I used to work as a service advisor - or as the article says, receptionist. This system will not work as described for several reasons.
1. Unless you have a recent job that matches the exact same repair/service, you have incorrectly estimated the cost of the repair. In some states, this matters a lot and will cost the shop money. Unless your LLM only quotes for labor in sane amounts for diagnostic and nothing else, you’re only adding noise. This is a disservice to the client and the shop owner. The client now has an inaccurate quote for work and the shop will get a reputation for being inaccurate in quoting work.
2. Let’s say that you manage to get the exact same job twice. Your machine now needs to source parts. Parts may have been in stock yesterday. The might be out of stock now. If they are in stock, you need to retotal the price since prices are dynamic. Did you teach the agent how to source parts? What rules does it have for sourcing used parts?
3. New jobs can’t be quoted. Even if you taught the machine how to calculate book time and margins, it still has to find the right parts. If your shop does high end work, you know how much of a pain in the ass this is. Also remember that some work requires nonobvious parts - like fluids if you need to remove a part in the way of your goal.
4. The only area I see this being useful in is pickup. The shop can mark a car as done and the LLM can call to inform the client that they can come at a preset, unchanging time to get the vehicle. If the vehicle is staying overnight, the LLM can call with a progress update.
Finally, I’d like to note that this sort of dev work goes beyond hubris. It’s dangerous. The more we assume we know without verifying, the greater the risk. In this case, the dev is risking someone else’s livelihood.
The shop can mark a car as done and the LLM can call to inform the client that they can come at a preset, unchanging time to get the vehicle. If the vehicle is staying overnight, the LLM can call with a progress update.
This doesn't need an LLM. It can be and has already been done for many years with a simple TTS.
I am certainly not an expert but I agree a lot with your sentiment about the hubris - but the problem as presented in the article makes no sense to me.
If you see a value need for a receptionist, and you suspect that it is costing you thousands of dollars, wouldn't a normal response be, "I should think about hiring someone," rather than turning to an unproven, untested solution like this and leaving your business at the hands of how correct it is? I just cannot understand this line of thinking at all, reaching for a tool that would probably do a worse job than a human would do. Is it not wanting to hire? Not wanting to manage? Hype cycle? Where does this urge come from?
To take this further, if the focus really is the "luxury" part of the market, how do they expect this sort of response to go down well with customers?!
If someone is interested in paying luxury size fees, do they really want some cobbled together chatbot? I say this as an advocate for (high quality) chatbots for various practical needs, but it just seems like it is misunderstanding the customers (or maybe luxury is a bit of a loose term new in the area this mechanic works in?)
Business owners tend to resent having to rely on and pay their workers.
Many of them believe people should line up and volunteer/be forced to work at their companies for free, the fact that they have to pay them is an insult.
They need workers, but workers are not worthy of being needed by them, or paid, so they look for any out at all.
Aside from a cost? It's also managing the actual human being, and making sure they have enough work. If the place has 5-10 calls a day, then it's pointless to hire receptionist that will do nothing for 1 hour, and then get 2 minutes chat. It used to be pointless to build software to do that, but since claude code it's cheap enough to make sense.
If someone put on their website and voicemail that they were available for calls only from 8-10am (for example), or that they would return my call at that time, I'd make a point to call them then. It's reasonable that people are busy too.
receptionist as a service has been a thing for like... forever. You are never going to solve the problem of accurately estimating and quoting with AI or an answering service, so pay for someone to answer the phone and take down the details; have a mechanic or trained service rep review and estimate. Cheap code that doesn't solve the problem is not cheap.
> If you see a value need for a receptionist, and you suspect that it is costing you thousands of dollars, wouldn't a normal response be, "I should think about hiring someone," [...]
If you only have thousands of dollars is savings from the move, hiring someone might be too expensive.
Because the capital owning class in America commonly has an aversion to labor.
Labor is other humans and all their social hierarchy monkey brain bullshit activates in a way that a machine doesn’t. That’s why you’ll see companies spending equivalent or even slightly more money for a tool to do a job over a human being.
Walmart employs this amount of workers only because it is subsided by food stamps and other government assistance. The minute they were forced to actually pay for the labor they employ would fire a lot of people
I'm projecting, but I think you're right. Not wanting to manage is probably a large driver. I can imagine that if you've dealt with messy humans before, that a robot receptionist that's not going to show up late, call out when hungover, need an advance for a family member's surgery and then quit, is quite attractive.
Until the robot breaks for reasons unknown and you have to pay for expensive engineering time to fix it. Surprise, since the engineer vibe coded the whole thing, he also has no idea how to fix it except to get the AI to try.
From the post it's clear that the shop has a set schedule of services and prices that the bot is pulling from. All the things you're saying are true for a shop that needs to custom quote each job but do not apply to the situation as presented.
The solution is to have the quote manually prepared, entered into the system of record, and then automate the outbound phone call to let the customer know, and agree to the work based on the accurate quote. That's the savings.
One of my specialties is creating call centers using Amazon Connect. I agree with everything you said. I wouldn’t let an LLM go near doing a quote or ordering parts.
> Finally, I’d like to note that this sort of dev work goes beyond hubris. It’s dangerous. The more we assume we know without verifying, the greater the risk. In this case, the dev is risking someone else’s livelihood.
I think this is a bit of an overstatement. The dev states it’s her brother’s business, and one can assume he’s asked her to help him out.
Getting the service to be 100% perfect is of course a near impossible challenge, but that’s most likely not the business owner’s concern — they simply want a way to avoid totally losing business. If the service can convert even 10% of customers with a rough quote and timeline it’s most likely useful.
High end shops live off reputation alone. Usually they’re started by a very skilled mechanic who does racing or some other specialty automotive hobby.
The exit plan for these guys is usually to sell the shop. Most buyers are usually skilled white collar workers looking for a new hobby. The shop folds after that because they no longer have the same connections to the specialty community.
You can get business outside of the specialty auto scene. In fact, it’s required since that’s what actually makes money. Google reviews and word of mouth are king here.
So do you remove the owner from the customer experience? I wouldn’t. But if you are going to do that, then, understanding the risk is important.
