this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
320 points (98.5% liked)
Technology
78154 readers
1397 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm surprised this is news. Automated phone menus have been common for decades. If an automated system could solve your problem, then you would have used the website and not had to wait. The only reason to call is if you need a human to help.
Now they're offering the same thing, except you can't just type 123whatever to get back to where you were.
The thing is that customers wouldn't dislike dealing with AI in customer service if it actually worked.
It is like a self-service checkout. There is no problem with it, unless an item doesn't want to scan, or an error appears where an employee is needed.
Think the issue is either a self service portal that works in very predictable way (like the self checkout) or a human to deal with nuance.
To the extent an LLM might be useful, it's likely blocked from doing so because the operator doesn't trust it either.
The biggest annoyance is that the LLM support tends to more aggressively refuse to bring a human in.
I wonder if it'll be just like those self service checkouts — literally no improvements for 20 years.
The biggest improvement on the user side was to stop trying to weigh the bagging area to prevent loss.
The newer machine vision based systems are less likely to screw up. "Unexpected item in bagging area" was an almost universal experience, nowadays I have only been flagged for human review once.
Also, one store I was at just lets you put your items under a camera without finding barcodes, and you just confirm the identified products.