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😺 Customer support, but it's actually helpful!

😺 Customer support, but it's actually helpful!

PLUS: you might be ordering from an AI at your favorite drive-thru

Noah Edelman & Pete Huang
August 11, 2023

Welcome, humans.

Just received an email that started with, “As an AI language model…”

… so I replied, “Talk to my Roomba, it handles my spam!” 🗑

Here’s what’s going on in the world of AI today:

PlayHT2.0 is a new amazing AI model that can “talk.”
Restaurants are already automating customer service.
Custom instructions are available for all ChatGPT users.
Academics are writing research papers with AI.

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Sam Altman: “AI Will Replace Customer Service Jobs First”.

Imagine ChatGPT, but it talks instead of types, with any emotion, any accent, and in any language.

Impossible?

Nope. We just described PlayHT2.0.

Trained on over a million hours of speech, this new AI model is like “a well-read individual who has spent over 500 years reading absorbing … audio clips,” say its creators.

It’s the best model text-to-speech model we’ve seen, right alongside ElevenLabs.

Not only do its AI voices sound exactly like a human, but they can sound exactly like YOU.

All it takes is 6 (six!) seconds of your voice, and voila: it can replicate you saying any sentence in any tone, be it happy, sad, or angry.

The use cases are endless, but here are two immediate ones:

Hyperpersonalized content. Imagine your favorite Netflix show but with every person hearing a slightly different script.
Customer support agents. We're talking about ones that are actually helpful, a far cry from the norm!

Customer support AIs are actually already here and in action. Read till the end to see if your favorite fast-food chain is already using AI to take your orders…

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Generative AI Will Help Service Businesses Automate Support.

America’s favorite fast-food chains have been some of the earliest adopters of AI technology. Anything to cut costs, eh?!

McDonald’s has been experimenting with AI ordering in its drive-thrus since 2019. Now, most food chains are testing customer support bots, including Wendy’s, Popeyes, Taco Bell, and our personal top pick: Panera Bread.

Text-to-speech models such as play.ht could give every small business a customer support bot with truly humanlike voices.

Here are two AI tools trying to automate support for any business:

Air AI. This new tool can have 10-40 minute-long phone calls and remembers everything.
Slang AI. This AI assistant manages your phone line and can respond to any inquiry about your business. And no, it doesn't resort to using slang like we do...

Around the Horn 🦄

More peer-reviewed scientific research papers are being written with AI.
Custom instructions are now available to all ChatGPT users (prompting tips).
How 25 language models stack up performing real-world, pragmatic tasks (spoiler: GPT-4 wins by a lot).
A great guide to understanding how Meta’s LLaMA-2 works and performs.
A roundup of all the AI mentions from Big Tech’s Q2 earnings this week.