I share your skepticism but it does seem like the author addressed 1 and 3:
> When a caller asks something that isn’t in the knowledge base, the AI doesn’t guess. It tells the caller it doesn’t have that information, asks for their name and a good callback number, and saves that to MongoDB. Dane gets a list of callbacks to return — no lost leads.
> The escalation path is not an edge case — it’s a core feature.
I haven't been a service advisor before, but if it's anything like working the phones at other retailers, you get a lot of the same questions over and over again, and a bot could certainly answer those things correctly.
> The phone rings, he can’t answer, the customer hangs up and calls someone else. That’s a lost job — sometimes a $450 brake service, sometimes a $2,000 engine repair — just gone because no one picked up.
Sure, that's a problem, but...
> Dane gets a list of callbacks to return — no lost leads.
Yeah. So. I'm still going to hang up, phone somewhere else, and you get no business. I'm also doubly annoyed because not only did you waste my time speaking to a computer, it couldn't answer the question so I'm now worse off than if you'd ignored the call.
Yeah - this scenario presupposes that if I need my car fixed I'm going to wait for you to give me a call back, rather than continue working down my list.
The AI doesn’t have to solve every problem to solve some problems. If it can answer 10% of questions, isn’t that 10% better than having all of them go to voicemail unanswered?
There is no way to ensure that the AI doesn't guess. You can do all the prompting and RAG you want but sometimes it's just going to make shit up and ignore instructions
It might be the same calls if you work at a shop that only works on one model year vehicle doing a set of services. Note that services are not repairs.
Couldn't you blast through all of that with some kind of warning like: "All labor and part prices are estimates, for exact pricing leave your name and number and we will get back to you".
From the Washington state attorney general’s website:
“ Estimate: You are entitled to a written price estimate for the repairs you have authorized before the work is performed, only if you deal face-to-face with the facility and the work is expected to cost more than $100. Once you receive an estimate, the facility may not charge you more than 10% above the estimated costs without your prior approval.
The estimate includes, among other things: the odometer reading; a description of the problem or the specific repair requested; choice of alternatives for the customer; the estimated cost; labor and parts necessary for the specific diagnosis/repair requested”
So the LLM builds an estimate. Maybe it’s under 10% difference when the customer walks through the door.
When it’s not, there’s a big problem. Yes, this is still before work has begun, but now you’ve wasted the customers time. And potentially wasted their money if the vehicle was towed in.
> “ Estimate: You are entitled to a written price estimate for the repairs you have authorized before the work is performed, only if you deal face-to-face with the facility and the work is expected to cost more than $100. Once you receive an estimate, the facility may not charge you more than 10% above the estimated costs without your prior approval.
I don't see how "estimates" given over the phone by the LLM and "estimate" as mentioned in this quote refers to the same thing, for the legal purpose of this statement. This would be strictly before repairs have been authorized, and it's obviously not a written estimate. If the client requests a written estimate, it would have to come at a later time after the human mechanic reviews related costs (like specialty parts availability/ship times), or the client bringing the machine in for physical inspection by the mechanic.
From my understanding of the article, it doesn't sound like the LLM is built to fully circumvent a customer phone call by the owner/mechanic before approving a job request unmanned: It's simply to not let go of a client lead because there was no one available to answer the phone, without needing to hire a full-time phone receptionist.
It seems highly unlikely a customer is towing their vehicle in without talking to the mechanic directly first, who now has some context and the ability to sift nonsense requests from realistic ones from the logs before calling or writing to the customer on their own time with all the expert nuance necessary.
I didn’t say it was a written estimate. I said the opposite.
Do you know how towing a car into this particular shop works? If so, please enlighten me.
In most shops, mechanics do not talk to customers. Mechanics get paid to work on vehicles - not talk on phones.
Regardless, the potential for sticker shock exists if the LLM and the mechanic disagree on pricing. You can and will lose customers due to this. I’ve seen it happen. That’s why service advisors are trained to only quote for diagnostics over the phone.
Finally, in the sales training we got, we were taught to not compete on price. This rule doubly applies to a high end shop. They make their money by competing on quality and timeliness. Adding the LLM to the equation compromises both of those.
Realistically, every single mechanic has Google reviews that say “they said it would be $C but it was $D” and so on. You’re claiming a level of rigor I don’t think any real mechanic has.
> Finally, I’d like to note that this sort of dev work goes beyond hubris. It’s dangerous. The more we assume we know without verifying, the greater the risk. In this case, the dev is risking someone else’s livelihood.
Every single phone call to a business will be having this in the back office within 5 to 10 years.
If you are already drowning in work, make everything expensive enough to cover the errors. You always have some % chance to lose money with each customer. If the estimate is to high one can give a discount afterwards.
Could play the call on the speaker and decide if it is worth dropping your tools and walking to the phone. Those 10-20 daily marketeers are definitely not it.
A blog post like this is half the story. I’d like to see the results. Did your brother get more business? What were the failure modes? Did customers care if it was a bot or not?
It also ignores easily available solutions that could have been deployed prior to AI
For example, even if it shows a boost of $100,000 per month in revenue. It could likely have been achieved with a shared virtual assistant / receptionist for about $200-1000 per month (depending on exactly call volumes).
So really, the revenue was already lost and going forward you’re just deciding to capture it. You've created a more complicated mouse trap than what was already available to you. The difference is saving a couple hundred dollars of labor less whatever your AI/tech costs are. I’d still go the human route because it’s more future proof and if this is a luxury service, human service is always going to feel more luxurious.
This is such an important point. My plumber that we always call is extremely busy and usually doesn't have availability for at least a week. He is a one man shop and prefers it that way. You call his phone, leave a voicemail and he calls you back whenever he is able to. I asked him if he wants to get more business by automating his incoming calls and he said "not really, I am already very busy and have enough business. I don't need these tools".
So we cannot always assume that the business owner (especially the solo mom and pops) wants more business. Good ones are already very busy.
This seems to be true with every trade shop in my area. HVAC, plumbing, electrical, landscaping, appliance repair, and so on: Nobody picks up the phone, and when you do get someone, they don't seem to be very interested in your job unless it sounds like big money to them. Everyone already apparently has as much work as they want, and if you're a small fish you're out of luck.
