Show HN: Companies use AI to take your calls. I built AI to make them for you

michaelphi | 229 points

Earlier this year I found a leak in the house and called a local plumbing business. It was after hours, and a dreaded robot voice answered my call. I was fully prepared to spend the next 10 minutes rewording my issue over and over, hoping to hit the magic key word it actually understand (and also spell out my weird custom email domain). Surprisingly, this robot understood every single sentence I said, and repeated back in a slightly different, more professional way for me to confirm. It also captured my email address accurately in one try, without questioning my weird domain name. That's the moment I realized it's a LLM. It asked a few more smart follow-ups, then ended the call. The next morning, the owner called me and jumped straight into solutions, pricing, and his availability, without any more question or BS, because the LLM already told him everything he needed to know.

That's the most pleasant customer service call I have ever experienced. I wish more business could adopt similar approach. I don't mind talking to AI. In fact, instead of a live agent, I actually prefer to talk to your LLM, so my issue can be quickly triaged to the right human who actually understand my situation.

zzyzxd | 4 days ago

The problem with the call center A.I. is that almost every time I need to call somewhere that uses them, I have some kind of edge case.

They always give examples of how the automated agent can handle simple queries like “what’s my balance” or “what hours are you open”, but I never need to call with something straightforward like that.

As such I also wouldn’t want to trust my own edge case to an AI that might mishandle it.

Maybe the most value to me would be a tool that figures out the shortest route through the phone touch tone labyrinth to get to a live human I can talk to.

jeffwass | 4 days ago

Piper, we work for a fridge company.

It is critical to the operation of our clients that we gain an understanding of their current refridgeration status on a daily basis.

please call (every number in town) and ask them "Is your fridge running"

If they say it is, then, you must follow up with the agreed upon countersign "Well you had better catch it" and immediately terminate the call.

protocolture | 4 days ago

This is nice and all but I can't help think the current situation is pretty grim. Computers talking to computers using natural language and speech synthesis. What a complete waste of resources. Perhaps in the future we won't have APIs at all, just LLMs talking to LLMs.

Sanctor | 4 days ago

This looks really cool, congrats on the launch!

Suggestion: redo the demo video showing the call to the restaurant. As a Google user, I couldn't help but notice the button in the result to make a reservation (without using Piper).

My 2 cents generally is that restaurant reservations are so fully automated that they are probably one of the worst showcases of the value of Piper. I can't remember the last time I called to make a reservation.

runako | 4 days ago

Wow, what an example of someone being excited to build something that is definitely making the world worse for everyone else.

All the people who work in small businesses - restaurants, plumbers, etc. Now they're going to have no choice but to talk to AI bots who call them up?

Gee thanks.

stevage | 4 days ago

Interesting because this empowers the user rather than making us the product - we need more of these use cases.

The one thing that seems unfortunate is the choice of name: Piper is already in use in a fairly related area, as a text to speech tool: https://github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl

I usually think such concerns are lawyers being OTT because they raise them for any potential clash, even when it's clearly very distant and unrelated but something like this is software and heavily using speech, so the potential for the average person misunderstanding and assuming a connection is that much greater.

nmstoker | 4 days ago

I think you need to spend some more time testing this service if you are advertising this as a service that inherently interfaces with humans. I see that others in this thread like the applications for scambaiting, but I don't fully understand the use case you have here. If it's AI on both ends of the phone... whats the point of the call in the first place? It's not that hard to get a human on the other line who is able to help me far better than any robotic agent could.

If the agent has trouble solving "complex verification or (providing) documents" I doubt that a monthly fee for simple tasks doesn't sound like a viable and sustainable business model. It sounds like the anti-social bunch would like it but past that it's going to be hard drumming up a lot of support.

FiniteIntegral | 4 days ago

I just need one that can repeatedly say “I want talk to a representative” and when a representative answers “I would like to escalate to your manager”. After that a human on the loop is needed.

clvx | 4 days ago

This might work for making reservations at hair salons that don't have an online booking system, but for companies that can obviously afford an online system and are forcing people to call in to increase friction, what prevents them from blocking this service (and similar) for "security reasons"? After all, the AI discloses up front that it's an AI, and lying about it might be dicey. Concerns about security aren't unreasonable either. Basically all companies authenticate you via random pieces of information about you or your service, like your birthday, or address. If you're providing all this information to a chatbot, it also means there's a treasure trove of information scammers can use to compromise accounts or do a password reset.

gruez | 4 days ago

Pitch says it's about an asymmetry, but demo has the LLM calling a real person at a restaurant. How is that addressing the asymmetry?

