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> This is intended to handle the increase of calls that are related to one incident, so callers get automatically routed to an AI agent who asks if they are cal

> This is intended to handle the increase of calls that are related to one incident, so callers get automatically routed to an AI agent who asks if they are calling regarding the incident. If the answer is yes, then callers can receive information or updates, and if it's no, then the callers are transferred to a human. You don’t need ‘AI’ for this really - all it needs is a prerecorded message asking that question and if the caller presses a button it continues. Or if they don’t respond for N seconds it puts them through to an operator. I guess you could use the AI to record that message ahead of time if they really have to, but it doesn’t need to be running in real time responding to people. We’ve had stuff like this in the UK for years now to do this to prevent accidental dialling (where it will stop to ask “you are calling XYZ service” please confirm, kind of thing)

wraptile 1mo ago
> all it needs is a prerecorded message asking that question and if the caller presses a button it continues. This actually seems better with very little overhead. I'd very much prefer hearing a human recording than AI bot.
- sjsdaiuasgdia 1mo ago
  Working at a call center in the 90s with a phone system from the 70s, it was pretty easy even then to quickly record a custom message and dump people to that before they go in the queue.
cucumber3732842 1mo ago
The potential I see for AI to help here is identifying and recording a message for "if you're calling about the whatever that just blew up on maple street press 1" situations because obviously the operators will be too bogged down to do that in the moment.
- LorenPechtel 1mo ago
  Yeah. I was expecting to be horrified but reading the article I find it entirely reasonable. Hey, that ground is burning! I was traveling at highway speed, I would have no way of knowing if it's something a hundred other people saw and called about, or if it's something new. An AI picking out a gazillion calls about a brushfire on 15 will be a lot more responsive than a human operator programming it. I don't really see a failure scenario here, either it guesses right and duplicates get discarded without human intervention, or it guesses wrong and the call goes through normally. I see no path where this dumps calls that should go through.

wraptile 1mo ago

> all it needs is a prerecorded message asking that question and if the caller presses a button it continues. This actually seems better with very little overhead. I'd very much prefer hearing a human recording than AI bot.

sjsdaiuasgdia 1mo ago
Working at a call center in the 90s with a phone system from the 70s, it was pretty easy even then to quickly record a custom message and dump people to that before they go in the queue.

cucumber3732842 1mo ago

The potential I see for AI to help here is identifying and recording a message for "if you're calling about the whatever that just blew up on maple street press 1" situations because obviously the operators will be too bogged down to do that in the moment.

LorenPechtel 1mo ago
Yeah. I was expecting to be horrified but reading the article I find it entirely reasonable. Hey, that ground is burning! I was traveling at highway speed, I would have no way of knowing if it's something a hundred other people saw and called about, or if it's something new. An AI picking out a gazillion calls about a brushfire on 15 will be a lot more responsive than a human operator programming it. I don't really see a failure scenario here, either it guesses right and duplicates get discarded without human intervention, or it guesses wrong and the call goes through normally. I see no path where this dumps calls that should go through.