Electrician here. I had zero unemployment time between my current job and the last. Sent ~5 applications, had two interviews. Current employer called me in the afternoon offering me a job, after interviewing the same morning.
Yea.. When people say "you can make great money in the trades" what they usually mean is that you can make great money by owning a trade business and/or hiring tradesmen. Which is kind of different than being a tradesman.
True but electricians have a real system without bullshit, we wire something up and it just works, it keeps working too! You press the button, the light goes on, you press it again and it goes off! Except from audio all of the automatons come with the right plugs.
You would think after 50 years software devs build something similar but besides the <input type="submit"> button absolutely nothing works like that. Switching on the lights by clicking on a button using the mouse would already be a serious enterprise level undertaking. Then when you think you are done someone in Russia and someone in China are also able to control your lights.
There are no labels on our buttons, the dimensions are in exact mm. If you ask a software dev they will tell you mm have something to do with printing. On a screen a button can have any size, no one knows really how big it turns out regardless which of the 50 different units you use. pt rm rem px % vw etc etc
Sounds pretty unscientific? Can you at least tell me when it is finished and how much it will cost? Did I say something wrong?
That's wild. Plumbing especially seems like a field where if you need a plumber you need them right now, not a week from now.
I guess as a plumber having enough of the type of jobs that can wait a week that you can turn away the urgent calls might be one of those feature-not-a-bug type situations.
It depends. If you need a faucet changed out with this new fancy one, or if you want to replace a toilet with a new one using less GPF, or any other kind of update/remodel.
Not every job a plumber does is an emergency situation. I used a plumber to help me setup a backyard project to set up a portable propane tankless gas water heater. I took a look at buying at the parts and pieces I would need, but they needed special tools that would only be used once if I were to buy them. Instead, I had the plumber do it for me with all of the necessary parts/pieces on the truck plus the tools to do it. It cost me less than it would have to buy everything. Now, I just need a cold water feed, and I have a portable hot/cold running system.
You can shut the entire network off, shower/poop at neighbours places or work, laundry at the local self-laundry shop and brush you teeth with a bootle of water. Inconvenient sure, but it would as much problematic to be denied electricity for a long time: lights off, fridge off, no heating, boiler off… there’s alternatives but the usual way for us is to share a long electric cord by an open window… so obligatory work-and-stay-at-home if you’re lucky to have an appropriate activity.
I think that’s wrong for a couple reasons. I think author doesn’t fully understand the problem or doesn’t explain it well leading to this assumption.
He wouldn’t care to get these extra jobs if he’s full, so why do this to begin with. He could however hire another mechanic if he books more jobs and grow his business to one of shop owner instead of mechanic (no idea if this is his motivation or not).
It’s likely he’s not actually under the hood all day but If phone rings twice a day and it just happens to be he’s under the hood at those times, he misses the call and it’s like he’s under the hood all day. It doesn’t mean he has no capacity, it just means he’s missing some calls throughout the day.
I tried getting some work quotes not long ago and was surprised by how many local shops still don't have: (1) website that takes info and emails/calls back, (2) voicemail, or (3) having one or both of those and didn't call back all week. I suspected they had all the business they can handle. I did get a call back later in the week from one that said as much.
Why would a car repair shop need a website for? All I care about is the phone number, with the hope that someone will pick it up. IDK about the world, but in Poland every single mechanic I know has no downtime at all. The better ones have queues measured in weeks or months for simple repairs. They don't care about extra business, the business will find them anyway.
I've made that website! Just put the name and a big fat print phone number in the middle of the page.
There use to be a windows shop around here that had a game on the website where you have to throw stones at windows. Limited time per house, limited stones, more points for big windows, run away when you hear police sirens.
Hard to estimate how much extra work they got out of it but I imagine it > 0.
That generates more supply (mechanics) not less demand (volume of broken cars). Sometimes having excess demand is ideal to keep the market balanced in your favor.
Could he not just increase the price until the number of calls matches the time he has?
I know it's not that simple, but my gut says theres value to at least hearing out the people taking action to call you. Especially if that's automated and low cost to you.
Based on the post I would guess it hasn't been live long and gone through a ton of battle testing.
I wish her luck though, things get much murkier as you start stacking more intents and it is no longer just a chatbot that funnels to text to speech.
People also assume "AI" is a miracle worker now so they will be pissed when they say "Yeah just email me at charlezmcnaughton@gmail.com" and it spells it completely wrong. Like there is no reality where a transcriber is going to reliably transcribe most emails correctly, so for shit where it is vital to be 100% accurate (email, name, etc.) you have a battle on your hands.
side: I found Anthropic to be prohibitively slow for live voice chat. I was getting response times in the 1-2s range which when combined with the other parts of generating a response led to 2.5s+ silent periods before responding. Groq is insanely fast if you want pure performance from an LLM. Like <200ms to complete a response.
I needed to replace my car's windshield in a hurry while on an extended trip. I called around to see who might have one in stock that could do a rush order. There was one place that had an automated voice system, and I hung up because it kept redirecting the conversation to get me to hand over more information than necessary to answer my question.
If I were already an existing customer and just wanted to schedule an oil change, it'd be fine, though I'd probably just schedule on the website anyway. I'm really only going to call in if I have an unusual circumstance and actually need to speak with someone.
Automated voice systems that try to sound human but are in fact purely scripted are insanely annoying. E.g. "I think you said 'windshield', is that correct? ... Got it, thanks!"
If you only have 4 options, just give me the old school list of voice options and I'll press 1 through 4, in less time, and being only moderately annoyed.
But a knowledgeable AI system as described in the article - that knows what it knows and tells you when it doesn't - could work great. If it had access to inventory and calendar, it might have worked for you. The question is whether the implementation lives up to the high expectations set by the articles.
Me too, but I wonder whether we're in the minority here. I'm sure there must be plenty of people who just call places to get information easily found via the web, or there wouldn't be so many automated phone systems that explain how to get information via their website.
I know someone who works on the voice response system for $LARGEBANK. She says that more than 95% of calls are just to find out a checking account balance.
That's fine, and there's no need for AI pretending to be a human, or to ask me to talk to a computer as if it is a human. Routine decision trees work really well here.
