This is very interesting. One thing I wondered about the per-minute pricing is how to keep a phone agent like this from being kept on the phone in order to run up a bill for a company using it. It'd be very inexpensive to make many automated calls to an AI bot like the dentist receptionist in the demo, and to just play a recording of someone asking questions designed to keep the bot on the phone.
As a customer of a service like Retell (though of course not specific to Retell itself), how might one go about setting up rules to keep a phone conversation from going on for too long? At 17¢ per minute, a 6-minute call will cost just over $1, or about $10 per hour. Assuming the AI receptionist can take calls outside of business hours (which would be a nice thing for a business to offer), then such a malicious/time-wasting caller could start at closing time (5pm) and continue nonstop until opening time the next day (8am), with that 15 hour span costing the business $150 for billable AI time. If the receptionist is available on weekends (from Friday at 5pm until Monday at 8am), that's a 63-hour stretch of time, or $630. And if the phone system can handle 10 calls in parallel, the dentist could come in Monday morning to an AI receptionist bill of over $6,300 for a single weekend (63 hours × $10 per hour × 10 lines).
This is in no way a reflection on Retell (I think the service is compelling and the usage-based pricing is fair, and with that being the only cost, it's approachable and easy for people to try out). The problem of when to end a call is one I hadn't considered until now. Of course you could waste the time of a human receptionist who is being paid an hourly wage by the business, but that receptionist is going to hang up on you when it becomes clear you're just wasting their time. But an AI bot may not know when to hang up, or may be prevented from doing so by its programming if the human (or recording) on the other end of the line is asking it not to hang up. You could say it shouldn't ever take more than five minutes to book a dentist appointment, but what if the person has questions about the available dental procedures, or what if it's a person who can't hear well or a non-native speaker who has trouble understanding and needs the receptionist to repeat certain things? A human can handle that easily, but it seems difficult to program limits like this in a phone system.
This can be handled with function calling and other features in LLM. We support the input signal of closing the call, and you can have your rule-based (timer) system or LLM-based end call functionality and use that to hang up.
I use PrinceXML for converting long HTML into PDFs and haven’t had trouble with large documents, though I don’t know if we’re in the same ballpark in terms of file size or element count. It’s expensive but is a one-time purchase (and I think it’s free to use personally and to evaluate). You can also use it indirectly through DocRaptor (basically a PrinceXML SaaS with an API), though I’ve never tried it.
The overall size is not that big. The problem is that the html contains lots of small <div>s. But yeah I didn't bother trying any paid services. I probably should have.
I’ve had copy fail for whatever reason (maybe a bug, maybe I didn’t press C all the way) and then pasted into a terminal window. Nothing bad has happened, but it certainly could have.
While I don’t paste in place of my copy, I do use Cmd+Ctrl+V to paste in Terminal (which escapes all “special” characters with a backslash) to avoid trouble.
From Apple’s support page on how to revive or restore after a failed upgrade [1]:
> A supported USB-C to USB-C charge cable, such as the one sold by Apple (may not be available in all countries or regions) or a supported USB-A to USB-C cable
> The USB-C cable must support both power and data. Thunderbolt 3 cables aren’t supported.
The reason creationists push so hard against the teaching of evolution is that it fundamentally discredits their entire theology. It’s not just about the origin story.
If there wasn’t a literal Adam and Eve, then Adam and Eve never sinned by eating fruit from the wrong tree, and thus they never passed that sin down to all of humanity, meaning we aren’t all born with “original sin” for which we need to be forgiven and saved from being sent to hell when we die.
Nothing about Evolution disproves Adam and Eve. If an all powerful person is in the story, it's a theological and metaphysical question how Evolution and Creation fit together.
It's also kind of a boring question because there's no experiment we could run to explain how creation miracles worked. It's definitely a fountain of controversy, though.
> without religion, there is no such thing as morality.
Would you agree that non-human animals aren’t religious? Because we see moral behavior in animals. For example [1]:
> In another experiment with rats, researchers find that if a rat is given the choice between two containers—one holding chocolate and one holding a trapped rat who appears to be suffering—the rat will try to help the suffering rat first before seeking the chocolate. Experiments like these show that animals make moral choices and that their behavior cannot be explained through natural selection alone.
There are lots of other examples, like animals that call out to warn their group of an approaching predator, placing themselves at higher risk.
Also, it seems like you’re arguing that an “external” moral code is The Only Way but then excusing people in biblical times for owning slaves because “that was a long time ago.” But shouldn’t their supposed access to this special moral code have been sufficient to conclude that owning humans as property is immoral?
> You wouldn't even be able to reason that murder is evil.
This is just downright silly. As a rational, thinking person, it’s easy to reason why murdering fellow human beings is not good.
> the Bible teaches the very opposite of sexism
Anyone can search for “sexism in the bible” to see what it has to say in its own words. For convenience, here’s one such link [2].
> without a higher power, we have no grounding for our morality.
This might be more convincing if we had empirical evidence that this “higher power” even exists and could discern (and thus agree on) what it wants and why what it wants is good.
As a customer of a service like Retell (though of course not specific to Retell itself), how might one go about setting up rules to keep a phone conversation from going on for too long? At 17¢ per minute, a 6-minute call will cost just over $1, or about $10 per hour. Assuming the AI receptionist can take calls outside of business hours (which would be a nice thing for a business to offer), then such a malicious/time-wasting caller could start at closing time (5pm) and continue nonstop until opening time the next day (8am), with that 15 hour span costing the business $150 for billable AI time. If the receptionist is available on weekends (from Friday at 5pm until Monday at 8am), that's a 63-hour stretch of time, or $630. And if the phone system can handle 10 calls in parallel, the dentist could come in Monday morning to an AI receptionist bill of over $6,300 for a single weekend (63 hours × $10 per hour × 10 lines).
This is in no way a reflection on Retell (I think the service is compelling and the usage-based pricing is fair, and with that being the only cost, it's approachable and easy for people to try out). The problem of when to end a call is one I hadn't considered until now. Of course you could waste the time of a human receptionist who is being paid an hourly wage by the business, but that receptionist is going to hang up on you when it becomes clear you're just wasting their time. But an AI bot may not know when to hang up, or may be prevented from doing so by its programming if the human (or recording) on the other end of the line is asking it not to hang up. You could say it shouldn't ever take more than five minutes to book a dentist appointment, but what if the person has questions about the available dental procedures, or what if it's a person who can't hear well or a non-native speaker who has trouble understanding and needs the receptionist to repeat certain things? A human can handle that easily, but it seems difficult to program limits like this in a phone system.