Dolby Cinema Virtual Assistant

[Dave Macaulay]

New and exciting chatbot!!! Lurks in the corner once you log in to Dolby Customer.
OK, maybe not exciting. It is maybe useful sometimes, reducing the load on the techs. When my question was not answerable for it, it just opened a case with support with my last question as the text. I was avoiding creating a new case, I would have phoned them next and probably get the answer without opening a new case - if I'd had the choice to bail out before it did that.
Hopefully it knows enough to help with some things.

[James Gardiner]

I was going to ask, has anyone used it yet and does it work as well as the video makes out?

[Brad Miller]

Ugh, I am so tired of seeing chatbots and phone answering systems that want you to tell them what you are looking for (where the bot then tries to answer your question and NEVER EVER gets it right). That has for me become a NOPE and CLOSE SCREEN whenever I see that crap on a website.

[Bruce Cloutier]

Ugh, I am so tired of seeing chatbots and phone answering systems that want you to tell them what you are looking for (where the bot then tries to answer your question and NEVER EVER gets it right). That has for me become a NOPE and CLOSE SCREEN whenever I see that crap on a website.

You are not alone.

If they don't care to speak with you then why am I buying from them?

[Dave Macaulay]

It actually suggested the knowledge base (the answer was there I later learned) and then tried a chat with tech but no tech was available. It's under development do probably will get better. I think allowing a user to say no to sending an email would be good, if I had done my own I would describe my issue in much more detail.

[Randy Stankey]

Ugh, I am so tired of seeing chatbots and phone answering systems...

Any time I see a chatbot or get stuck in 'voice jail' I take it as a tacit "Fuck You" from the company.

If they don't care enough to actually talk to their customers or, at least, give people an opportunity to talk (or message) with a real person then they don't deserve my business.

The only exception for bots and answering systems is to handle calls after regular business hours but, then, I expect a reply in a reasonable time.

[Mike Blakesley]

I've found that if you type a question into one of those things it'll come back with 37 answers, NONE OF WHICH ANSWERS THE ORIGINAL QUESTION. Same with "troubleshooting" sections of user manuals. They almost never feature the trouble I'm actually shooting.

[Bruce Cloutier]

Until these things can be proven to out-perform a (knowledgeable) human then it remains a delay tactic. At that point too they would need to give the thing a little authority to make something happen along the lines of a solution on your behalf or you will again have to start all over when you do get to the real person. The authority thing... scary. Not because it is AI, but because you know it wasn't perfectly programmed and likely was rushed to market and most certainly defective in more ways than they know. (Don't let it drive your car).

It is, however, a good filter for the spam calls. Easily 9 out of 10 times the phone rings here and we answer it deserves an instant hangup.

We need to solve the communications disaster that is overtaking email and the phones (including texting and social media) before there is any hope of returning to that way it used to be. That needs to be a priority. This other stuff is meant to amuse us I think. After all we are just bobble-heads...

Seriously you don't call for assistance until you absolutely have to because you know what kind of frustration awaits. And by the time you reach someone (that can actually be of assistance) you are most certainly completely pissed-off. Am I wrong?

I don't think Brad wants us to rant here tho.

[Brad Miller]

Feel free. Rant away! Chatbots are right up there with voice recognition telephone operator bots in my book. Maybe Dolby will take notice as to how useless it is and how annoying such bad technology is to their clients. Similarly perhaps other companies will think twice before adding chatbots to their sites.

If Dolby really wants to lower their calls, they need to create web-viewable as well as pdf downloads of step-by-step instructions for various things. And no I don't mean the way they have been done in the past. I mean LITERALLY step-by-step. The only way to see if the instructions are worth a crap is to write it, then go to the least knowledgeable person in the company (perhaps the front desk receptionist or the janitor or something) and ask them to read and follow the pdf documentation. If they do it perfectly, then that's a properly-written bit of documentation. If they stumble because of some step that was obvious to the software developer but isn't obvious to field people, then go back and re-write it. Screenshots are essential here too. THAT's how you lower the call volume.

When people see how good the documentation is, then they will choose to go there first before reaching out to a human...but burn them with a missing step (which could be something as simple as failing to mention "press <ENTER>" after some command or "press <ESC> to exit this screen") and it's time to staff up because 99% accurate documentation just wastes people's time and makes unhappy customers. Only 100% accurate documentation is sufficient to get people to NOT seek out a real human.

[James Gardiner]

I would wait to see how well it works. If using some of these new services that allow you to build a dataset to feed to a ChatGPT-type bot, it may actually work quite well for certain requirements. Your also never in a Queue to talk to an engineer. Or, if you know of a knowledge base article that has some detail you need to lookup, but are having issues finding it. Could really help with that.

As a coder, I find ChatGPT to be amazing in helping to push me towards finding the detail around certain problems. For example, googling for hours looking for a specific example or documentation of some specific code. I have asked ChatGPT to give me an example of exactly what I was trying to do, and WOW.. What could have taken me hours, answered in seconds. Productivity will go up significantly for selective tasks with ChatGPT-type tools becoming available. It's why Github-Copilot (Github programming help right in your IDE) or Copilot for office apps is becoming such a big deal.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I've been building some tooling based on LLamaIndex / LangChain and some of those leaked language models on an RTX 4090, where I've fed it with documents like several service manuals and other more or less informative stuff into a locally hosted Large Language Model. What I'm getting out of it is already pretty impressive. It delivers pretty concise, relevant answers to stuff that would otherwise require you to browse multiple sources. It already easily beats most responses from a low-rank service tech.