In fact, decision trees are nice because they tell your more or less up front what they're capable of.
What really sucks (AI or decision tree, either way) is when they don't let you easily speak with someone.
I'd argue a well designed AI assistant would be considerably better than a decision tree for that use case. Decision trees are slow because you normally need to wait through several options before getting to the one you're interested in. (Though sure, perhaps not if your call is literally for the most common thing.) But with an AI you could jump straight to what you're interested in.
"Hi, I'm the LargeBank AI Assistant. How can I help you?"
"I'd like to know the balance of my checking account."
And then authenticate and get the balance as usual. Simpler and faster.
Agreed that it becomes a problem if it's seen as a replacement for human agents though. In an ideal world it would actually free up the human agents for when they're actually needed. In reality it'll probably be some of each.
I believe that. Probably 95% of my support calls to online shops are about order status (aka: the website shows "in preparation" for a week already, I need to talk to a real person).
Often the relevant information is a pain to find on a website, but even if it isn't, the people who answer the phone often have important context like "Usually we do offer that recently but one of our suppliers..." or "We can do that, but maybe instead..." or "Oh the website isn't updated with..."
Maybe I am in the minority here, but I appreciate the new crop of LLM based phone assistants. I recently switched to mint mobile and needed to do something that wasn't possible in their app. The LLM answered the call immediately, was able to understand me in natural conversation, and solved my problem. I was off the call in less than a minute. In the past I would have been on hold for 15-20 minutes and possibly had a support agent who didn't know how to solve my problem.
Also I bet the LLM didn't speak too fast, enunciate unclearly, have a busted and crackly headset obscuring every other word it said to you, or have an accent that you struggled to understand either.
I was on the wrong end of some (presumably) LLM powered support via ebay's chatbot earlier this week and it was a completely terrible experience. But that's because ebay haven't done a very good job, not because the idea of LLM-powered support is fundamentally flawed.
My big question is. Why has the company and their development process failed so horribly they need to use LLM instead the app? Surely app could implement everything LLM can too.
Don't LLMs still have to interface with whatever system allows them to do things? Or are they really given free range to do anything at all even stuff no one considered?
I imagine they just help with triaging the customers query so it ends up with the right department/team. Also probably some tech support first in case it can solve the issue first.
Amazon support does this pretty well with their chat. The agent can pull all the relevant order details before the ticket hits a human in the loop, who appears to just be a sanity check to approve a refund or whatever. Real value there.
Didn't work for me. I had a package marked delivered that never showed. The AI initiated a return process (but I didn't have anything to return). I needed to escalate to a human.
I had a similar situation with a chatbot: I posted a highly technical question, got a very fast reply with mostly correct data. Asked a follow-up question, got a precise reply. Asked to clarify something, got a human-written message (all lowercase, very short, so easy to distinguish from the previous LLM answers).
Unfortunately, the human behind it was not technically-savvy enough to clarify a point, so I had to either accept the LLM response, or quit trying. But at least it saved me the time from trying to explain to a level 1 support person that I knew exactly what I was asking about.
Agreed; they're far better than the old style robots, which is what you'd have to deal with otherwise.
More generally, when done well, RAG is really great. I was recently trying out a new bookkeeping software (manager.io), and really appreciated the chatbot they've added to their website. Basically, instead of digging through the documentation and forums to try to find answers to questions, I can just ask. It's great.
I had a recent experience with the Lowes agent today. It was pretty decent! Until I asked "how many of that item is available", and it didn't know how to answer that (It was a clearance item). At least when I asked to talk to a human I got one in a few seconds.
i genuinely don't get the point of this. isn't it easier to have a native chat interface? phone is a much worse UX and we simply use it because of the assumption that a human is behind it. once that assumption doesn't hold - phone based help has no place here.
I think the point is: If there is an API somewhere in Company's systems that does what the customer wants, why have a phone tree or an LLM in the way? Just add a button to the app itself that calls that API.
most support volume comes through voice, and you need a layer to interpret what the customer intent is
additionally for many use cases it's not feasible from an eng standpoint to expose a separate api for each entire workflow, instead they typically have many smaller composable steps that need to be strung together in a certain order depending on the situation
There's no reason the app itself couldn't string together those composable steps into an action performed when the user invokes it. OP's point is there is that neither an LLM or a voice layer is really required, unless you're deliberately aiming to frustrate the user by adding extra steps (chat, phone call). Customer intent can be determined with good UX.
What could the LLM be doing that wasn't possible inside the app? At the end of the day, the LLM is just making an API call to whatever system needed to be updated anyway, that could have just been a button in an app.
Just to be clear, the LLM assistant could be a great supplement to the app for people with disabilities or those who struggle with phone apps for whatever reason, but for most people the LLM phone call seems worse.
There's plenty of time for me inside the Amazon app where I'll click the button to get a refund or replacement on an order and go through the little radio options wizard to select the reasoning, and it will tell me it's not eligible for a refund in the end.
I'll switch to the AI chat where it lets you select your order and I'll do the same thing, and it has no issue telling me it can give me a refund and process it instantly.
So my case, the two seem to behave differently. And these are on items that say they're eligible for refunds to begin with when you first order them.
If the item is eligible for refund and the wizard fails where the LLM succeeds, then that's obviously a bug in the wizard, not a special capability of the LLM. It's also wasted money for Amazon, burning tokens at scale for something that could have been a simple API call.
>and he’s losing thousands of dollars per month because he misses hundreds of calls per week. He’s under the hood all day. The phone rings, he can’t answer, the customer hangs up and calls someone else. That’s a lost job — sometimes a $450 brake service, sometimes a $2,000 engine repair — just gone because no one picked up.
How much does it cost to have an outsourced receptionist? Even if it is 500 a month if we are really talking about thousands of dollars per month lost your ROI is still crazy.
Never mind an outsourced receptionist, some of those calls could be handled simply by the mailbox. Of course, some people will hang up once the mailbox message starts - but then again, some will also hang up once they realize they're talking to an AI chatbot, so...
This is the critical data —» how many people hang up on the AI chatbot vs how many people hang up on the voice message prompt.
If it is even close, well, the AI needs to be improved.
