alt Hacker NewsIs anyone old enough to remember the switch from customer call centers having a human quickly answer to long long annoying phone menus because that friction, getting the customer to do some work or busy distraction, somehow saved costs for the company?
No-one likes phone menus and immediately wants to escape them (then they disable pressing 0 for human)
"AI" to me means the exact same thing
company wants to cut costs by eliminating human labor to increase profits
it means things are going to be wildly inconvenient with limited options
it ALWAYS means it's going to be worse
Hide your "AI", no-one is impressed or excited about it, quite the opposite
If it's a website, if I can't block your "AI" via javascript, I'll do it via CSS
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LLMs are replacing a lot of the inflexible phone menus, and in leading implementations, can do all of the things a human could do. Or at least, make a recommendation for things it can't do that just require a human to hit an accept button.
> No-one likes phone menus and immediately wants to escape them (then they disable pressing 0 for human)
They beat waiting for somebody to answer the phone just to tell you they are sending the call to somebody else and you'll have to explain everything again.
The sequences where you authenticate on the menu and no person is allowed to ask for authentication information makes sense too. I don't think anybody actually like it, but it is better than the alternative.
Nobody likes badly designed menus.