Customer service chatbots are notoriously aggravating as they waste time hitting you with questions that trap you in prompt loops, often designed to delay and deflect you from speaking with a human agent. But I dove right into the dark pits of hold-music hell this week, because I moved homes and needed to set up Internet service at a new location. After spending over three hours on the phone, with multiple phone calls to two Internet service providers, I can confidently say that the chatbots are not up to the task of doing what a human representative can accomplish. But those bots are good at one thing: wearing down our sprits.
In this episode of Tech Therapy, embedded above, I needed to vent about the odyssey of finding knowledgable humans on a customer service call, and how the tech barriers are increasing. Without speaking to a human, at one point I was asked if Verizon could use my voice data as a security fingerprint for my next call. No, thanks — I don’t need to give up my voice data without knowing what is being done with it, only to have service denied the next time I catch a cold and sound stuffy. In the end, the relief of reaching helpful humans won my business. But, as my co-host Scott Stein points out, sometimes the only way to get to a human is to be nice to the robots blocking your path.
I don’t see the situation getting any better for customers, as AI is being used in more chatbot agents, which can get answers completely wrong — as the New York Times pointed out in its reporting on problematic AI hallucinations. Will we eventually be dealing with chatbots that sound human, like overly agreeable ChatGPT voices, but will we be able to tell it’s AI? Maybe not — unless the voice glitches out and becomes a demon.
But Scott shows off some tech that is going in the right direction with Spacetop. The new AR laptop software creates a 180-degree virtual desktop with floating monitors, using one pair of glasses. Maybe it’s a tool for travel. Maybe it’s for the workspace of the future. But maybe I’ll be using it the next time I need tech help, as I will need multiple monitor windows open to research and troubleshoot the answers to my questions — all while circumventing the inevitable useless AI support bots.
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