If the AI is way ahead, but still loses/drops more than a live receptionist (outsourced or in-house), the AI either needs improvement, or to be dumped for a live receptionist, and that's kind of a spreadsheet problem (how many jobs lost in each case, vs costs).
I think the question of lost opportunities versus costs is the best thing to look at here. You could pay a receptionist like 50-60k a year but they have to bring in the work. Maybe the AI dumps a percentage over a real receptionist but they still bring in more than the mailbox. But there's a cost to the AI too.
But the real question you should also ask is what else can that human do for you that the AI can't because they have eyes and ears and hands?
The question is more why employ a full time receptionist when fractional services are available and it’s an old well established industry. A couple hundred dollar a month could employ a human only when the phone rings and to schedule their visit plus any FAQ. I’m sure Ruby.com already has plenty of auto shop customers.
A barber won’t be able to service that many customers anyway. A barbershop which gets a phone call every two minutes probably has several barbers on staff and a receptionist.
He will still need a pipeline of work to keep himself and his team busy. Someone has to do that job, if clients are self selecting then it makes sense to automate it if possible.
I have a friend who runs a trade with an outsourced reception - they employ 3 full time people and the reception is about £150/mo for 9-5 manning of calls. He does the scheduling in the evenings.
If we take OP’s post at face value, presumably his brother is already at 100% capacity otherwise he wouldn’t be missing all these calls.
It's called a telephone answering service. Different companies have different billing methods, but the most common billing method is to bill for "work time" - you pay a monthly fee with a set amount of work time and then pay overage fees for any usage in excess of the monthly allotment. It's a good solution if you don't expect to be hammered with calls during your business hours (e.g. you expect to get at most 30 calls a day rather than 30 calls an hour), but it starts to get prohibitively expensive after you reach a certain volume. It's a good idea to keep track of the usage and consider "upgrading" to a full-time staff member once you get to a certain usage amount (then you just direct calls to the answering service when that staff member isn't available). It doesn't work very well if your call length is long. You also need to be realistic about what you want the agents to do. It's not like they can provide top tier support or resolve issues. Expect it to be exactly what it is, which is a telemessaging service. You'll usually get better luck with ones that specialize in specific industries. There are some that only answer for law practices, for example. Some only provide day-time support, while others run 24/7.
No - £150/mo for the service. I asked him and he said they take the calls, write up notes and he handles the callbacks/etc himself.
I don’t know if he’s “tested”, but he said he’s happy enough with the service. We don’t always have to AB test every possible option - sometimes good enough is good enough.
Well presumably 150 is what you pay to use the service, and they have like 100+ companies using it.
The model is exactly like Planet Fitness or similar gyms: It doesn't work if everyone visits at once, but you plan on most people using it once a week.
Yeah exactly - I don’t know how many calls he gets but it’s less than an amount to employ a full time person, but more than enough that it’s worth having someone to pick up a phone he can stay on the job.
A good 'Service Writer' (the term you use for this job) isn't cheap and typically aren't outsourced. Usually because your (local) competition is going to be using them too. And also because customers aren't going to trust a person that is writing service for multiple shops.
That said, a good service writer is worth their weight in gold. Also, they are typically going to be the person you end up selling the business to when you retire. Most mechanics aren't good enough at the business side of things to actually buy, but service writers are.
Generally, by whether they know what’s going on at the shop. Usually if I’m calling on the phone, it’s for a specific answer that’s not gettable through a computer.
“Hey can you look out and see if Joe’s almost done with the blue Chrysler?” is an easy ask for the phone answerer at my local Joe’s shop (it’s his wife, and as a bonus she’ll also holler at him or his crew to hurry up because @alwa is waiting on it).
Contrast with the grant-funded pharmacy I use. Some management type suggested they could deal with their insane level of overwork by automating away the phones to a hostile and labyrinthine network of IVRs. Oh, it has “AI,” but only to force choices between forks in decisions trees corresponding to questions I didn’t have—and every path still eventually ends in “this voice mailbox is full, goodbye.”
After literal hours of my life trying to wrestle their IVRs into helping—I do sympathize with their workload and don’t want to be a special snowflake—I now drive 30 minutes to ask questions face to face.
In general I’ve maxed out what’s discoverable by automated means before I call. So a call center is both useless and insulting.
Responsible (directly or indirectly) for quite a few of them, mostly oldish and wheezy; I’m not myself mechanical; and we use the shop mostly for routine maintenance—rotate the tires every few thousand miles, swap the brake pads, deal with the oil changes/fluids/filters, etc.
Partly as a preventative measure: we trust them. In the rare cases when they find something, it’s real. As a consequence we get ahead of brewing problems.
Plus loyalty, to some extent; we try to throw work their way when we can, even if we probably could handle it ourselves. The relationship between our families goes back a good 60 years by now.
Fully grant that my situation is unlikely to be representative. And no shade toward OP—it sounds like a cool project thoughtfully done, and a real improvement over the status quo for her relative!
Plus, maybe the customer would prefer to support a business that invests in and employs from the local community, even if it costs a little more. Or they see it as a quality signal. If I call a plumber who outsourced their reception to a call center to save a few bucks, I'm starting to think, "What else is he willing to do to save a few bucks?"
Would redirecting them to a website where they can go through a guided intake and get some confirmation of a callback? A well designed UI that allows them to ID their vehicle (make/model/year) and the issue they're having? HTML5 has decent speech to text out of the gate and they can just talk it out.
Obviously that process could happen purely via voice but I think there's not as much love for walking through forms in a phone call.
If Joe has a PC in the shop with a tailored UI, he could get pings of pending requests and when he comes up for air, update the intake (via voice to minimize greasy hands) and initiate a call back then and there?
Related - Monro Muffler Brake apparently switched to an offshore call center model to handle scheduling every single auto shop location. I hear nothing but complaints from both fellow customers as well as the shop managers themselves about their local phone number being ripped away from them and handed off to a call center to try to schedule vehicle service from thousands of miles away.
Big old ad for Mongo right in the middle even with all my ad blocking, so I assume that is it. I hate being One of Those People because the trend toward doubting everything bums me out, but this is not 1982. People with fancy cars are not using some local guy with a lift in his backyard and even if they were, where is Dane located that he is missing 100s of calls for work on the Rolls, Ferrari, Bentley in addition to the ones that are keeping him so dangerous busy?