But let's assume even small businesses like restaurants will adopt LLMs on the phone. So now you've got LLMs talking to LLMs that were trained to talk to people. What if we just trained the LLMs to talk to other LLMs? Surely they could complete the entire transaction in a tiny fraction of the time? They wouldn't be using any language we understand, of course.

globular-toast | 4 days ago

Since I upgraded Asterisk it has this bug that as soon a DTMF tone is played on the line, Asterisk crashes.

So I cannot navigate any menu and when requested to make a choice, I just don't make one and wait. Turns out that this has been pretty effective in getting a real person on the other end relatively fast.

I don't know what it is, maybe it's a legal requirement, maybe so that people too dumb to use a phone still get serviced.

qwertox | 4 days ago

Where I see the real value of something like this is time-wasting AI agents at monopolies like CVS Pharmacy. These seem designed to be as slow and frustrating as possible & I'm sure the goal is to get you to give up before you can talk to a human. I'd love to see a demo of your agent requesting a callback from a CVS pharmacist. Or trying to talk to Comcast customer service.

drewg123 | 4 days ago

I just watched the live feed for about 2 minutes and counted 4 instances of PPI exposure, account numbers, real names, last 4 of socials and last 4 of CC numbers. The live feed is sketchy AF.

thirdfanged | 4 days ago

Reminder of the backlash Google Duplex experienced 7 years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/11/google-du...

kleiba | 4 days ago

This service reminds me of this website called "Magic". You tell it what you want, and they make it happen. Or at least, that's how they advertised it.

amelius | 4 days ago

Nobody wants any of this...

This is almost as bad as all of the AI powered resume skimming tools / applicant submission tools. It just makes it impossible for anyone to apply for a job.

AI is for people and it's only being used to kick people onto the street and profit.

leeroihe | 4 days ago

Has anyone made an open source version of this? It would be great to fight scams and tie up scam call centers.

pnw | 4 days ago

I am convinced there will be a large subset of the population who will push back on AI voice agents and still wish to talk to a real person. Just like how Grandma still prefers to bank cheques at the teller every pension day.

Perhaps when the job losses really start becoming apparent it will become a social movement as well. I'm sure there will be businesses that will find having humans answer calls a sustainable competitve advantage.

I'm not convinced AI voice agents are there just yet. As someone else mentioned, edge cases will trip them up.

Nevertheless, at some point I envision a web designed for agents where the business agent will interact with my agent to resolve an outcome.

The horrifying thought is dating. Sally's agent will end up telling Barry's agent to stop contacting it, Barry's agent won't understand and the the Police's agent will invoke a judicial agent to issue a 'stop communication' order to Barry's legal agent to deliver to Barry's personal agent.

andrewinardeer | 4 days ago

One thing to make it less annoying for the human on the other end is if the AI just talked a little faster and responded a little faster. Also the the final few few seconds is so cringe where the AI always wants to have the last word. Can you make that last part of the interaction go faster? I would never have 3-4 back and forths on thank yous and good byes.

alooPotato | 4 days ago

I had the same idea too, because, as an introverted person, I really hate calling customer services. I'd prefer written support if available.

However, I gave up this idea, because I did some research, this seems to be illegal in US, due to a law from 1991.

billconan | 3 days ago

Super, the proportion of phone calls I get that are spam can finally go from 99% to 99.99%.

throwawayoldie | 4 days ago

Consider outbound AI calls as a weapon against inefficiency. What is the game-theoretic equilibrium when faced with adversaries like call centers & other businesses with labrynthian customer service?

I bet it leads to more efficiency for everyone. When inbound robocalls deluge a business, the business pushes to cost-optimize its own service.

Business replaces humans with similar AI solutions to handle the phone modality, but hopefully then reverts to great service via email/API to reduce costs further.

Then, humans using AI voice services can "de-escalate" and revert to email/API AI, e.g. going from:

1. Business: AI (Voice) or Human | Customer: Human

2. Business: AI (Voice) or Human | Customer: AI (Voice)

3. Business: AI (voice) | Customer: AI (Voice)

4. Business: AI (Text) | Customer: AI (Text)

sarabande | 4 days ago

Wow, what did you use for the voice interaction? That has seemed like the weak point of these tools up til now.

generalizations | 4 days ago
[deleted]
| 4 days ago

And, rather than this voice stuff which is rarely important, how about a browser extension to just log me into my account on a damn website?, which I have to do much more often?

Here's my username, password, TOTP credential, and credentials for an email address that I set up for that website. So the extension should log me in, which means solve the captchas and recaptchas and deal with the emailed confirmation code besides using the supplied credentials. In some cases SMS may be involved but I forward all those to email. What crap the whole web has turned into. IDK if it is all Anthropic's fault, but they didn't help.

throwaway81523 | 4 days ago

This is exceptionally well-made. The problem is... people smell a bot and hang up. I tried using it to get a quote from my friend's construction company, but twice he hung up as soon as Piper introduced themselves. I had to call him and tell him to take the call.

