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I was agreeing with all the nay-saying comments, but yours made me see the idea as good. I guess the word "luxury" ruined it for OP.

But a speech-to-text and text-to-speech system that I know is "understanding" me would be great rather than waiting music. The shop could even sell it as "As a small shop, most of our employees are busy fixing cars, so we are using AI to help with calls" (Although then people who are anxious about AI stealing jobs might hang up). The robot can ask me what I need, and then say "So for [this service], the price would be..." (to tell the caller what it has understood).

If the AI can even look at gaps in the shop's schedule and set an appointment time, the customer might even be happy that they just spent a minute on the phone instead of 10+...

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I would rather just be sent to a regular old answering machine. Dealing with an AI is dehumanizing. In almost every single case where I actually need to call a place, its because I need to talk to them about something an automated system like booking an appointment, can't handle.
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Congrats..?

A friend of mine worked for a call center that did car rentals, old people would call them and ask to rent a car.

Maybe the AI system should have "Press 1 to talk to AI, press 2 to leave a message" so experts like you can press 2.

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I know it's intended to be dismissive, but I would appreciate the choice.

Even if the new model that came out last week totally fixed all the problems this time for real, most people's experience with chatbots is that they are prone to misunderstanding or making false statements. "Hallucinations"

I have yet to experience any degree of confidence in any output from an LLM, so I'd rather leave the message. I don't know how common this point of view is.

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brutal market for lemons: the last 100 times they heard robovoice on the phone they had a terrible experience, and any money you spend fixing this is wasted because the customer cant tell your robovoice is actually honest and capable of making commitments because they all sound perfectly confident and correct even the ones who know nothing and will promise anything
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Sounds like the typical dealer experience minus the ai
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