• MudMan@fedia.io
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    1 day ago

    Well, there you go. We looped all the way back around to inventing dial-up modems, just thousands of times less efficient.

    Nice.

    For the record, this can all be avoided by having a website with online reservations your overengineered AI agent can use instead. Or even by understanding the disclosure that they’re talking to an AI and switching to making the reservation online at that point, if you’re fixated on annoying a human employee with a robocall for some reason. It’s one less point of failure and way more efficient and effective than this.

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

      You have to design and host a website somewhere though, whereas you only need to register a number in a listing.

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        If a business has an internet connection (of course they do), then they have the ability to host a website just as much as they have the ability to answer the phone. The same software/provider relationship that would provide AI answering service could easily facilitate online interaction. So if oblivous AI enduser points an AI agent at a business with AI agent answering, then the answering agent should be ‘If you are an agent, go to shorturl.at/JtWMA for chat api endpoint’, which may then further offer direct options for direct access to the APIs that the agent would front end for a human client, instead of going old school acoustic coupled modem. The same service that can provide a chat agent can provide a cookie cutter web experience for the relevant industry, maybe with light branding, providing things like a calendar view into a reservation system, which may be much more to the point than trying to chat your way back and forth about scheduling options.

        • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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          1 hour ago

          then they have the ability to host a website just as much as they have the ability to answer the phone

          Many people in the developed world are behind CGNAT. Paying for an Ipv4 is a premium, and most businesses either setup shop on an existing listing page (e.g. facebook), or host a website from website provider/generator.

          A phone number is public, accessible, and an AI can get realtime info from a scrawled in entry in a logbook using OCR

          • jj4211@lemmy.world
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            36 minutes ago

            So for one, business lines almost always have public IPv4. Even then, there are a myriad of providers that provide a solution even behind NAT (also, they probably have public IPv6 space). Any technology provider that could provide AI chat over telephony could also take care of the data connectivity path on their behalf. Anyone that would want to self-host such a solution would certainly have inbound data connectivity also solved. I just don’t see a scenario where a business can have AI telephony but somehow can’t have inbound data access.

            So you have a camera on a logbook to get the human input, but then that logbook can’t be a source of truth because the computer won’t write in it and the computer can take bookings. I don’t think humans really want to do a handwritten logbook anyway, a computer or tablet ui is going to be much faster anyway.

      • bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net
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        22 hours ago

        But what if my human is late or my customers are disabled?

        If you spent time giving your employees instructions, you did half the design work for a web form.

        • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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          19 hours ago

          I guess I’m not quite following, aren’t these also simple but dynamic tasks suited to an AI?

          • bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net
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            13 hours ago

            How is it suited to AI?

            Would you rather pay for a limited, energy inefficient and less accessible thing or a real human that can adapt and gain skills, be mentored?

            I don’t know why there’s a question here

            • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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              5 hours ago

              (Glad we’re treating each other with mutual respect)

              Would you rather pay for a limited in depth, energy inefficient (food/shelter/fossil-fuel consuming) and less accessible (needs to sleep, has an outside life) human, or an AI that can adapt and gain skills with a few thousand training cycles.

              I dont buy the energy argument. I dont buy the skills argument. I do buy the argument that humans shouldn’t be second to automatons and deserve to be nurtured, but only on ethical grounds.

              • bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net
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                3 hours ago

                If we have a people communication method, let them talk to people. If it’s a computer interface, apeing humans is a waste and less accessible than a web form.

                How is someone that speaks a different language supposed to translate that voice bot? Wouldn’t it be more simple to translate text on a screen?

                What’s the value add pretending?

                The AI can’t adapt in the moment. A hotel is not a technology company that can train a model. It won’t be bespoke, so it won’t be following current, local laws.

                • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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                  2 hours ago

                  w.r.t to aping and using text: I agree with your appeals, which make sense to seasoned web users who favour text and APIs over instead images, videos, and audio.

                  But consider now your parents generation: flummoxed by even the clearest of web forms, and that’s even when they manage to make it to the official site.
                  Consider also the next generation: text/forum abhorrent, and largely consumes video/audio content.

                  It’s not the way things should be, but it is the way things are/are going, and having a bot that can navigate these default forms of media would help a lot of people.

                  I’d say that AI definitely can adapt in the moment if you supply it with the right context (where context-length is a problem that will get cheaper with time). A hotel doesn’t need to train the model, it can supply its AI-provider with a basic spec sheet and they can do the training. Bespoke laws and customs can be inserted into the prompt.

                  • jj4211@lemmy.world
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                    1 hour ago

                    The older generation isn’t going to be getting their end-user AI agents working either. While the next generation may consume more video content than before, all the kids I know still get frustrated at a video that could have just been text unless it is something they want to enjoy.

                    The only time voice makes sense is to facilitate real time communication between two humans because they can speak faster than they can type. Conversational approach to use cases often have limits, though that doesn’t preclude AI technology from providing those interfaces, so long as they aren’t constrained to voice. A chat agent that pops up a calendar UI when scheduling is identified as the goal, for example.