Yes - but as others have mentioned you wouldn't have good advertising material for your AI "readiness" courses.
More to the point - does this garage even have the time and space to service more vehicles? Generating a bunch of new low-value/low-loyalty customers takes up time and space and might have a lower return-per-hour while making it harder to retain higher value returning customers.
Additionally, as "luxury mechanic" (apparently specializing in BMW but servicing other makes) you'll need to appeal to "luxury drivers" and bolting on more crap that makes the experience worse is probably not the way to do that.
> This isn’t a generic chatbot. It’s a custom-built voice agent that answers his phone, knows his exact prices, his hours, his policies, and can collect a callback when it doesn’t know something.
> When a caller asks something that isn’t in the knowledge base, the AI doesn’t guess.
I've seen a number of instances of this type of thing in wild, and under the hood it's usually some prompt that asks the llm to gauge confidence in its own answer. And from my admittedly naive understanding of how this all works, this seems extremely unlikely to be accurate. But I'm curious if that's still the case or if I'm operating under pre-2026 information?
At the moment I'm pretty inclined to hang up if I feel I'm wasting my time with a robot.
But maybe soon we will not even realise we speak to a robot, given the current speed of ai development.
I wonder how that will erode trust in calls. I moved from cold emailing and cold LinkedIn to cold calling because of the massive amounts of ai spam I have to compete with. But maybe cold calling will die soon as well if the robots emerge.
I've been car shopping recently, and it took me a full week to realize that every dealership I'd talked to had an LLM with a fake name handling customer intake. I was 4 emails deep with one before I stopped to think about how plausible their near-instant response times were.
Is RAG even necessary here? Minimal information like a couple of price list with job times and opening hours should easily fit into any context window, right? It's not like he's dumping entire service manuals into the vector database here...
It most likely isn't, but it seems like this project was more for learning purposes than for anything else. In that case, why not go for the "production-ready", "highly scalable" solution? I sometimes do the same for my personal projects. I over-architect them not because it's necessary, but because I want to get my hands dirty and learn something new.
For voice conversations the issue can be more latency than filling the context. Without knowing the site is hard to say, but if he had multiple pages worth of text (dunno, type of cars, procedures, some emotional story, etc.) and a "slower" model, it might be worth it to use RAG to preselect fast a small portion and use LLM to refine the answer.
This is bad engineering. Step 1 should not be "start building the thing". The first thing you do (after understanding the customer's problem) is look for existing solutions already available and evaluate them.
I'm not part of the target market but I hate talking about technical and financial things on the telephone even to a human being. I much prefer being able to put my request in writing and get a written response plus a phone call from someone who has already been able to evaluate my request and pick holes in it and advise me what to do next.
That way there are fewer misunderstandings. This is how arranging servicing with Tesla works (at least in Norway and the UK). I use the app to describe the problem, add photographs if i think they would help. Then if it clear wat is to be done the app will notify me that the estimate is ready for approval, otherwise I'll get a message in the app or a phone call or both.
Reading this thread has me wondering if a smarter voicemail inbox system would be a viable and useful alternative.
Something like leave a voicemail and get a ticket created in the system to log the call for triage once the owner's hands are free.
The system could be configured to text a link to an intake form or quote calculator or calendly or whatever if intent is successfully detected.
I wouldn't mind this as a caller because I'd hear a typical phone tree setup, have a callback option, __and__ have a digital action I can take without being annoyed by a fake receptionist.
I imagine a certain type of business owner would appreciate the more streamlined workflow, plus having more control without the AI risks.
I assume people are pissed off because its building something that people already hate and its a fully AI generated post that is jarring to read.
Nothing pisses people off faster than calling up and getting put on the line with a robot. Like if we're thinking about this problem and how to solve it we can look at other examples like a website with a booking form,call the mechanics cell directly, hire a receptionist or worst case outsource the receptionist to a booking agency.
The alternative here isn't talking to a person. The alternative is leaving a voicemail and praying for a callback. Likely, you don't even leave a voicemail and a match is not made.
Asking a business to hire a receptionist is probably a bit unlikely for small businesses in today's environment.
Voicemail alone doesn't have information about someone's schedule.
"I'd like to schedule a smog check tomorrow or Wednesday?" rather than leaving a message and hoping for a callback that you don't miss either (and have go to voice mail).
Consistency of interface. I've got the phone number of the mechanic I go to in my phone's address book... and the various medical services for appointments there.
If they were to have an app on their website, I wouldn't know because I don't use the webpage for that purpose - I call them.
Now, they've all got receptionists there that work full time and handle the appointments and take that first tier of service. These are larger places that have two receptionists working the full day (handling walkins, calling confirmations, and the other administrative tasks)... I don't think that an LLM (even with access to appointments) would do a better job than what they do (and certainly wouldn't be able to do the "ok, I showed up, now what do I do?")
However, I could see this for a small mechanic shop. When I lived in California, I went to what is now Shoreline Auto Care on El Camino and Shoreline - a small two bay mechanic... and that's not the type of place that has the business that can afford a full time receptionist.
So the question for a place like that... "what do you get for the phone calls you miss?"
That makes sense, but maybe the UX problem runs a bit deeper. Maybe contacts apps should surface websites higher in the UI for saved businesses?
Running a small website with a calendar booking link just sounds much easier, cheaper, less error prone, and a better UX than running a voice LLM that is connected to a RAG and calendar. And I still don't think the technology around us has been built to support small websites or small businesses.
You're probably correct in that (edit: re-reading this... no, I'm not an AI - some people write this way and I tend to prefer to defuse potential arguments where two people are arguing for the same thing in a thread). Though I would think of the voice LLM system more as a smart answering machine rather than a complete replacement of calling the shop. The normal (preferred) course would be for one of the human staff there to pick up the phone... say before the 5th ring. On the 7th ring, it goes to voicemail... or to the voice LLM augmented voicemail.
If the LLM augmented voicemail is not much more than the business voicemail service that such places have now, is it enough value add?
That also implies other things - such as the capability to integrate with the calendar and appointment system which I'm still in the very hesitant side, but it could be an interesting service add on if it was properly limited.