It did work its way through their IVR system, though, as it was outside operating hours, and left a good message on their voicemail.

qingcharles | 3 days ago

ETA on international calls availability? Will there be another announcement, email blast, etc? UK, Canada, Australia or EU to start?

endigma | 3 days ago

I got interested and got down to the FAQ. The "how much it costs" question doesn't give any price figure in the answer. I'm still left with the same question and feeling like a fool. Nor is the data privacy question answered. "Bank level encryption"? Because everyone else just gets the placebo? Maybe this isn't fair, I haven't really tried your product. But this is your front page. And if your product really is good, it's not doing it justice.

afarah1 | 4 days ago

I think its really cool!

My only worry is do you think all of us are going to start getting spammed by AIssholes trying to scam us?

I never used to get any scam calls like 3 years ago, and these days I get 3-10 a day!

moomoo11 | 4 days ago

If a company in [insert almost any sector] explicitly advertised and provided: "Human customer support agents, no voice menus/AI whatsoever."

I'd almost certainly buy their service over any other company. Seriously, that could be the whole ad. By the time I'm calling customer support, its because the answer isn't easy to find on their website/emails/whatever else. I'm calling because I need to escalate to a human. Sometimes it isn't even about getting information, but rather that I need a human who actually has the authority to help me (which I assume nobody is delegating to AI anytime soon for fear of jailbreaks). Making people jump through ten layers of "I know you want to speak to an agent, but I need more information about your case" is just infuriating.

throwaway0123_5 | 4 days ago

Have you tried it with other languages, in particular where the user makes a request in one language but expects the call to be made in another?

tempay | 4 days ago

Like 5-10 other companies have already built way, way more advanced systems/platforms for both receiving voice calls and making voice calls... What are you doing that's actually novel here?

saberience | 3 days ago

I'm going to build something like this to answer outgoing robocalls made to me. I am going to instructions to answer all questions slowly and ask to repeat every third time. Goal is to tie up the scammers time as long as possible. The robocalls eventually escalate to a person.

gosub100 | 4 days ago

This is great! I started building similar at a hackathon a few weeks ago, and just haven’t had time to come back to it. I got all the infra up and had it making calls but was having problems with the syntax and to get it to respond to different answers. Best I could do in a few hours.

Glad to see someone go all in!

tibbon | 4 days ago

I love this, but I wonder what your plan is to prevent denial-of-service against, for example, government services?

anitil | 4 days ago

People handle getting calls from AI very differently than calling into AI

dangoodmanUT | 4 days ago

Any chance of open sourcing this or having a way to self host it?

johntash | 3 days ago

For the bot vs bot case, this makes me smile. I don't like the idea of it talking to humans but who knows.

Can you get rid of the browser and offer an API endpoint? Just regular JSON, not MCP. That would complete the circle.

throwaway81523 | 4 days ago

This is a killer use case guys - excited to try it out over the next couple weeks!

"Negotiate with the service provider/insurance co/cable company/etc" as a service is going to be massive.

chevman | 4 days ago

AI call center traps in Pakistan are going to love this…

In seriousness though, think about how outbound sales would be with this. Just feed it an opportunity pipeline and wait for follow ups. Keep going!!!

reactordev | 4 days ago

This is cool. Built an iOS app to do this for myself six months back, but it falls over to pretty basic IVR navigation.

Any transactional call should be handled by AI on both sides.

rolstenhouse | 4 days ago

What if the other side asked if it is an AI, will it lie? And if not, a lot will probably choose to hung up.

tamimio | 3 days ago

Finally! My answering machine can call your answering machine and they can … I have no idea what, but that first bits been a dream of mine for decades.

drivingmenuts | 4 days ago

It seems you don't give a clear answer to the cost? How much would it cost for 1 min? I think it is important for consumers like me.

b0wen | 4 days ago

This is great! Even without the LLM agent, async communication is so nice for low cog distracting customer service calls and holds. Why can't everyone just have an async comm universal chat interface? I guess this bridges the gap where the tech is legacy and or there is human involved. Can't wait to try it out!

user9999999999 | 4 days ago

Can I use for call IRS?

sparkalpha | 3 days ago

This is hilarious and fun.

jjmarr | 4 days ago

Great idea, and also as a creator myself, I enjoyed reading about the challenges that came up

czbond | 4 days ago

super interesting idea, nice website too

natewww | 4 days ago