I believe customer support should actually be done by humans, as customers feel undervalued when they talk to scrappy voice agents, atleast make an effort to use good ones, so it tries to speak like humans

Voice agents are a royal pita. They have trouble with any kind of British regional accent, they are tiny models because anything usable is too slow, and they have zero capability because they'd probably mangle the toolcalls anyway.

Elevenlabs using a completely incapable voice agent for sales outreach made me wonder if they were actively trying to dissuade customers.

It feels like the sort of thing a disinterested engineer implemented to appease a manager fixated on the shiny.

It seems that low quality human customer support, or rather, no support at all, has been normal for some time. I don't enjoy talking to an AI, but if they are constructed to be efficiently helpful, I welcome it, grudgingly.

The real fun one is calling the utility company to report a downed line from a pole snapped in half and the bot agent doesn’t transfer you to a human even when you say “emergency”, “public hazard”, “utility pole obstructing a roadway”, “potential property damage your corporation will be liable for”, “immenient danger to life and limb” or any and all applicable keyword variations that might warrant humanly answering (and, to add insult to injury, cannot take a report of the event either but simply ends 10 of your calls in a row with a texted link to livechat with its textbot sibling). Like +−×÷ says nearby, it’s austerity.

AI is essentially austerity. We're going to get synthetic/inferior versions of many products and services, wherever using AI can make them cheaper to produce. Companies no longer fear losing customers because customers have proven so passive and docile as these forces have already started to accelerate over the last decade.

It’s part of the continual squeeze of more water out of the same rock

Something that was table stakes in the past would now be seen as crazy for a company to spend money on

Until it either gets good, or consumers revolt against it.