Q: Why are we building out this new technology?
A: Because we can.
Better Q: What good will this new technology bring to society?
Voice AI and Voice assistant (also assistance) press releases keep coming my way. They extol how realistic the conversations with (nonhuman) voice AI are becoming. Companies will be able to use these more extensively for customer support.
I understand how challenging finding employees for this sort of work has become. Especially that they would like to be paid. The operations expenditure for a voice assistant is quite low after a modest capital expenditure. Makes it attractive to MBAs.
Just today I was trying to find the source of a problem between my WordPress site (with WP Engine) and Cloudflare. Three weeks ago a DNS update at WPEngine (I think) shut down my site. I searched around looking for an answer. Updated some DNS settings on Cloudflare, and my site was back up.
But there were still little problems. Now my site is showing no statistics. Went to WPEngine. It had forgotten who I was. (Another story). Went to Cloudflare. Checked DNS settings versus what I saw on WPEngine. Updated for the second time in a month.
But support? All I got were generic tree-structure questions and perhaps an AI chat bot. No real help.
I appreciate the technology behind Deepgram, about whom I’ve written five times this year (here, here, here, here, and here). But as a consumer, I’m not all that sanguine about the use of the technology. Just because we can do it, will that make customer service and support more human and helpful?
