday July 29, 2025 @07:10PM
(#44729316)
> leaky faucet, toilet won't flush or is clogged, laundry machine overflowed, omg there's water everywhere, etc.
looks like a GUI with 5 buttons. Which is faster?
Re:Show HN: Companies use AI to take your calls. I built AI ...
by mikepurvis on Wednesday July 30, 2025 @10:37AM
(#44734813)
Most end users are not good at slotting themselves into predefined categories— a bot that can listen to a person's explanation and identify "okay this sounds like exactly a fit for task X" or "this is 70% a task Y but there's an extra wrinkle ZZZZ" seems to me like it would be pretty valuable.
Re:Show HN: Companies use AI to take your calls. I built AI ...
by lm28469 on Wednesday July 30, 2025 @08:15AM
(#44733194)
> Because there's still a benefit to a synchronous interaction. The bot can perform first level troubleshooting, ask for clarification, begin to form a plan and get your buy-in, etc.
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
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.