Is RAG even necessary here? Minimal information like a couple of price list with job times and opening hours should easily fit into any context window, right? It's not like he's dumping entire service manuals into the vector database here...
>and he’s losing thousands of dollars per month because he misses hundreds of calls per week. He’s under the hood all day. The phone rings, he can’t answer, the customer hangs up and calls someone else. That’s a lost job — sometimes a $450 brake service, sometimes a $2,000 engine repair — just gone because no one picked up.
How much does it cost to have an outsourced receptionist? Even if it is 500 a month if we are really talking about thousands of dollars per month lost your ROI is still crazy.
A good 'Service Writer' (the term you use for this job) isn't cheap and typically aren't outsourced. Usually because your (local) competition is going to be using them too. And also because customers aren't going to trust a person that is writing service for multiple shops.
That said, a good service writer is worth their weight in gold. Also, they are typically going to be the person you end up selling the business to when you retire. Most mechanics aren't good enough at the business side of things to actually buy, but service writers are.
I have a friend who runs a trade with an outsourced reception - they employ 3 full time people and the reception is about £150/mo for 9-5 manning of calls. He does the scheduling in the evenings.
If we take OP’s post at face value, presumably his brother is already at 100% capacity otherwise he wouldn’t be missing all these calls.
No - £150/mo for the service. I asked him and he said they take the calls, write up notes and he handles the callbacks/etc himself.
I don’t know if he’s “tested”, but he said he’s happy enough with the service. We don’t always have to AB test every possible option - sometimes good enough is good enough.
Well presumably 150 is what you pay to use the service, and they have like 100+ companies using it.
The model is exactly like Planet Fitness or similar gyms: It doesn't work if everyone visits at once, but you plan on most people using it once a week.
Yeah exactly - I don’t know how many calls he gets but it’s less than an amount to employ a full time person, but more than enough that it’s worth having someone to pick up a phone he can stay on the job.
I assume people are pissed off because its building something that people already hate and its a fully AI generated post that is jarring to read.
Nothing pisses people off faster than calling up and getting put on the line with a robot. Like if we're thinking about this problem and how to solve it we can look at other examples like a website with a booking form,call the mechanics cell directly, hire a receptionist or worst case outsource the receptionist to a booking agency.
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 poster has built something that, while technically interesting, is profoundly annoying as a user and deserves to be backlashed to prevent more of this kind of stuff to be built
Just how much effort even went into this? The project is LLM generated, the blog post is LLM generated. It produced something that is really annoying to deal with as a consumer. The last thing I want to talk with when calling a boutique garage is some AI receptionist.
At the moment I'm pretty inclined to hang up if I feel I'm wasting my time with a robot.
But maybe soon we will not even realise we speak to a robot, given the current speed of ai development.
I wonder how that will erode trust in calls. I moved from cold emailing and cold LinkedIn to cold calling because of the massive amounts of ai spam I have to compete with. But maybe cold calling will die soon as well if the robots emerge.
No idea what `luxury` is doing here, but if I get an LLM receptionist, that ain't it.
This isn't to disparage the project - I think this sort of usage will become very common and a decent standard that produces good consumer surplus in terms of reduced costs etc. Especially impressive is that it's a DIY family-first implementation that seems to be working. It's great hacker work.
But be warned it will erode - in general - the luxury previously associated with your brand, and also turn some customers away entirely.
In America the normal term is "European", not "luxury".
It would be somewhat odd to specialize in both American and European luxury cars. It'd be significantly less odd to service a RR and a BMW 3er next to each other.
The actual company’s website says European, not luxury. My guess is that the OP wasn’t familiar with this distinction and just figured luxury means the same thing (the car shop is his brother’s as per the link.)
Admittedly I missed this distinction, but does the point still stand?
A BMW owner has fussier standards (on average) than a Toyota owner. The 'higher touch' a service you're trying to provide, the less welcome these interventions will be. If there's a distinction between a normal-car garage and a luxury-car garage, this probably comes down to some sort of licensing or certification from those luxury brands. Seems plausible to me that luxury brand X could stipulate things like availability of human contact points.
