If you're going to be communicating with a machine for later review by humans, why bother with a voice-based phone at all?

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mikepurvis 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

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. When you just have a fire-and-forget email form, you're going to have incomplete reports, missing information, people who have no idea what they're talking about, and who knows what else.

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.

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lm28469 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> 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

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throwaway290 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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?

	▲	mikepurvis 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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loloquwowndueo 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most people find it easier to talk than to type.

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const_cast 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well in the future, you won't do the calling. You'll ask your own personal LLM to do it for you. Ideally such an agent is intimately familiar with your life, and will be able to figure it out.

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.

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pcthrowaway 5 days ago | parent [-]

> Ideally such an agent is intimately familiar with your life

and doesn't grow to want to murder you

	▲	const_cast 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		In my fake world the agents are perfect. 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.

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Gud 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Uhm, why not?

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grues-dinner 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Attaching pictures, being able to review the content for accuracy/completeness before sending it, being able to pause and do something else in the middle, B/CCing others, and having a copy of the sent document for the record are all pretty helpful. The reason I'd forgo those benefits and call is if I thought I was going to be able to talk to a human right now and just get it done without a to-and-fro.

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

	▲	lucyjojo 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		lots of people can't write without putting in a lot of effort.

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gosub100 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because it's insulting to be forced to talk to a machine

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addandsubtract 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because emails exist?!

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siffin 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

That's true, but isn't it so awkward to type, or maybe you're disabled so it's difficult or impossible.

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.

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Piskvorrr 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

And they're a best-effort, asynchronous store-and-forget^Wforward, reply-whenever-if-at-all solution.

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grues-dinner 5 days ago | parent [-]

What is an LLM that transcribes it and plops it in the CRM queue?

	▲	Piskvorrr 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		An opportunity to rant about South Africa, because that's surely what the email said - honest, that came out the request to transcribe! In other words, a singularly noisy pipe. (yeah, I know, it's going to be great as soon as it starts being great)

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5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]