HN user
The alternative here isn't talking to a person. The alternative is leaving a voicemail and praying for a callback. Likely, you don't even leave a voicemail and a match is not made.
Asking a business to hire a receptionist is probably a bit unlikely for small businesses in today's environment.
The amount of negative comments here to someone building something is incredible.
I appreciated your post and have some takeaways around text formatting for TTS in my own projects. Thanks!
I had a similar thought but challenged myself to think about the other side. Using this list many companies and thinking about those founded after 2012, because it takes a couple years to enter the mainstream, we can see that there's quite a bit of opportunity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_Internet_compa....
Social media for sure, but the entirety of AR/VR. AI, and not just GPTs. but recommendation, detection, sentiment, data mining are all things that are 'new'. We can also think about things like online banking or healthcare apps that didn't exist. I was still sending checks in 2014, and I certainly wasn't doing video visits with my doctor. As someone that is middle age, when I ask younger people they point out how much opportunity as a counterpoint to the cynicism I'm seeing here HN.
From the article as an example of what doesn't scale:
"...He was going through emails in his inbox, then responding to questions in the craigslist forums, and hopping onto his cellphone about once every ten minutes. Calls were quick and to the point "Hi, this is Craig Newmark from craigslist.org. We are having problems with a customer of your ISP and would like to discuss how we can remedy their bad behavior in our real estate forums". He was literally chasing down forum spammers one by one, sometimes taking five minutes per problem..."
Seems like it's possible but not feasible to build a pipeline to scale out that sort of behavior.