Re: not being a car mechanic, it's true, but I'll have you know that I replaced my own blower motor a few months ago :)
This isn’t accurate. Lots of types of people own older used European/luxury cars, it’s not just a rich people thing. Used BMWs especially aren’t that expensive compared to new cars.
This garage is for those older cars and has no connection to the actual manufacturers, so there is no licensing required.
Sure and just to add a funny anecdote here: a family member of mine used to own a 1980s Jaguar. Beautiful car and he probably paid $5,000 for it, but it had issues pretty much every month. His reasoning for keeping it was that the monthly repair costs were roughly equivalent to what a new car payment would be.
I agree with you on the dealership dynamics though.
> No idea what `luxury` is doing here, but if I get an LLM receptionist, that ain't it.
Bingo.
You can't get away with AI slop in a service oriented for wealthy customers.
The day my dealership starts answering me with AI they lose a customer 100%.
This solution screams "built by a tech bro with no idea about economics and marketing" which is the VC playbook into modernizing (and failing) businesses they don't understand.
You are right, but this also isn't a luxury mechanic shop. A luxury mechanic shop would be a place that services and customizes Bentleys, RRs, vintage Ferraris and similar. And to your point, the clientele there will be extremely unimpressed if they are asked to speak with an AI. A place like that is as much about being pampered by staff as about the workmanship.
OP's brother is by all accounts running a successful boutique workshop, but the various luxury annotations were completely unnecessary and just detract from the actual project. If they do want to lean into the luxury segment, being cheap with AI receptionists is not the way to go. They need to hire actual staff who has experience with HNW individuals.
If it’s anything like talking to ChatGPT via voice they’d definitely notice. And if it has anything like the failure modes it does, the OP’s brother is going to eat into a lot of the cost savings he’d get (vs using a human receptionist or even an outsourced receptionist) dealing with fires like the AI said my car would absolutely be done today.
Ignore the expected negativity, many here have not used the latest gen of voice agents in development. Even if used as a router , prefer that to waiting to get through
I was agreeing with all the nay-saying comments, but yours made me see the idea as good. I guess the word "luxury" ruined it for OP.
But a speech-to-text and text-to-speech system that I know is "understanding" me would be great rather than waiting music. The shop could even sell it as "As a small shop, most of our employees are busy fixing cars, so we are using AI to help with calls" (Although then people who are anxious about AI stealing jobs might hang up). The robot can ask me what I need, and then say "So for [this service], the price would be..." (to tell the caller what it has understood).
If the AI can even look at gaps in the shop's schedule and set an appointment time, the customer might even be happy that they just spent a minute on the phone instead of 10+...
I would rather just be sent to a regular old answering machine. Dealing with an AI is dehumanizing. In almost every single case where I actually need to call a place, its because I need to talk to them about something an automated system like booking an appointment, can't handle.
brutal market for lemons: the last 100 times they heard robovoice on the phone they had a terrible experience, and any money you spend fixing this is wasted because the customer cant tell your robovoice is actually honest and capable of making commitments because they all sound perfectly confident and correct even the ones who know nothing and will promise anything
Honestly great work, but this is very much something where the results matter more than the product. It ends without a single comment about whether it worked in Production.
How are they measuring the success rate? It seems like a project like this is a great time to dive into the problem and define the parameters of success. If only to inform how you design the ai’s presentation of the shop. Ie. how quickly does it get customer’s profile and discover their issue.
Thinking about my experiences with mechanics shops—with the exception of dealerships and larger operations—if you’re talking to a principal, the conversation is brief. It’s possible customers will respond positively if the bot is effective for scheduling and if the price communicated by phone, and the final price are somehow aligned to expectations.
> Wired up Claude for response generation — The retrieved documents get passed as context to Anthropic Claude (claude-sonnet-4-6) along with a strict system prompt: answer only from the knowledge base, keep responses short and conversational, and if you don’t know — say so and offer to take a message. No hallucinations allowed.
Claude will hallucinate anyway, sometimes.