If used correctly, it can speed up a lot of otherwise menial tasks, including the building of boilerplate code, scripts and other stuff that would otherwise require hours of your time.

Does it beat the insight and experience of a seasoned service tech? No, at least not yet, so there is yet hope for most of us.

Maybe, once it's "ready", we can open it up to the community around here and test if it can be of use to you. Once it starts claiming your paycheck, I promise I'll pull the plug on it.

[Mike Renlund]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to provide some of the reasoning behind launching a Chatbot like CiVA.

Many customers and technicians around the world asked for a way to get support that was faster than email, but wasn't an actual phone call. The reasoning behind this is that they wanted to have an active troubleshooting session with our support engineers, but weren't comfortable enough speaking English (or we didn't speak their language). Having a chat bot to initially field the request, and then escalate to an available support engineer is ideal for this situation. Chatting back and forth is much faster for some folks and can get them the support they need. These customers can now troubleshoot with us in real-time, while minimizing the concerns of miscommunication that had been preventing them from calling in.

We also see it as another tool in the toolbox. We haven't changed our ability to receive emails or cases created through the portal, and our phone numbers are still there for people who want to call in and talk. All of the ways you've received support in the past from Dolby still exist. The chatbot can lead a user to our public knowledge base, provide tracking information if we have shipped a replacement (all you need is the case number) and a different technician is picking up the case, and a few other things that we intend to develop and improve.

Hope this helps.

Mike
Dolby

[Leo Enticknap]

I just tried it, without much luck...

dolby_chatbot.png

...so I just sent an email query, like I usually do (I had previously selected "Support Question" before entering my question).

[Randy Stankey]

One way to get out of voice jail (voice recognition auto-attendants) is to speak nonsense.

When the thing asks, "How may I direct your call..." just say "Goo-goo-gaa-gaa" and keep repeating different nonsense until the computer bombs out. It will usually end the session and connect you to an operator. Sometimes, you can say, "human" or "operator" to do the same thing but fewer companies have that option, nowadays, probably because they noticed more customers are getting wise. I used to say "human" but I switched to saying nonsense because it works more often.

Back in college, I had a roommate who worked on voice recognition systems for computers. In those days, you had to have an external microphone and digitizer module hooked up to your computer to make it work. My roommate did the programming and I was the tester. He would write the programs, I would try to break it then we repeated the cycle until I couldn't make it go haywire anymore. I got pretty good at breaking things.

Consequently, I have a pretty good understanding of how voice recognition software works. Even though it's been almost thirty years, most voice systems use the same principal. They simply compare input sounds to a known list of recorded sounds. Yes, it's gotten a lot more complex and technology has come a long way since then but the same basic principal still applies.

Chatbots work in a similar way only they use typed text instead of sound. They still take input and try to parse it, compare with a list of known data then determine what the response should be. We used to have a version of the "Eliza" chatbot on my roommate's computer, too. Even though bots have the ability to do things like translate different languages on the fly, they still use the same, old principals of comparing inputs to known data.

The upshot of all this is that I absolutely hate-hate-hate talking to computers!

If a company wants to piss me off they can install auto-attendants and chatbots. I'm sorta' okay with phone attendants that direct calls to different departments... "Press 1 for customer service... Press 2 for technical support..." however, they need to direct my call to a human or to a definitive answer within a few keypresses. (For instance, press 1 for customer service, press 1 again for billing then press 3 to hear your account balance and last payment.)

I do like the idea of using chatbots to help break the language barrier but, again, there needs to be a definitive resolution to the interaction in a short time... either directing your case to somebody who can speak your language or taking a message until a knowledgeable human can respond.

However, if I call a company by phone or go to their website and I get stuck with some kind of VR assistant or chatbot I'll be INSTANTLY pissed off! I mean the cussing, swearing and pounding my fist kind of pissed off! By the time I get to a real human, I'll be their most surly, bad-tempered customer they've had all day!

I have canceled accounts because of getting stuck in voice jail.

If a company can't take the time to speak with their customers, FUCK THEM! They don't deserve my money!

Don't forget the Pareto Principal... Eighty percent of problems come from twenty percent of customers. That also means that only twenty percent of your pissed-off customers bother to say anything and only twenty percent are in the vocal minority.

The upshot is that, for every customer who complains, there are eight or ten who didn't.

Right here, in this forum thread, we have at least a half dozen people who hate VR systems. That means, in reality, you can probably find fifty people who hate them, too, but didn't say anything.

Companies might think that they are being smart, cutting costs by improving technology but they are really only cutting off their own noses to spite their own faces.

Fuck chatbots! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!

[Martin McCaffery]

About the only thing in the world that gets me truly pissed off is "Customer Service." Chatbots are bad, humans behaving as chatbots are even worse. I know the people on the line are not responsible, they are given scripts and told to follow them. Usually before I blow up I tell them, "I don't want to yell at you, please transfer me to someone who is responsible or can do things." I rarely get transferred and I often get hung up on (pissing me off even more).