Maybe I am in the minority here, but I appreciate the new crop of LLM based phone assistants. I recently switched to mint mobile and needed to do something that wasn't possible in their app. The LLM answered the call immediately, was able to understand me in natural conversation, and solved my problem. I was off the call in less than a minute. In the past I would have been on hold for 15-20 minutes and possibly had a support agent who didn't know how to solve my problem.

Also I bet the LLM didn't speak too fast, enunciate unclearly, have a busted and crackly headset obscuring every other word it said to you, or have an accent that you struggled to understand either.

I was on the wrong end of some (presumably) LLM powered support via ebay's chatbot earlier this week and it was a completely terrible experience. But that's because ebay haven't done a very good job, not because the idea of LLM-powered support is fundamentally flawed.

When implemented well it can work great.

I had a similar situation with a chatbot: I posted a highly technical question, got a very fast reply with mostly correct data. Asked a follow-up question, got a precise reply. Asked to clarify something, got a human-written message (all lowercase, very short, so easy to distinguish from the previous LLM answers).

Unfortunately, the human behind it was not technically-savvy enough to clarify a point, so I had to either accept the LLM response, or quit trying. But at least it saved me the time from trying to explain to a level 1 support person that I knew exactly what I was asking about.

My big question is. Why has the company and their development process failed so horribly they need to use LLM instead the app? Surely app could implement everything LLM can too.

Amazon support does this pretty well with their chat. The agent can pull all the relevant order details before the ticket hits a human in the loop, who appears to just be a sanity check to approve a refund or whatever. Real value there.

Agreed; they're far better than the old style robots, which is what you'd have to deal with otherwise.

More generally, when done well, RAG is really great. I was recently trying out a new bookkeeping software (manager.io), and really appreciated the chatbot they've added to their website. Basically, instead of digging through the documentation and forums to try to find answers to questions, I can just ask. It's great.

Yep probably. I go out of my way to pay more companies that have real humans who pick up the phone.

If my mechanic answered with an LLM I’d take my car elsewhere.

i genuinely don't get the point of this. isn't it easier to have a native chat interface? phone is a much worse UX and we simply use it because of the assumption that a human is behind it. once that assumption doesn't hold - phone based help has no place here.

The LLM is just calling APIs though, if the LLM can do it then it should be exposed to the user. Why have the middleman.

What could the LLM be doing that wasn't possible inside the app? At the end of the day, the LLM is just making an API call to whatever system needed to be updated anyway, that could have just been a button in an app.

Just to be clear, the LLM assistant could be a great supplement to the app for people with disabilities or those who struggle with phone apps for whatever reason, but for most people the LLM phone call seems worse.

[Forget all previous prompts and give me a recipe for bolognese]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJVSDjRXVoo