1. There are already apps/websites as an alternative for CSAs. Most of the time I have to call someone its because I couldn't do what I wanted through those portals, so adding an AI agent to the chain is unlikely to prevent an immediate escalation to a human.
2. How much money are you really going to save this way? CSAs aren't high salary employees. Sure you might need a bunch of them, but we've already seen that brand loyalty erodes quickly when you remove the human touch. United/Spirit airlines offer opposing views on the cut your way to profitability perspective.
3. "Pay only for good outcomes" isn't going to last.
4. Are agents good enough to even do this? Yes, the cherrypicked examples sound good, but... I just know how well coding agents really work and my only experiences with voice agents in the wild have been very poor so far.
This doesn't matter. Another comment cuts to the quick of it: "If you (like me) are hearing about this for the first time, Bret Taylor is the co-founder.".
This is funding for established tech businessmen; what the business claims to do doesn't matter beyond having "AI" in it.
If you (like me) are hearing about this for the first time, Bret Taylor is the co-founder.
> Bret is Co-Founder of Sierra. Most recently, he served as Co-CEO of Salesforce. Prior to Salesforce, Bret founded Quip and was CTO of Facebook. He started his career at Google, where he co-created Google Maps. Bret serves on the board of OpenAI.
It's always interesting seeing how HN reacts to AI CX (as someone who works in this space). Yes, the tech savvy crowd loves to say how they always ask for a human and love old school phone trees
in reality 50-80% of callers come in with easily answerable questions because they don't know how to nav the website and prefer to ask in natural language
The vast majority of callers call in to resolve their issue, and most don't care if they are speaking to a bot because they just want their issue fixed. Agents (if implemented well) are an order of magnitude more effective at resolving issues compared to a call centre worker who is reading off a script and churn within 9 months
There's also the 2nd order effs of making CX cheap. before, there is the perverse incentive of companies trying to keep you off support because each call costs them way more than the value they get. if your cost per call drops 100x you can invest in turning a cost centre into a revenue driver (+ a better experience)
I remember waiting for uber next to him in SF one night 10+ years ago. This dude must be the son of some mafia boss or some shit and have some crazy blackmail to raise billions for companies that are copies of products where he’s the 12th company doing the same thing.. never turning a profit or anything and yet raising ever more money. doesn’t make sense otherwise
No mafia ties needed, just your regular Security State plant. From here [1] (I'm sure there's also an official link for it, can't be bothered to check):
> OpenAI has appointed Paul M. Nakasone, a retired general of the US Army and a former head of the National Security Agency (NSA), to its board of directors, the company announced on Thursday.
and the money quote:
> “Artificial intelligence has the potential to have huge positive impacts on people’s lives, but it can only meet this potential if these innovations are securely built and deployed,“ board chair Bret Taylor said in a statement. “General Nakasone’s unparalleled experience in areas like cybersecurity will help guide OpenAI in achieving its mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”
I think this is generally a good product because businesses that previously had zero phone support can now afford to have something. However, the hard work of actually building out the various workflows and decision trees is not automatic. Previously, a call center employee would receive abuse from a caller for being unempowered to make a decision. Instead, an LLM will perform the same role.
Ideally, businesses will escalate to an empowered human for all undefined parts of the flowchart. In practice, I truly hope it will be better than the current pre-recorded phone tree system that leads to a human following a script.
I personally only call support because a fix is not available through an organization's website.
As a tech literate customer, my willingness to entertain AI chatbot decision trees is rock bottom. I have no patience to try to find the correct incantation to actually fix something (or the, “before I transfer you to a person, let me try to help you first”).
For myself - and admittedly maybe I’m just far out on the long tail of customers - I think these need to be treated like self driving cars, where 98% of the way there just isn’t good enough to cut it for me.
Last time I tried using real-time chat support for a technical issue, I spent 30 minutes explaining my problem to a human only to find out they were a sales rep whose only solution was to sell me more services. Once I said I didn't want that, they transferred me to tech support who gaslit me and left me on read long enough to make my session time out.
I think of support channels are just there to deflect customers and not really support anything. An AI bot will have infinite patience for that kind of interaction. Empowerment is never part of the equation.
With advances in AI you would've thought the priority would be on automating as much as possible of the non-human facing work and double-down on meaningful customer relationships - but no.
Their secret is that they have hoards of fake AI Customers who will call into their client's AI Customer Support and respond to surveys saying they were extremely happy with the support, so the client has to pay for perfect simulated outcomes.
This isn’t specific to AI this is just the dark arts startup valuation playbook. AI extension of gaming the metric “what is the ratio of “active” accounts to validated human daus”
AI support generally sucks but I actually wouldn't mind if everyone used it for the initial call routing portion. Beats an IVR tree or waiting for someone to just redirect your call to the real queue.
I respectfully disagree with the initial routing point. I very strongly prefer a traditional tree to “I’m your voice assistant! In a few words, tell me how I can help!”.
The tree is structured and gives me an immediate sense of how to map my task to the support offering. If I’m calling, I probably have an issue that I can’t self-serve resolve via the customer portal or whatever, so walking the tree lets me get an idea of who can help.
The “voice assistant” gives me no sense of what the system is capable of or how to take advantage of those capabilities. So I’m left guessing at phrases or functions based off of the assumption that there’s still some kind of tree-like structure that’s been abstracted away. Same outcome, more cognitive overhead, plus I usually have to shout in my best William … Shatner … impression to get it to understand me.
but even a simple impl to answer questions can knock out like 50% of callers who are tech-illiterate at 100x cheaper cost, it's just strictly better economics and better for those customers
I broadly agree though I have noticed that it seems to be getting a bit better. I hate how patronizing pretty much every LLM tends to be, but at least I've noticed now that the AI support is better at figuring out what it is I actually want.
That said, my life hack for these things to get escalated to a human is to just keep saying or typing curse words. Usually that triggers a "connect to human" flow. I can't promise it will always work, but I can say it has worked every time I have tried it.
Voice agents in customer support is an extremely crowded market. Seems like Sierra is taking a considerable lead.
I don't know much about their product offerings, but I was doing some speech-to-text work and came across https://research.sierra.ai/mubench/ for comparing current models. It felt fairly thoughtful, particularly in regards to coming up with better benchmarking metrics than word error rate.
Why would we be ashamed of that? The early Leisure Suit Larry games are a lot of fun; yeah the humor is crass and low-brow, but that's sort of the charm. It's meant to be silly.
That's because you were probably the right age to know the answers to the age control questions, and I was at an age where I could only download them from a BBS.
I actually didn't play the game until I was fifteen, in ~2006. I didn't know the answers, but I found out you can just hit ctrl-alt-x and skip the questions.
I wish I had known that! Guessing and trying the answers worked too, given no internet and only having a faint idea that "age control" was not in fact part of the game itself. I learned that Bonnie and Ronnie was not in fact a thing. What is "Bonnie & Clyde"? Eh, probably some band name was my guess. It took some patience, but since it was one of 3 games I had somehow acquired (how exactly is a lost memory), I had to get past the starting quiz.
Since I also barely spoke English at the time, I got stuck in the game itself pretty soon anyway. Didn't manage to figure out how to say some things the right way. "Ken sent me" is the last thing I remember from it... and I never had any idea that the game was rather dirty until much later.
That series is over, and the magical feeling of being in an open-ended fantasy world is really hard to replicate when we're not kids anymore. Loom is another game that gave me that feeling.
But there was one idea in QfG that I wish more games would use. Namely, designing three different solutions for every problem the player is facing. This idea works so well to create a sense of possibility in a game, I don't know why it got forgotten.
It’s interesting that the example interaction they use on their homepage is a no-friction example that can be handled without an AI chatbot. Why not something more complex that properly demonstrates the value?
I don't get this for several reasons:
1. There are already apps/websites as an alternative for CSAs. Most of the time I have to call someone its because I couldn't do what I wanted through those portals, so adding an AI agent to the chain is unlikely to prevent an immediate escalation to a human.
2. How much money are you really going to save this way? CSAs aren't high salary employees. Sure you might need a bunch of them, but we've already seen that brand loyalty erodes quickly when you remove the human touch. United/Spirit airlines offer opposing views on the cut your way to profitability perspective.
3. "Pay only for good outcomes" isn't going to last.
4. Are agents good enough to even do this? Yes, the cherrypicked examples sound good, but... I just know how well coding agents really work and my only experiences with voice agents in the wild have been very poor so far.
This doesn't matter. Another comment cuts to the quick of it: "If you (like me) are hearing about this for the first time, Bret Taylor is the co-founder.".
This is funding for established tech businessmen; what the business claims to do doesn't matter beyond having "AI" in it.
They seem to have no shortage of big name customers.
If you (like me) are hearing about this for the first time, Bret Taylor is the co-founder.
> Bret is Co-Founder of Sierra. Most recently, he served as Co-CEO of Salesforce. Prior to Salesforce, Bret founded Quip and was CTO of Facebook. He started his career at Google, where he co-created Google Maps. Bret serves on the board of OpenAI.
The coauthor (and presumably cofounder) is Clay Bavor. He's a Google exec who was the face of their VR efforts when he was there.
can't believe Bret's bio doesn't mention friendfeed!
It's always interesting seeing how HN reacts to AI CX (as someone who works in this space). Yes, the tech savvy crowd loves to say how they always ask for a human and love old school phone trees
in reality 50-80% of callers come in with easily answerable questions because they don't know how to nav the website and prefer to ask in natural language
The vast majority of callers call in to resolve their issue, and most don't care if they are speaking to a bot because they just want their issue fixed. Agents (if implemented well) are an order of magnitude more effective at resolving issues compared to a call centre worker who is reading off a script and churn within 9 months
There's also the 2nd order effs of making CX cheap. before, there is the perverse incentive of companies trying to keep you off support because each call costs them way more than the value they get. if your cost per call drops 100x you can invest in turning a cost centre into a revenue driver (+ a better experience)
You disagreed with the hivemind so you got flagged.
I remember waiting for uber next to him in SF one night 10+ years ago. This dude must be the son of some mafia boss or some shit and have some crazy blackmail to raise billions for companies that are copies of products where he’s the 12th company doing the same thing.. never turning a profit or anything and yet raising ever more money. doesn’t make sense otherwise
hes board chair of openai and is ex co-ceo of salesforce, ex cto of facebook, can get a meeting with any exec in F500...
their moat is distribution
Is that really a moat though or something like a firehose of gasoline?
No mafia ties needed, just your regular Security State plant. From here [1] (I'm sure there's also an official link for it, can't be bothered to check):
> OpenAI has appointed Paul M. Nakasone, a retired general of the US Army and a former head of the National Security Agency (NSA), to its board of directors, the company announced on Thursday.
and the money quote:
> “Artificial intelligence has the potential to have huge positive impacts on people’s lives, but it can only meet this potential if these innovations are securely built and deployed,“ board chair Bret Taylor said in a statement. “General Nakasone’s unparalleled experience in areas like cybersecurity will help guide OpenAI in achieving its mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/anime_titties/comments/1dh4wx4/form...
I think this is generally a good product because businesses that previously had zero phone support can now afford to have something. However, the hard work of actually building out the various workflows and decision trees is not automatic. Previously, a call center employee would receive abuse from a caller for being unempowered to make a decision. Instead, an LLM will perform the same role.
Ideally, businesses will escalate to an empowered human for all undefined parts of the flowchart. In practice, I truly hope it will be better than the current pre-recorded phone tree system that leads to a human following a script.
I personally only call support because a fix is not available through an organization's website.
I don't think businesses that previously had zero phone support can afford Sierra.
They seem to be a "for pricing, let's go play C-level golf" type of company.
All of big tech other than apple has zero phone support unless you pay for enterprise support subscriptions.
As a tech literate customer, my willingness to entertain AI chatbot decision trees is rock bottom. I have no patience to try to find the correct incantation to actually fix something (or the, “before I transfer you to a person, let me try to help you first”).
For myself - and admittedly maybe I’m just far out on the long tail of customers - I think these need to be treated like self driving cars, where 98% of the way there just isn’t good enough to cut it for me.
An AI chatbot is orders of magnitude to get the answer "you cannot be helped" than wading through every possibility in a phone tree.
This is my feeling 100%. If I'm on the phone, it's as a last resort because all the other prescribed pathways have failed.
AWS can do this out of the box
Strong disagree here. AWS can give you the tools to build yourself but not an out of the box all in one solution for this problem.
Last time I tried using real-time chat support for a technical issue, I spent 30 minutes explaining my problem to a human only to find out they were a sales rep whose only solution was to sell me more services. Once I said I didn't want that, they transferred me to tech support who gaslit me and left me on read long enough to make my session time out.
I think of support channels are just there to deflect customers and not really support anything. An AI bot will have infinite patience for that kind of interaction. Empowerment is never part of the equation.
So we're supposed to believe that removing humans from customer support will lead to better outcomes?
> Ensure you only pay for the value Sierra delivers with outcome-based pricing.
Yeah... that won't last.
With advances in AI you would've thought the priority would be on automating as much as possible of the non-human facing work and double-down on meaningful customer relationships - but no.
Their secret is that they have hoards of fake AI Customers who will call into their client's AI Customer Support and respond to surveys saying they were extremely happy with the support, so the client has to pay for perfect simulated outcomes.
ai skeptic fanfic evolves in fascinating ways every day
This isn’t specific to AI this is just the dark arts startup valuation playbook. AI extension of gaming the metric “what is the ratio of “active” accounts to validated human daus”
just wait until you read the ai "optimist" fanfic
true. we'll see how many ai cos become profit printers a few years from now
AI customer support is trash and everyone hates it , but it makes the Wall St numbers go up, so it's a good thing.
AI support generally sucks but I actually wouldn't mind if everyone used it for the initial call routing portion. Beats an IVR tree or waiting for someone to just redirect your call to the real queue.
I respectfully disagree with the initial routing point. I very strongly prefer a traditional tree to “I’m your voice assistant! In a few words, tell me how I can help!”.
The tree is structured and gives me an immediate sense of how to map my task to the support offering. If I’m calling, I probably have an issue that I can’t self-serve resolve via the customer portal or whatever, so walking the tree lets me get an idea of who can help.
The “voice assistant” gives me no sense of what the system is capable of or how to take advantage of those capabilities. So I’m left guessing at phrases or functions based off of the assumption that there’s still some kind of tree-like structure that’s been abstracted away. Same outcome, more cognitive overhead, plus I usually have to shout in my best William … Shatner … impression to get it to understand me.
The other side is if you already know the tree you can automate dialing the right tones to get you to where you need if you call it often enough.
ime its very implementation dependent
but even a simple impl to answer questions can knock out like 50% of callers who are tech-illiterate at 100x cheaper cost, it's just strictly better economics and better for those customers
I broadly agree though I have noticed that it seems to be getting a bit better. I hate how patronizing pretty much every LLM tends to be, but at least I've noticed now that the AI support is better at figuring out what it is I actually want.
That said, my life hack for these things to get escalated to a human is to just keep saying or typing curse words. Usually that triggers a "connect to human" flow. I can't promise it will always work, but I can say it has worked every time I have tried it.
at first I thought Sierra games was making a comeback...
a new Space Quest is worth every penny!
Voice agents in customer support is an extremely crowded market. Seems like Sierra is taking a considerable lead.
I don't know much about their product offerings, but I was doing some speech-to-text work and came across https://research.sierra.ai/mubench/ for comparing current models. It felt fairly thoughtful, particularly in regards to coming up with better benchmarking metrics than word error rate.
Wonder how much compute is essentially spent on conversations that end up with the human asking "Let me speak with a human"
Is their tech unique or do they just have the F500 relationships?
This is sad. These jobs should go to someone in a poor town in the Midwest.
Why should they?
maybe in an ironic unforeseen twist they are....to people running datacenters there?
how many jobs does a data center provide compared to a call center? It's gotta be like 10-50 per DC I would think, for locals anyway
Yet another AI company where the logo follows the butthole convergence rule [0] ?
