My initial project will be to replace my aging parent's and my home FreePBX IVR with something a bit more useful. At the moment it requests you press 1 to make the phones ring and that drops pretty much all unwanted calls but that will soon be automatically defeated.

I do also have some rather more commercial ideas but baby steps. Mind you a RPi based drop in box with a decent auto attendant for say £100 hardware, open source software and some fettling time seems a pretty good opportunity. You could go for somewhat cheaper hardware. The UK is being migrated away from copper A and B wires to what is called SOGEA and/or FTTP. Basically its going to be all VoIP for telephony from pretty much now on. The good old days of an analogue handset that is powered by the line will mostly go away within a few years. On the bright side our signalling was bloody weird and SIP is nearly eternal!

We’ve also built in Human-in-the-Loop support so a person can step in anytime the AI falls short. More on that here: https://docs.videosdk.live/ai_agents/human-in-the-loop

It’s about shifting roles, not eliminating them and doing it responsibly.

My reaction was slightly different: how many companies selling this (meager) service at a high premium will go out of business now that it's free/open?

However what will actually happen is society will use these people to brick lay for houses, care for the elderly or something else. That's honestly a good thing for society as we have massive shortages there, and not a bad thing for the individuals as a whole.

big question will be availability of humans as fall back that actually have some skills

In my experience AI based CS agents are not deployed to actually provide customer service. That does not differ too much from the "old school" phone call centre with scripts etc.

Anyway, you can run a phone exchange on a RPi. My favorite anti marketing thing is a simple IVR: "If you think we would like to speak to press 1, if you are making an unsolicited sales call, then hang up". However, that will soon be defeated (but not yet, I'm happy to report). Eventually, I will need the machine to take calls for me. For that I will probably need a system like OPs.

When it comes to telephony, the biggest issue is who pays for the call. For me it is the caller. For some (US int al) it might be the recipient. The only "cost" to me is my time to take a call.

Now, back to call centres. You want problem resolution and they want call stats. There is a bit of a disconnect. Power companies and other utilities all claim to be competitive but nearly everywhere that is bollocks.

In the UK we have privatised water companies, covering regions but how on earth can I, within the purvey of Wessex water, get my water from say Scotland. Ironically enough SSSE (one of the S is Scottish) is the local area electrical provider. I can choose my electic and gas supplier but not my water supplier. How on earth is that a free market? Well it might be but not for me, the consumer. I understand that ISP provision in the US is pretty similar to our water company situation: you have a choice of one.

So, I think, that the problem here is not the AI or the medium or whatever but something far deeper and far more entrenched.

Your shitty customer experience is because the status quo is say 50-100 years old and nothing to do with some nerdy new technology.

It doesn't have to be inevitable...but the track record of big corps and their view of customer-facing departments as being loss-centers instead of being directly and indirectly connected to retaining and bringing in revenue doesn't leave me optimistic.

For small-to-medium businesses...it just depends. SMBs are typically more sensitive to the opinions and sentiments of their customers (and also bad press) and also typically have workers with relatively more institutional and tacit knowledge compared to big corporations. So I would like to believe more of them will be much more methodical and intentional about their approaches (especially with cautionary tales like Klarna and DuoLingo). There's no reason for any business to ruin their customer service with AI other than impulsive and/or poorly executed decisions being made out of some mix of fear, hype, greed, or willful ignorance. Entirely avoidable.

The bot will have more info and doesn't degrade every few years (as nobody is there to be replaced and lose the tribal knowledge that makes a business run).

It also.. is just a dumb bot and _only_ knows what it is told.

Uh, so your own attempt at a similar project didn't work and was a terrible experience and the fundamentals of the system are specific and still require babysitting. But it's inevitable (???) that it'll get better... and this improvement only MIGHT make things better for people, only some of the time?

I'm not alone in being unimpressed by this, right? Nothing about what was written here sounds... good? Even the most optimistic part is "well, maybe it might be good, sometimes". Like, this sucks. This is a bad system that doesn't work and makes things worse.