You don't need quality or flexibility for an AI demo.
Hand crafting a voice agent to schedule simple appointments for a barber in San Francisco where the caller is in a quiet environment, is a one day exercise in prompt engineering.
Building a voice agent to schedule real appointments (on a real calendar of a working business) for real customers, for any business type, in any city: significantly more difficult. Real customers can be on a bad cell connection, have background noise, or worse, there's somebody in the background having another conversation.
Building a working agent isn't the hard part of building a real world agent. It's establishing human and offline evals, identifying loss patterns, hill climbing, capturing and processing user feedback, doing hacks to deal with model limitations, learning how an agent-driven conversation has to be subtly different from a real human conversation, and so on.
Comments
You don't need quality or flexibility for an AI demo.
Hand crafting a voice agent to schedule simple appointments for a barber in San Francisco where the caller is in a quiet environment, is a one day exercise in prompt engineering.
Building a voice agent to schedule real appointments (on a real calendar of a working business) for real customers, for any business type, in any city: significantly more difficult. Real customers can be on a bad cell connection, have background noise, or worse, there's somebody in the background having another conversation.
Building a working agent isn't the hard part of building a real world agent. It's establishing human and offline evals, identifying loss patterns, hill climbing, capturing and processing user feedback, doing hacks to deal with model limitations, learning how an agent-driven conversation has to be subtly different from a real human conversation, and so on.