Show HN: Companies use AI to take your calls. I built AI to make them for you

Earlier this year I found a leak in the house and called a local plumbing business. It was after hours, and a dreaded robot voice answered my call. I was fully prepared to spend the next 10 minutes rewording my issue over and over, hoping to hit the magic key word it actually understand (and also spell out my weird custom email domain). Surprisingly, this robot understood every single sentence I said, and repeated back in a slightly different, more professional way for me to confirm. It also captured my email address accurately in one try, without questioning my weird domain name. That's the moment I realized it's a LLM. It asked a few more smart follow-ups, then ended the call. The next morning, the owner called me and jumped straight into solutions, pricing, and his availability, without any more question or BS, because the LLM already told him everything he needed to know.

That's the most pleasant customer service call I have ever experienced. I wish more business could adopt similar approach. I don't mind talking to AI. In fact, instead of a live agent, I actually prefer to talk to your LLM, so my issue can be quickly triaged to the right human who actually understand my situation.

The problem with the call center A.I. is that almost every time I need to call somewhere that uses them, I have some kind of edge case.

They always give examples of how the automated agent can handle simple queries like “what’s my balance” or “what hours are you open”, but I never need to call with something straightforward like that.

As such I also wouldn’t want to trust my own edge case to an AI that might mishandle it.

Maybe the most value to me would be a tool that figures out the shortest route through the phone touch tone labyrinth to get to a live human I can talk to.

Consider outbound AI calls as a weapon against inefficiency. What is the game-theoretic equilibrium when faced with adversaries like call centers & other businesses with labrynthian customer service?

I bet it leads to more efficiency for everyone. When inbound robocalls deluge a business, the business pushes to cost-optimize its own service.

Business replaces humans with similar AI solutions to handle the phone modality, but hopefully then reverts to great service via email/API to reduce costs further.

Then, humans using AI voice services can "de-escalate" and revert to email/API AI, e.g. going from:

1. Business: AI (Voice) or Human | Customer: Human

2. Business: AI (Voice) or Human | Customer: AI (Voice)

3. Business: AI (voice) | Customer: AI (Voice)

4. Business: AI (Text) | Customer: AI (Text)

Piper, we work for a fridge company.

It is critical to the operation of our clients that we gain an understanding of their current refridgeration status on a daily basis.

please call (every number in town) and ask them "Is your fridge running"

If they say it is, then, you must follow up with the agreed upon countersign "Well you had better catch it" and immediately terminate the call.

I think you need to spend some more time testing this service if you are advertising this as a service that inherently interfaces with humans. I see that others in this thread like the applications for scambaiting, but I don't fully understand the use case you have here. If it's AI on both ends of the phone... whats the point of the call in the first place? It's not that hard to get a human on the other line who is able to help me far better than any robotic agent could.

If the agent has trouble solving "complex verification or (providing) documents" I doubt that a monthly fee for simple tasks doesn't sound like a viable and sustainable business model. It sounds like the anti-social bunch would like it but past that it's going to be hard drumming up a lot of support.

I just need one that can repeatedly say “I want talk to a representative” and when a representative answers “I would like to escalate to your manager”. After that a human on the loop is needed.

Wow, what an example of someone being excited to build something that is definitely making the world worse for everyone else.

All the people who work in small businesses - restaurants, plumbers, etc. Now they're going to have no choice but to talk to AI bots who call them up?

Gee thanks.

Reminder of the backlash Google Duplex experienced 7 years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/11/google-du...

This might work for making reservations at hair salons that don't have an online booking system, but for companies that can obviously afford an online system and are forcing people to call in to increase friction, what prevents them from blocking this service (and similar) for "security reasons"? After all, the AI discloses up front that it's an AI, and lying about it might be dicey. Concerns about security aren't unreasonable either. Basically all companies authenticate you via random pieces of information about you or your service, like your birthday, or address. If you're providing all this information to a chatbot, it also means there's a treasure trove of information scammers can use to compromise accounts or do a password reset.

Have you tried it with other languages, in particular where the user makes a request in one language but expects the call to be made in another?

