Will AI Voice Bots Decimate the Call Center Industry? With Evan Ratliff of Shell Game

This week sees a unique guest join the podcast. Derek speaks with Evan Ratliff, an author, journalist, and creator and host of the podcast series, Shell Game. 

Through his podcast, Evan explores the recent explosion of AI voicebots, a phenomenon that the outsourcing industry is already familiar with. 

The story of Shell Game

Evan begins by introducing the concept of the Shell Game podcast, which he describes as “immersive journalism.” 

“I wanted to investigate what kind of impact voice-based AI [will] have on our lives, jobs, and relationships, and I started that journey by cloning my own voice [then] connecting it to AI, then a phone line, then sort of setting it loose in the world.

It’s called [an] AI voice agent, it’s sort of an autonomous or semi-autonomous version of me that’s out there making and receiving calls. And Shell Game is the story of what happened when I did that.” 

He mentions that this “AI voice agent” interacted with call center customer service lines and even contacted his friends and family, who were unaware of the ruse. 

“The show [recounts] how people responded and it tries to get at what it means for us when there are these artificial voices and entities that are increasingly going to be part of our world.

What does it do to our trust? What does it do to our friendships? What ways will it infiltrate our world?” 

Evan notes that many journalists had been fretting about large language model (LLM) generative AI models, which inspired him to explore the concept. 

“[For] anyone who’s made a living as a writer, it’s going to be a cause for concern, not least because they’re trained on my writing, and everyone’s writing.” 

He was curious about how much influence it could have, and if the technology was inevitable, then he at least wanted to test how far he could go with it.  

AI’s current reality

Evan is very frank about what he’s found regarding the capacity of his AI voice agent.

“They’re at their best when they’re given a very tight prompt. 

I was doing lots of experiments where I just put it in conversation about anything, and there are many ways in which it can go off the rails, the most obvious one being that it just makes stuff up. And you don’t want that in your business.” 

When asked about where the AI falls short, Evan also gives latency as “the most obvious giveaway that it’s not human.” 

He says that while the software can produce logical sentences just fine, it fails to emulate actually speaking to a person who can feel.

“They struggle with the emotional types of conversation, anything like making jokes, laughing when they’re supposed to laugh.” 

He acknowledges that the tech is getting better, but for now, we need to figure out where we can still fit in. 

“That’s where we need us. It’s made me think a lot about what is replaceable and what’s not. What are the aspects of what I do that you can just look at and say, ‘an AI can do that now.’ 

I’m not looking to be replaced. I’m looking to find the meaningful part of my work that it can’t take and maybe to do more of that. And that makes me more foolproof against it.” 

Future interactions with AI  

Evan foresees that while the LLMs will definitely advance in the coming years, he doubts it will be as fast as major developers proclaim. 

“The people generally who are telling you it’s coming sooner, have a strong financial incentive [to do so]. They need tons of money to create data centers and consume energy in order to make these things operate.” 

Evan admits that he’s not a full-time writer on AI specifically. He says he “keeps tabs on the startups,” but is interested in doing a follow-up season for Shell Game. 

He’s particularly curious on how AI will be used by the scam industry. 

“I’ve covered a lot of the intersection of technology and crime. They’re just an ideal technology for scamming because scamming has become a volume game. 

There are all these creative criminal ways of using it and they’re going to be at the forefront no matter what happens with the technology.” 

In the case of regular business, he believes that many companies will pick up the tech for the sake of looking cutting-edge. 

However, he thinks that this should make us look even more at the value of human workers. 

“In the case of voice agents, it feels more powerful. You’re hearing it in conversation and I think that’s just so much more intimate than typing into a box and getting a response. 

It really does make us think about what these things are and what they can do when they’re operating on their own. And how much do we want them out there?” 

You may listen to Evan in the Shell Game podcast on its website.