As an aside, my favorite Sierra Entertainment logo version is probably the 1983-1993 version [1]. I think the design still holds up even today.
[0] https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-butt...
[1] https://logos-world.net/sierra-entertainment-logo/
Damn, for just a moment I thought the Sierra Online company was coming back. I want a new official Quest for Glory game.
Assume Sierra owners are too young to know what Sierra games means. I was absolutely obsessed with their logo (1) at school time.
1. https://preview.redd.it/remember-sierra-games-1979-2008-they...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMQi7olp-tw
It occurs to me just now that the logo is in fact a mountain and not a breaching Orca whale like I'd always thought
isn't it the yomesite's half dome, on their logo?
Wow seeing that hit me surprisingly hard. Such good times
The Psygnosis logo similarly has a special place in my memory
It's simply the best looking game company logo for me.
Capstone - the pinnacle of entertainment
Probably many are ashamed to remember that the name Sierra is also associated with the Leisure Suit Larry (1) games.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_Suit_Larry
Why would we be ashamed of that? The early Leisure Suit Larry games are a lot of fun; yeah the humor is crass and low-brow, but that's sort of the charm. It's meant to be silly.
That's because you were probably the right age to know the answers to the age control questions, and I was at an age where I could only download them from a BBS.
I actually didn't play the game until I was fifteen, in ~2006. I didn't know the answers, but I found out you can just hit ctrl-alt-x and skip the questions.
Take a look at how it was in 1995. InterAction (Sierra Online) magazine [PDF copy]. Article about the Larry 6 release on page 50.
https://sierrachest.com/gfx/Publications/IA/IA_8_1/023_Inter...
I wish I had known that! Guessing and trying the answers worked too, given no internet and only having a faint idea that "age control" was not in fact part of the game itself. I learned that Bonnie and Ronnie was not in fact a thing. What is "Bonnie & Clyde"? Eh, probably some band name was my guess. It took some patience, but since it was one of 3 games I had somehow acquired (how exactly is a lost memory), I had to get past the starting quiz.
Since I also barely spoke English at the time, I got stuck in the game itself pretty soon anyway. Didn't manage to figure out how to say some things the right way. "Ken sent me" is the last thing I remember from it... and I never had any idea that the game was rather dirty until much later.
What was wrong with their logo? Or did you mean to type "obsessed"?
Obsessed, correct.
One of the most beautiful game logos, going back to the early nineties.
At least I'm not the only one:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Entertainment
I was about to post a snarky comment along the lines of "Sierra? The publishers of Homeworld and Homeworld 2?"
Every single word domain seems to have become some new AI company.
I still get briefly confused when I see a post on here about X, only to realize they're talking about Twitter, and not the display server.
There are 26 letters and millions of words; people should choose other ones.
and not only one https://www.cyera.com/press-releases/cyera-raises-400m-to-me...
Likewise, I was hoping for more Space Quest :(
Not exactly the same, but SpaceVenture finally released at the end of last year: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1374960/SpaceVenture/
This looks great but wow, what a hilariously shameless knock-off! :D
Use plunger.
That series is over, and the magical feeling of being in an open-ended fantasy world is really hard to replicate when we're not kids anymore. Loom is another game that gave me that feeling.
But there was one idea in QfG that I wish more games would use. Namely, designing three different solutions for every problem the player is facing. This idea works so well to create a sense of possibility in a game, I don't know why it got forgotten.
Me too, now I am suddenly wanting Space Quest 2026!
Space Quest IV: Roger?
Same. A new Gabriel Knight would be fun!
Oh yeah! For some reason I was convinced that Gabriel Knight was LucasArts but nope, just misremembered.
Gabriel Knight was awesome, I'd love a new one.
So you want to be a hero?
Well, if MicroProse could do it...
A new Lode Runner when
EDIT: holy shit I stand corrected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lode_Runner
It’s interesting that the example interaction they use on their homepage is a no-friction example that can be handled without an AI chatbot. Why not something more complex that properly demonstrates the value?