- “I can say, ‘you’re a piece of s—!’ But if I say it with an upward fluctuation at the end of the sentence, the AI likes it."
I have a 3CX phone system. I am certified to design them. It's perfect for what I need to do, also grossly outsized. I can handle 16 simultaneous calls but the system can be built out to thousands. It was designed for call centers, can also be used for hotels. I can put up a big-screen leaderboard of which of my top 50 agents for converting calls and I can arrange wake-up calls and room service.
I don't do any of that but that's okay, the system is extensible and deeply customizable. It has API fingers into Salesforce, it has fingers into Zoho, it has fingers into Hubspot. It speaks to Google very easily - the fanciest thing I have it do is take calls that are routed to "page", have the system phone-pool all of my midwives, have it record their message, have it send that message to Google, have Google convert it from speech to text and then have the phone system simultaneously email a monitored inbox and text everyone in the pool so that my midwives get not one, not two, but three independent notifications that someone called and get a written summary of what they called about so they can look up their notes before they call the patient back. I can also "barge, listen and whisper": we have used this in limited quantities when we want one of our students to learn how to communicate with patients while having a midwife supervise and advise without the patient knowing our student has training wheels.
So I could build this. me. It'd be easy. I'd route any phone call to the google speech-to-text as a "whisper" on every conversation. I'd take the output of that speech-to-text and feed it into chatGPT. I'd need the training data? but it sure as shit sounds like HomeServe USA just fuckin' rolled on it and is training as they go.
Ultimately? It sucks working in a call center. It's the sort of job that you'd like to automate out of existence. But as with most automation, it's gonna be shitty for a while and the people who experience the worst of it are gonna be the people it's replacing.
- “I don’t think anything is off limits because we have to enable our customers to transact in whatever means they’re most comfortable,” said Mr. Rusin, the CEO. “So my philosophy is—automate everything. The choice will ultimately reside with the consumer.”
Call centers are high-turnover shitholes. They've never not been. But there are also a half million people in the USA - 15 million worldwide - who rely on them to earn a living. And their jobs are going to get worse before they disappear - Comcast's AI is hilarious because the more you shout at it the faster you get a human. You can literally cut your wait time in half if you shout "NO FUCK YOU LEMME TALK TO A GODDAMN HUMAN" and then the human gets scored on how chipper they are while eating your shit.
The ultimate goal of any call center operation has been to reduce headcount to zero. AI is not yet capable of doing that? But that won't stop companies from trying.
If AI makes your job easier now, AI will make your job extinct later... and it will do it in an excruciating fashion.
