Google has had this forever. I’ve used it to make actual reservations. Now I wonder if it was people making the calls .
I used it maybe twice but the first time got curious and asked the worker there if he got called by a real person or a generated voice. He said it was a robot.
Restaurant reservations, job applications, apartment viewing and whatnot. AI is ruining living.
I read a similar thing about older generations who grew up without the internet and found it taking over every part of living, and being very angry about it.
Basically if you didn’t want to touch the internet as it became ubiquitous, then suddenly you can’t just go and see a movie since all seats are sold out a week in advance and reserved now, can’t find an apartment or get a job without it, newspaper classifieds all replaced by craigslist/ facebook marketplace making it hard to sell your old car, etc.
I grew up with it and as I age I identify with those generations more and more. When I was young I didn’t want to deal with people to get things done, and to a certain extent I still feel that way, but we’ve given up so much for those touches of convenience and so many times we made the simplest use cases easy while completely fucking over the less common ones.
For example, a couple times within the last few years I’ve needed to check into hotels early in the morning. This has traditionally been easy: book starting the night before, call the front desk, let them know and they make sure not to give the room away. Well, seems like now some hotel chains only direct calls to the call center and don’t have a pathway to reach the front desk anymore. I tried telling them and they said they let the front desk know, and both times the room was cancelled.
Big corporations have too much power and it’s too hard to avoid using them. I’m lucky enough to have enough money where I can afford to go out of my way to choose small businesses but most people are really limited in how much they can do this.
And AI is changing what facet of our life? Just because we don’t want to use a personal butler suddenly we can’t join the society anymore? This really sounds like an advertisement for a problem that didn’t exists, manufactured by techbros, and then sell the solution for it.
Oh make no mistake, I hate the AI-ification of everything with a passion. Feeling like I can’t avoid it anywhere.
Nope - I refuse to play the game. I’ll eat at home
even when I used to eat out I was loathe to go to places with reservations.
In some places like NYC it’s tough unless you want fast food or something from a cart
AI: Solutions for problems we wouldn’t have without it.
Not even solutions.
Well yeah, advertised as solutions.
… because reservations are based on how fast you can click?
I always imagined they were based on when a person decides they want a reservation, but that may be on me.
Omakase places and busy small restaurants sometimes do call ins at a set time. It’s a mad rush and an agent could certainly game this. It’s not a great reservation system anyway imo (favors the leisure class with time to make these calls).
I’m a pretty good cook!
Paywalled
Found a link to access it https://archive.is/bRToX
While the agent apps have been billed primarily as time-saving devices, some users have claimed more direct savings — and earnings — by instructing them to do things like cancel unwanted subscriptions, apply for refunds or renegotiate services to get cheaper rates. Multiple social media users say agents have successfully applied to states’ unclaimed property sites to retrieve funds owed to them
I’m taking that one away from the article. And how business don’t seem to appreciate the utility of those kind of agents.
What? Are the LLMs eating shitty Chinese food now?
Succulent Chinese meals!
So it seems like all the use case are basically asking someone else to do that stuff for me. I feels like sooner or later more often than not the website aren’t gonna build with UX in mind, and more toward, idk, AIX? LLMX? It’s gonna be unusable buggy mess.
A website with AI in mind is just making it simpler and easier to parse. It’s the opposite of a buggy mess.
The buggy mess comes from trying to make fancy things that end up only working on one browser properly. I welcome the pressure as a Firefox user.
You’re imagining a ui optimized for accessibility, which benefits LLMs but is not the same as an LLM optimized interface without having a visual component for regular human users.
With how vibecoded everything gonna be, i’m not as optimistic as you might be.
Agents are hungry? Ok.
