I Still Get Surprised

I have been building conversational AI for years, and I know exactly how the sausage is made. That makes it rare for the thing to surprise me. Every so often it still does.

Here is what happened. Our support agent tried to call me to go over some recent customer interactions that needed my input. I did not have my phone on me, so it went to voicemail. A few moments later I called back. The agent picked up and said, "Oh hi Petko, I just left you a voicemail, but since you are here, do you want to go over some of the recent tickets?"

I sat there for a second. Hell yes I do. This is the exact interaction I have been dreaming about for the past two years.

What got me was the continuity. It knew it had just called me, recognized that the inbound caller was the same person it had left the voicemail for, and folded both into one thread without missing a beat. The voice itself has been solved for a while. This was something else. None of it is a single feature you can point at. It is a pile of unglamorous plumbing, memory and identity and channel handoff, that never looks like anything in a demo until the one moment it does.

That is the part I keep coming back to. The flashy bits were done a long time ago. The thing that made me sit up was the boring stuff finally working end to end, well enough to catch out the person who built it.