As a consumer, the errors that AIs make are more than an annoyance. I have yet to meet an AI phone assistant that can do anything more than an explicitly programmed phone tree, and several, including the one for the pharmacy I use, that do far less. They are undoubtedly much more expensive to create and test.

Clearly there's a bubble going on, and unprincipled people chasing funding and promotions as usual, but why are companies like CVS paying more to get less?

I think it is literally to waste our time. It's one more layer of defense to stop you from talking to a person.

There are two big wins in health care. One is to increase the scope of health care that gets paid for. More and more expensive treatments, to bring the money in. The second big win is to stop people from getting treatment. Deny coverage, confuse them and wear them out with bureaucracy, and in this case stop them from talking to an expensively educated human pharmacist. That's what an AI does better than a phone tree, because it more effectively creates a sense of helplessness and valuelessness in the customer.

Expanding the scope of care you're entitled to and then fighting against your ability to get it isn't a contradiction any more than it's a contradiction when a person breathes in and breathes out. It's two synergistic parts of a system whose goal ultimately has nothing to do with health care.

First, The technology works, and it scales, but the whole bottleneck is domain expertise and implementation. These are expensive, and hard to scale. We hire pharmacists as project managers, that's how important domain expertise and implementations are.

Second, the amount of noise of "Voice AI for <industry>" is incredible. Most of them are completely clueless about the industry & basically "YC-striver" type who can only sell to other yc companies. They fail hard the moment they touch critical functions of the real world.

We have hundreds of pharmacies with us now and they mostly successful and happy. Our biggest friction is customers being burned by vendors like this and writing off AI altogether as "not ready".

In many ways this is a repeat of the India call center train wrecks of the 00s. On paper, letting someone in Bangalore vs onshore handle incoming customer service calls looked like a path to amazing savings. In practice the customer experience was horrendous and companies CTRL-Zed these decisions and rapidly brought customer service back onshore again. AI is just that story of shortsighted decisions by weak leadership playing out all over again.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-...

> Air Canada essentially argued that “the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions”

I'm taking that information and building a voice version. I'm taking a lot of time to make sure the phone version works naturally and that is can address most common things people call in about. Just like my chat version, GPT 4o was barely good enough to do what I needed. Since GPT 5 and on it has been more than adequate. I expect the same thing over time with voice, Open AI is going to release the GPT-live to the API which is a noticeable improvement.

Some people are just offended at the idea of talking to an AI chatbot voice or phone, no matter how good it is. I don't know how good this Kinney Drugs bot was, but it's very easy to make something that works but ends up being very frustrating for customers.

But this doesn't seem likely to translate well to pharmacy, where there will be consequences for treating customers like vermin, as opposed to actual incentives to do it.

I wouldn't be shocked if the tech needed in places like pharmacy or other sectors where there's some level forced responsibility leads to the version that's actually palatable elsewhere.

Still, I got it to send a chocolate chip cookies recipe to us.

These things are horrible, but then coding agents were dumb as dogshite not too long ago, so maybe in a few years AI support agents will become useful.

Set up whatever online portal or app you want. I’d prefer to just sign in and click a button.

If I’m picking up the phone or sending an email it’s because I have a weird problem and I need to talk to a person.

I think we need to take a good hard look at what we want out of this world and ask ourselves. Do we really need to automate this? Like really. What benefit does the world receive having an AI chatbot tell grandma the wrong doage for her meds? This is the naked extraction of value from a service that's already been offshored. Companies like these are gleeful to make their service as shitty as they can because they know their users are doing so against their will. Infact, that's become the goal.

it seems very implementation dependant, I know a startup with incredibly realistic voice agents that most people don’t detect is an ai that outperforms humans. But ai for CX seems like an easy project to do for companies looking to cut costs so the average agent a user encounters in the wild is poor quality

BS. How is the AI touching that information?

Prescription notification is outbound communication. It’s almost a recorded message. A little text to speech if it is supposed to read the drug name.

Wrong dosages?? This must be handled by the “enroll a new scrip” functionality, right? So basically B2B doctor interaction. You let AI touch that? Aren’t the vast majority of the costs from customers not doctors? None of this makes sense.

The biggest problem with AI customer service is that a human employee would've let a minor issue slide without escalating it. But a chatbot often inflames the situation, and by the time the customer reaches a human agent, they're already furious.

Most people aren't rational or logical. Non verbal feedback, like acknowledging someone's anger and showing empathy, is incredibly important.

But the biggest problem is ASR. WER is still atrocious even with SOTA models. When you add drug names and regional accents, it's a recipe for disaster.

We need to fight the talking point that open source is bad!

AI couldn't do this job with a checklist. It would forget the entire checklist after two responses, then get fixated on the words that the customer used to complain about how dumb the AI was and loop until they hung up and called back to hopefully clear the context.

edit: Unless Kinney had been sold a product that used caller ID to carry over context, then the customer's best chances would be to scream "Agent!" over and over again (to get put on hold for 45 minutes, then transferred to the most screamed-at Philippine minimum-wage gig worker on the planet), or to show up to the drugstore and start screaming at people.