If they can make the AI ajudicate the knowledge of the caller, I'm more than all for it.
"Hmm, this user seems to really understand network topology, better get him over to engineering"
vs.
"Hmm, the user doesn't know the difference between their router and their modem, I should help them identify the router then walk them through a power cycle".
Everything someone does is to give them something in return. Do you think HN would exist if not for the benefits of YC? Doesn't mean the blog post isn't interesting or helpful. Perhaps you dismiss the post because of your bias?
The poster has built something that, while technically interesting, is profoundly annoying as a user and deserves to be backlashed to prevent more of this kind of stuff to be built
Just how much effort even went into this? The project is LLM generated, the blog post is LLM generated. It produced something that is really annoying to deal with as a consumer. The last thing I want to talk with when calling a boutique garage is some AI receptionist.
Our local air conditioning/heating/plumbing place started routing their frontline answering service to an AI call service. It has an odd uncanny valley feeling to it that I simply don't trust. I chased down other points of contact until I got ahold of a person instead. I'd trust a phone tree with a voicemail box more.
Place I order takeout from using an AI assistant or tries to force you to order online. Neither is optimal when I'm trying to just order some takeout while I'm driving home from work.
But if you say "talk to a manager" it'll still force a human to answer, which is the only thing I ever do.
I think the biggest thing is to not give it access to anything like a shell (obviously), limit the call length, and give it a hangup command.
Then you tell it to just not answer off the wall questions etc. and if you are using a good model it will resist casual attempts.
I don't see being able to ask nonsense questions as being a big deal for an average small business. But you could put a guardrail model in front to make it a lot harder if it was worth it.
in general these types of attacks are still difficult to solve, because there are a lot of different ways they can be formulated. llm based security is still and unknown, but mostly i have seen people using intermediary steps to parse question intent and return canned responses if the question seems outside the intended modality.
I just called, chat bot is not even used yet. This is the worst tech demo ive seen on HN. New coders will be replaced by AI because they rather write articles and be streamers.
If you didn't have a sibling to do it for you free/cheap, I wonder how many months of a human receptionist (or service) the fee to build (and maintain) such a thing would cover.
It's also just easier. When I needed a service for my car (and I didn't already have an established shop where to take it), I just wrote what I was looking for once and emailed the same thing to multiple different places at once.
If I had to call four different places and spend five minutes on the phone with each shop, that'd eat up my entire lunch time.
I built something similar and learned a lot about how useful a “receptionist” (advisor) is vs something that just immediately sends the user to the shop asap
The foundational product truth is you win business by saying “oh you’re car is broken, come in right now” then an actual tech or manager does the sale
They admit a raw LLM would be dangerous and then proceed to use RAG... How is this any better? You cannot allow an LLM to generate the final outbound message if you are liable for what it says.
LLM to understand the question? Yes. Generate SQL maybe with Embeddings to look up answers? Yes. Generate the final response? No.
he hard part of voice AI agents is not building the first demo. It is handling the cases your training data did not cover. We run multi-agent systems daily and the pattern is always the same. Happy path works great on day one, then edge cases pile up for months. Having a clear escalation path to a human like you did is the right call
It’s a luxury to hire a human… but needed for these type of high value customers… just have the receptionist do other tasks a human can do while between calls… a clean shop is a functional shop ;)
No idea what `luxury` is doing here, but if I get an LLM receptionist, that ain't it.
This isn't to disparage the project - I think this sort of usage will become very common and a decent standard that produces good consumer surplus in terms of reduced costs etc. Especially impressive is that it's a DIY family-first implementation that seems to be working. It's great hacker work.
But be warned it will erode - in general - the luxury previously associated with your brand, and also turn some customers away entirely.
In America the normal term is "European", not "luxury".
It would be somewhat odd to specialize in both American and European luxury cars. It'd be significantly less odd to service a RR and a BMW 3er next to each other.
The actual company’s website says European, not luxury. My guess is that the OP wasn’t familiar with this distinction and just figured luxury means the same thing (the car shop is his brother’s as per the link.)
Admittedly I missed this distinction, but does the point still stand?
A BMW owner has fussier standards (on average) than a Toyota owner. The 'higher touch' a service you're trying to provide, the less welcome these interventions will be. If there's a distinction between a normal-car garage and a luxury-car garage, this probably comes down to some sort of licensing or certification from those luxury brands. Seems plausible to me that luxury brand X could stipulate things like availability of human contact points.
Re: not being a car mechanic, it's true, but I'll have you know that I replaced my own blower motor a few months ago :)
This isn’t accurate. Lots of types of people own older used European/luxury cars, it’s not just a rich people thing. Used BMWs especially aren’t that expensive compared to new cars.
This garage is for those older cars and has no connection to the actual manufacturers, so there is no licensing required.
Sure and just to add a funny anecdote here: a family member of mine used to own a 1980s Jaguar. Beautiful car and he probably paid $5,000 for it, but it had issues pretty much every month. His reasoning for keeping it was that the monthly repair costs were roughly equivalent to what a new car payment would be.
I agree with you on the dealership dynamics though.
> No idea what `luxury` is doing here, but if I get an LLM receptionist, that ain't it.
Bingo.
You can't get away with AI slop in a service oriented for wealthy customers.
The day my dealership starts answering me with AI they lose a customer 100%.
This solution screams "built by a tech bro with no idea about economics and marketing" which is the VC playbook into modernizing (and failing) businesses they don't understand.
> This solution screams "built by a tech bro with no idea about economics and marketing" which is the VC playbook into modernizing (and failing) businesses they don't understand.
I think you need to be better at self reflection. A tech bro who read a blog post and immediately accused the author of being "a tech bro with no idea about economics and marketing", and assumed that they didn't understand the business they built a software for.
As for AI for luxury services, you didn't look hard enough. See for example discussion of what Langham Hotel Group is doing with AI. Granted, nothing earth shattering:
You are right, but this also isn't a luxury mechanic shop. A luxury mechanic shop would be a place that services and customizes Bentleys, RRs, vintage Ferraris and similar. And to your point, the clientele there will be extremely unimpressed if they are asked to speak with an AI. A place like that is as much about being pampered by staff as about the workmanship.