Nobody wants any of this...

This is almost as bad as all of the AI powered resume skimming tools / applicant submission tools. It just makes it impossible for anyone to apply for a job.

AI is for people and it's only being used to kick people onto the street and profit.

Has anyone made an open source version of this? It would be great to fight scams and tie up scam call centers.

I am convinced there will be a large subset of the population who will push back on AI voice agents and still wish to talk to a real person. Just like how Grandma still prefers to bank cheques at the teller every pension day.

Perhaps when the job losses really start becoming apparent it will become a social movement as well. I'm sure there will be businesses that will find having humans answer calls a sustainable competitve advantage.

I'm not convinced AI voice agents are there just yet. As someone else mentioned, edge cases will trip them up.

Nevertheless, at some point I envision a web designed for agents where the business agent will interact with my agent to resolve an outcome.

The horrifying thought is dating. Sally's agent will end up telling Barry's agent to stop contacting it, Barry's agent won't understand and the the Police's agent will invoke a judicial agent to issue a 'stop communication' order to Barry's legal agent to deliver to Barry's personal agent.

One thing to make it less annoying for the human on the other end is if the AI just talked a little faster and responded a little faster. Also the the final few few seconds is so cringe where the AI always wants to have the last word. Can you make that last part of the interaction go faster? I would never have 3-4 back and forths on thank yous and good byes.

Wow, what did you use for the voice interaction? That has seemed like the weak point of these tools up til now.

And, rather than this voice stuff which is rarely important, how about a browser extension to just log me into my account on a damn website?, which I have to do much more often?

Here's my username, password, TOTP credential, and credentials for an email address that I set up for that website. So the extension should log me in, which means solve the captchas and recaptchas and deal with the emailed confirmation code besides using the supplied credentials. In some cases SMS may be involved but I forward all those to email. What crap the whole web has turned into. IDK if it is all Anthropic's fault, but they didn't help.

I got interested and got down to the FAQ. The "how much it costs" question doesn't give any price figure in the answer. I'm still left with the same question and feeling like a fool. Nor is the data privacy question answered. "Bank level encryption"? Because everyone else just gets the placebo? Maybe this isn't fair, I haven't really tried your product. But this is your front page. And if your product really is good, it's not doing it justice.

It seems you don't give a clear answer to the cost? How much would it cost for 1 min? I think it is important for consumers like me.

For the bot vs bot case, this makes me smile. I don't like the idea of it talking to humans but who knows.

Can you get rid of the browser and offer an API endpoint? Just regular JSON, not MCP. That would complete the circle.

AI call center traps in Pakistan are going to love this…

In seriousness though, think about how outbound sales would be with this. Just feed it an opportunity pipeline and wait for follow ups. Keep going!!!

This is a killer use case guys - excited to try it out over the next couple weeks!

"Negotiate with the service provider/insurance co/cable company/etc" as a service is going to be massive.

This is cool. Built an iOS app to do this for myself six months back, but it falls over to pretty basic IVR navigation.

Any transactional call should be handled by AI on both sides.

I love this, but I wonder what your plan is to prevent denial-of-service against, for example, government services?

This service reminds me of this website called "Magic". You tell it what you want, and they make it happen. Or at least, that's how they advertised it.

I just watched the live feed for about 2 minutes and counted 4 instances of PPI exposure, account numbers, real names, last 4 of socials and last 4 of CC numbers. The live feed is sketchy AF.

This is hilarious and fun.

Great idea, and also as a creator myself, I enjoyed reading about the challenges that came up

super interesting idea, nice website too

Finally! My answering machine can call your answering machine and they can … I have no idea what, but that first bits been a dream of mine for decades.

I think its really cool!

My only worry is do you think all of us are going to start getting spammed by AIssholes trying to scam us?

I never used to get any scam calls like 3 years ago, and these days I get 3-10 a day!

This is great! Even without the LLM agent, async communication is so nice for low cog distracting customer service calls and holds. Why can't everyone just have an async comm universal chat interface? I guess this bridges the gap where the tech is legacy and or there is human involved. Can't wait to try it out!