Posted by mooreds 12 hours ago
How are they measuring the success rate? It seems like a project like this is a great time to dive into the problem and define the parameters of success. If only to inform how you design the ai’s presentation of the shop. Ie. how quickly does it get customer’s profile and discover their issue.
Thinking about my experiences with mechanics shops—with the exception of dealerships and larger operations—if you’re talking to a principal, the conversation is brief. It’s possible customers will respond positively if the bot is effective for scheduling and if the price communicated by phone, and the final price are somehow aligned to expectations.
Would love to see benchmarks on Mac Studio with its 7.4 GB/s SSD bandwidth — feels like the sweet spot for this technique.
However, does the regular "joe/jane" feel the same way? I imagine my mom or dad would most likely not notice or care if they did.
But a speech-to-text and text-to-speech system that I know is "understanding" me would be great rather than waiting music. The shop could even sell it as "As a small shop, most of our employees are busy fixing cars, so we are using AI to help with calls" (Although then people who are anxious about AI stealing jobs might hang up). The robot can ask me what I need, and then say "So for [this service], the price would be..." (to tell the caller what it has understood).
If the AI can even look at gaps in the shop's schedule and set an appointment time, the customer might even be happy that they just spent a minute on the phone instead of 10+...
A friend of mine worked for a call center that did car rentals, old people would call them and ask to rent a car.
Maybe the AI system should have "Press 1 to talk to AI, press 2 to leave a message" so experts like you can press 2.
Even if the new model that came out last week totally fixed all the problems this time for real, most people's experience with chatbots is that they are prone to misunderstanding or making false statements. "Hallucinations"
I have yet to experience any degree of confidence in any output from an LLM, so I'd rather leave the message. I don't know how common this point of view is.
I went through hell on a home remodel project 6 months ago around this stuff. I got a quote from a reputable plumber and went to schedule the rough-in session. An AI receptionist answered, got confused during the scheduling flow and could not understand my address, asking me to repeat it over and over. And it couldn't forward to me to human.
If I'm paying you tens of thousands of dollars for remodeling work, I damn well better be able to get in touch with you. I found a different contractor and never looked back.