This isn't to disparage the project - I think this sort of usage will become very common and a decent standard that produces good consumer surplus in terms of reduced costs etc. Especially impressive is that it's a DIY family-first implementation that seems to be working. It's great hacker work.
But be warned it will erode - in general - the luxury previously associated with your brand, and also turn some customers away entirely.
Bingo.
You can't get away with AI slop in a service oriented for wealthy customers.
The day my dealership starts answering me with AI they lose a customer 100%.
This solution screams "built by a tech bro with no idea about economics and marketing" which is the VC playbook into modernizing (and failing) businesses they don't understand.
OP's brother is by all accounts running a successful boutique workshop, but the various luxury annotations were completely unnecessary and just detract from the actual project. If they do want to lean into the luxury segment, being cheap with AI receptionists is not the way to go. They need to hire actual staff who has experience with HNW individuals.
I assume the Op, being a programmer and not a car mechanic, just assumed they mean the same thing.
The entire discussion here about how AI undercuts luxury brands has absolutely nothing to do with the actual post.
It would be somewhat odd to specialize in both American and European luxury cars. It'd be significantly less odd to service a RR and a BMW 3er next to each other.
A BMW owner has fussier standards (on average) than a Toyota owner. The 'higher touch' a service you're trying to provide, the less welcome these interventions will be. If there's a distinction between a normal-car garage and a luxury-car garage, this probably comes down to some sort of licensing or certification from those luxury brands. Seems plausible to me that luxury brand X could stipulate things like availability of human contact points.
Re: not being a car mechanic, it's true, but I'll have you know that I replaced my own blower motor a few months ago :)
This garage is for those older cars and has no connection to the actual manufacturers, so there is no licensing required.
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.
How much does it cost to have an outsourced receptionist? Even if it is 500 a month if we are really talking about thousands of dollars per month lost your ROI is still crazy.
If we take OP’s post at face value, presumably his brother is already at 100% capacity otherwise he wouldn’t be missing all these calls.
The model is exactly like Planet Fitness or similar gyms: It doesn't work if everyone visits at once, but you plan on most people using it once a week.
I don’t know if he’s “tested”, but he said he’s happy enough with the service. We don’t always have to AB test every possible option - sometimes good enough is good enough.
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+...
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.
Claude will hallucinate anyway, sometimes.
I don't think there's any way around this other than a cli or MCP that says "press the 'play prerecorded .WAV file button that says the brake repair service info and prices.'"
But maybe soon we will not even realise we speak to a robot, given the current speed of ai development.
I wonder how that will erode trust in calls. I moved from cold emailing and cold LinkedIn to cold calling because of the massive amounts of ai spam I have to compete with. But maybe cold calling will die soon as well if the robots emerge.
I appreciated your post and have some takeaways around text formatting for TTS in my own projects. Thanks!
Nothing pisses people off faster than calling up and getting put on the line with a robot. Like if we're thinking about this problem and how to solve it we can look at other examples like a website with a booking form,call the mechanics cell directly, hire a receptionist or worst case outsource the receptionist to a booking agency.
Like CMON this is the bare minimum here.
dismalpedigree•1h ago
wartywhoa23•1h ago