OP's brother is by all accounts running a successful boutique workshop, but the various luxury annotations were completely unnecessary and just detract from the actual project. If they do want to lean into the luxury segment, being cheap with AI receptionists is not the way to go. They need to hire actual staff who has experience with HNW individuals.
I build software for contractors (plumbers, electricians, HVAC repair, etc) and they're some of the fastest adopters of these systems. I believe YC has even invested in a few.
Regarding the AI receptionists, from the calls I've listened to, there's still a bit of the uncanny valley/overlapping speech issues that I'm unsure are ever fixable just due to latency.
But for low margin businesses like contracting and (I imagine) auto repair where labor is your most expensive cost, these owners are doing anything they can to reduce their overhead.
I recently fired a plumber I was trying to contract for a five figure remodel job because his AI receptionist couldn't understand my address and therefore could not schedule the appointment. After that experience, I will not use a contractor that I cannot personally get in touch with until these systems improve demonstrably.
Cool use case: AI receptionists like this actually solve real-world bottlenecks, but the real test is how well they handle messy, unpredictable customer conversations.
Think about scaling this as you're building, your brother is just your first customer, make sure your service works with any number of customers out of the gate. I should be able to sign up for your service, point it at my website to ingest all my information, and have it ready to go.
A lot of incel attacks on this post, only because it's a woman. The same mf's who would be licking the balls of a guy who built a USD30k screen to show him the weather...
It was a nice read, thatlady.dev, and I'm happy for your experience - thank you!
Honestly great work, but this is very much something where the results matter more than the product. It ends without a single comment about whether it worked in Production.
How are they measuring the success rate? It seems like a project like this is a great time to dive into the problem and define the parameters of success. If only to inform how you design the ai’s presentation of the shop. Ie. how quickly does it get customer’s profile and discover their issue.
Thinking about my experiences with mechanics shops—with the exception of dealerships and larger operations—if you’re talking to a principal, the conversation is brief. It’s possible customers will respond positively if the bot is effective for scheduling and if the price communicated by phone, and the final price are somehow aligned to expectations.
If it’s anything like talking to ChatGPT via voice they’d definitely notice. And if it has anything like the failure modes it does, the OP’s brother is going to eat into a lot of the cost savings he’d get (vs using a human receptionist or even an outsourced receptionist) dealing with fires like the AI said my car would absolutely be done today.
A bunch of comments around the theme of "Is it worth it for _this_ use case?" misses the point of "Which of these techniques/lessons from the blog can I use for _my_ use case". I found the blog post a good starting point for some agentic stuff I want to do for my use case. Good on you for experimenting and good luck!
Ignore the expected negativity, many here have not used the latest gen of voice agents in development. Even if used as a router , prefer that to waiting to get through
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+...
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.
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.
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
Thanks for sharing the journey. What did you do in terms of security for the receptionist? I suspect someone can trick the agent through things like prompt injection.
The responses here remind me how much of a bubble we are in on HN. "I hang up when I realize I am talking to a bot", "I would rather email". I think a lot of non-tech-savvy people would rather not send an email or realize they are talking to a bot.
That made me laugh a bit as well. Definitely want to see some rigorous testing on that, I'd expect that on longer calls tha caller can make the ai say basically anything.
My mechanic has had an earpiece thing. After three rings it rings in his ear. Few customers realize the voice booking thier appointment is often elbow-deep in an engine.
He told me once that he would never have a dedicated receptionist. He has his mechanics rotate between the shop and the desk. They have the skills to give advice and prices over the phone, sometims ordering parts before the customer ever arrives.
> Wired up Claude for response generation — The retrieved documents get passed as context to Anthropic Claude (claude-sonnet-4-6) along with a strict system prompt: answer only from the knowledge base, keep responses short and conversational, and if you don’t know — say so and offer to take a message. No hallucinations allowed.
Claude will hallucinate anyway, sometimes.
I don't think there's any way around this other than a cli or MCP that says "press the 'play prerecorded .WAV file button that says the brake repair service info and prices.'"
Fair warning to those out there: I've had terrible experiences with AI receptionists so far, to the point that I refuse to do business with anyone who uses them.
I went through hell on a home remodel project 6 months ago around this stuff. I got a quote from a reputable plumber and went to schedule the rough-in session. An AI receptionist answered, got confused during the scheduling flow and could not understand my address, asking me to repeat it over and over. And it couldn't forward to me to human.
If I'm paying you tens of thousands of dollars for remodeling work, I damn well better be able to get in touch with you. I found a different contractor and never looked back.
I admire what you have done, but for a luxury experience, I do not want to talk to an AI that just tells me what is already on the website. If I have gotten to the point where I am calling you, its because I couldn’t find an answer to my question on the website in the first place.
I think we can solve this as a society by just making it clear that if you put an AI between you and your customers, you are absolutely bound by anything it offers them.
1. Unless you have a recent job that matches the exact same repair/service, you have incorrectly estimated the cost of the repair. In some states, this matters a lot and will cost the shop money. Unless your LLM only quotes for labor in sane amounts for diagnostic and nothing else, you’re only adding noise. This is a disservice to the client and the shop owner. The client now has an inaccurate quote for work and the shop will get a reputation for being inaccurate in quoting work.
2. Let’s say that you manage to get the exact same job twice. Your machine now needs to source parts. Parts may have been in stock yesterday. The might be out of stock now. If they are in stock, you need to retotal the price since prices are dynamic. Did you teach the agent how to source parts? What rules does it have for sourcing used parts?
3. New jobs can’t be quoted. Even if you taught the machine how to calculate book time and margins, it still has to find the right parts. If your shop does high end work, you know how much of a pain in the ass this is. Also remember that some work requires nonobvious parts - like fluids if you need to remove a part in the way of your goal.
4. The only area I see this being useful in is pickup. The shop can mark a car as done and the LLM can call to inform the client that they can come at a preset, unchanging time to get the vehicle. If the vehicle is staying overnight, the LLM can call with a progress update.
Finally, I’d like to note that this sort of dev work goes beyond hubris. It’s dangerous. The more we assume we know without verifying, the greater the risk. In this case, the dev is risking someone else’s livelihood.
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