alt Hacker NewsOr they just flat out don't work. I was on an insurance website recently, and getting big annoying popups to use their AI agent for help with the site or my plan, even encouraging me to ask questions about my plan. I did have one, very simple, "what's my plan's copay?"
"Sorry, I do not have that information."
So then, "Ok, where do I find it?"
"Sorry, I do not have that information."
What the hell? What is this for? Of course, someone will point out "it's because of regulations" or some technical limitation, sure, I can understand that, but then I must ask the question then why did you think it was worth building?
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I was dealing with a LLM help bot on a website where I had to upload some documents and asked the bot how to get through a step where I simply don't have the right things and it kept telling me I could sidestep that (but I could not) or upload the thing (which I told it I could not to begin with!).
It's not like the previous tree based bots were good but at least they had a path to speaking with a person.
I suspect nobody ever tried to use the bot.
seems to me like having a chatbot is the 2020s version of the 2000s "having a website" or 2010s "having a facebook page"
except it's worse, if you manage to get some info out of it, it could all be just hallucinated, you were told a lie and no one is responsible.
it's like the only purpose is to erect a barrier between the company and its clients.
They’re building very little. They’ve been sold/told AI is good at customer service. They usually only bother pointing it to their knowledge base and FAQs and can only really answer questions if the answer is in that
I called my dentist because I was sick and wanted to move my appointment. You can't talk to a human anymore, it's all ai, after a bit of back and forth it assured me it had canceled my appointment and booked a new one 2 days later. I was actually surprised it went so well
The next day I get an email at 7pm telling my appointment was successfully rescheduled for 1pm (the same day), none of these match either my og appointment nor the rescheduled one
When I went to the dentist for the appointment the ai assistant supposedly rebooked, they told me there was a mistake and I was assigned a kids dentist.
In the end I had to rebook a third appointment with the receptionist