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.

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.

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.

That said, a good service writer is worth their weight in gold. Also, they are typically going to be the person you end up selling the business to when you retire. Most mechanics aren't good enough at the business side of things to actually buy, but service writers are.

Christ just hire some local teenager or whomever. There's people who will work for minimum wage.

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.

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.

Why should people be impressed by this?

Assisted suicide? Handjobs?

Is Walmart bound by anything an employee says? Should it be?

If my mechanic answered with an LLM I’d take my car elsewhere.

I was on the wrong end of some (presumably) LLM powered support via ebay's chatbot earlier this week and it was a completely terrible experience. But that's because ebay haven't done a very good job, not because the idea of LLM-powered support is fundamentally flawed.

When implemented well it can work great.

More generally, when done well, RAG is really great. I was recently trying out a new bookkeeping software (manager.io), and really appreciated the chatbot they've added to their website. Basically, instead of digging through the documentation and forums to try to find answers to questions, I can just ask. It's great.

Unfortunately, the human behind it was not technically-savvy enough to clarify a point, so I had to either accept the LLM response, or quit trying. But at least it saved me the time from trying to explain to a level 1 support person that I knew exactly what I was asking about.

Just to be clear, the LLM assistant could be a great supplement to the app for people with disabilities or those who struggle with phone apps for whatever reason, but for most people the LLM phone call seems worse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJVSDjRXVoo

If I had to call four different places and spend five minutes on the phone with each shop, that'd eat up my entire lunch time.

If I were already an existing customer and just wanted to schedule an oil change, it'd be fine, though I'd probably just schedule on the website anyway. I'm really only going to call in if I have an unusual circumstance and actually need to speak with someone.

For example, even if it shows a boost of $100,000 per month in revenue. It could likely have been achieved with a shared virtual assistant / receptionist for about $200-1000 per month (depending on exactly call volumes).

So really, the revenue was already lost and going forward you’re just deciding to capture it. You've created a more complicated mouse trap than what was already available to you. The difference is saving a couple hundred dollars of labor less whatever your AI/tech costs are. I’d still go the human route because it’s more future proof and if this is a luxury service, human service is always going to feel more luxurious.

I wish her luck though, things get much murkier as you start stacking more intents and it is no longer just a chatbot that funnels to text to speech.

People also assume "AI" is a miracle worker now so they will be pissed when they say "Yeah just email me at charlezmcnaughton@gmail.com" and it spells it completely wrong. Like there is no reality where a transcriber is going to reliably transcribe most emails correctly, so for shit where it is vital to be 100% accurate (email, name, etc.) you have a battle on your hands.

side: I found Anthropic to be prohibitively slow for live voice chat. I was getting response times in the 1-2s range which when combined with the other parts of generating a response led to 2.5s+ silent periods before responding. Groq is insanely fast if you want pure performance from an LLM. Like <200ms to complete a response.

This is such a rorschach test for AI pessimism and optimism.

Then you tell it to just not answer off the wall questions etc. and if you are using a good model it will resist casual attempts.

I don't see being able to ask nonsense questions as being a big deal for an average small business. But you could put a guardrail model in front to make it a lot harder if it was worth it.

But if you say "talk to a manager" it'll still force a human to answer, which is the only thing I ever do.

> When a caller asks something that isn’t in the knowledge base, the AI doesn’t guess. It tells the caller it doesn’t have that information, asks for their name and a good callback number, and saves that to MongoDB. Dane gets a list of callbacks to return — no lost leads.

> The escalation path is not an edge case — it’s a core feature.

I haven't been a service advisor before, but if it's anything like working the phones at other retailers, you get a lot of the same questions over and over again, and a bot could certainly answer those things correctly.

I think this is a bit of an overstatement. The dev states it’s her brother’s business, and one can assume he’s asked her to help him out.

Getting the service to be 100% perfect is of course a near impossible challenge, but that’s most likely not the business owner’s concern — they simply want a way to avoid totally losing business. If the service can convert even 10% of customers with a rough quote and timeline it’s most likely useful.

If you see a value need for a receptionist, and you suspect that it is costing you thousands of dollars, wouldn't a normal response be, "I should think about hiring someone," rather than turning to an unproven, untested solution like this and leaving your business at the hands of how correct it is? I just cannot understand this line of thinking at all, reaching for a tool that would probably do a worse job than a human would do. Is it not wanting to hire? Not wanting to manage? Hype cycle? Where does this urge come from?

If you are already drowning in work, make everything expensive enough to cover the errors. You always have some % chance to lose money with each customer. If the estimate is to high one can give a discount afterwards.

Could play the call on the speaker and decide if it is worth dropping your tools and walking to the phone. Those 10-20 daily marketeers are definitely not it.

Every single phone call to a business will be having this in the back office within 5 to 10 years.

This doesn't need an LLM. It can be and has already been done for many years with a simple TTS.

He knows the prices and the parts, there isn't enough calls to hire a receptionist, and voice controlled systems are quite easy to make. If you use local voice recognition model, you could even mention neural networks in a write up, it's a win-win

And it's quite cheaper too, I'd estimate around 200$-300$ for a room. Most of it for a good microphone.

When you get right down to it, most people have never had much reason outside school to exercise their writing skills all that much. They certainly aren't likely to have the time or inclination to develop their own taste or voice, or recognize the value in that. So when LLMs come along, why wouldn't the average person see an opportunity to write "well"? They probably don't see it as obviously generated (hence her polite disclaimer) or even as bad writing.