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Ask HN: Automating Customer Interviews?

1 points by focuser ↗ HN
With voice AIs getting more capable (e.g. OpenAI's realtime API), it's becoming more and more viable technically to automate customer interviews -- just get a bot to conduct the interviews and give you a recap afterwards.

What are your thoughts about this? Personally, I’m skeptical of completely automated interviews (especially in voice), mainly because of the human factor — do people feel comfortable talking when they know the other end is an AI? Will they share facts like they do when talking to humans? Even if the technology is here, people are a lot harder to change.

On the other hand, there are already some attempts which seem to be doing well.

What are your opinions?

6 comments

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JohnFen
Personally, as a customer, I simply wouldn't take part in an automated interview. As a business, I wouldn't do them in part because I don't want to chase people off and in part because I wouldn't trust the LLM to do it properly.
focuser
thanks for the feedback. Yeah I agree. However, imagine the AI becomes advanced enough to do it properly, would you still talk to it as a customer? My immediate thought is that I wouldn't because I know it's a bot. But on a second thought, the line would perhaps blur if the conversation is realistic enough.
JohnFen
Well, if I can't tell, then I can be tricked. But if I'm fooled into thinking a computer is a human and I discover that trick later, I will be angry with and avoid the entity that tricked me.
focuser
It's indeed wrong to try to trick people. But the real question is that if you already know that it's a robot, are you still be willing to talk to it? What if the robot sounds like this: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/linton-ye/episodes/C...
JohnFen
> if you already know that it's a robot, are you still be willing to talk to it?

In the absence of some sort of really compelling reason to, no I wouldn't. It would signal to me that the company doesn't actually value me enough to treat me as a person. Also, I'm not interested in having a "conversation" with a machine, but that's more of a personal preference sort of deal.