I don't think there's any way around this other than a cli or MCP that says "press the 'play prerecorded .WAV file button that says the brake repair service info and prices.'"
I think we can solve this as a society by just making it clear that if you put an AI between you and your customers, you are absolutely bound by anything it offers them.
I admire what you have done, but for a luxury experience, I do not want to talk to an AI that just tells me what is already on the website. If I have gotten to the point where I am calling you, its because I couldn’t find an answer to my question on the website in the first place.
Is RAG even necessary here? Minimal information like a couple of price list with job times and opening hours should easily fit into any context window, right? It's not like he's dumping entire service manuals into the vector database here...
Completely agree. I think the whole thing can fit in context.
>and he’s losing thousands of dollars per month because he misses hundreds of calls per week. He’s under the hood all day. The phone rings, he can’t answer, the customer hangs up and calls someone else. That’s a lost job — sometimes a $450 brake service, sometimes a $2,000 engine repair — just gone because no one picked up.
How much does it cost to have an outsourced receptionist? Even if it is 500 a month if we are really talking about thousands of dollars per month lost your ROI is still crazy.
A good 'Service Writer' (the term you use for this job) isn't cheap and typically aren't outsourced. Usually because your (local) competition is going to be using them too. And also because customers aren't going to trust a person that is writing service for multiple shops.
That said, a good service writer is worth their weight in gold. Also, they are typically going to be the person you end up selling the business to when you retire. Most mechanics aren't good enough at the business side of things to actually buy, but service writers are.
I have a friend who runs a trade with an outsourced reception - they employ 3 full time people and the reception is about £150/mo for 9-5 manning of calls. He does the scheduling in the evenings.
If we take OP’s post at face value, presumably his brother is already at 100% capacity otherwise he wouldn’t be missing all these calls.
£150/mo for each? Do these receptionists actually answer? Has he "tested" them with test calls? Any recommended site to get this?
No - £150/mo for the service. I asked him and he said they take the calls, write up notes and he handles the callbacks/etc himself.
I don’t know if he’s “tested”, but he said he’s happy enough with the service. We don’t always have to AB test every possible option - sometimes good enough is good enough.
Well presumably 150 is what you pay to use the service, and they have like 100+ companies using it.
The model is exactly like Planet Fitness or similar gyms: It doesn't work if everyone visits at once, but you plan on most people using it once a week.
Yeah exactly - I don’t know how many calls he gets but it’s less than an amount to employ a full time person, but more than enough that it’s worth having someone to pick up a phone he can stay on the job.
Plus if he’s too slammed to answer the phone he’s too slammed to take on the missing work, most likely.
That’s not true at all, for any service profession. A barber that stops to answer the phone every two minutes isn’t cutting hair very efficiently.
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 assume people are pissed off because its building something that people already hate and its a fully AI generated post that is jarring to read.
Nothing pisses people off faster than calling up and getting put on the line with a robot. Like if we're thinking about this problem and how to solve it we can look at other examples like a website with a booking form,call the mechanics cell directly, hire a receptionist or worst case outsource the receptionist to a booking agency.
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 poster has built something that, while technically interesting, is profoundly annoying as a user and deserves to be backlashed to prevent more of this kind of stuff to be built
Just how much effort even went into this? The project is LLM generated, the blog post is LLM generated. It produced something that is really annoying to deal with as a consumer. The last thing I want to talk with when calling a boutique garage is some AI receptionist.
Why should people be impressed by this?
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At the moment I'm pretty inclined to hang up if I feel I'm wasting my time with a robot.
But maybe soon we will not even realise we speak to a robot, given the current speed of ai development.
I wonder how that will erode trust in calls. I moved from cold emailing and cold LinkedIn to cold calling because of the massive amounts of ai spam I have to compete with. But maybe cold calling will die soon as well if the robots emerge.
No idea what `luxury` is doing here, but if I get an LLM receptionist, that ain't it.
This isn't to disparage the project - I think this sort of usage will become very common and a decent standard that produces good consumer surplus in terms of reduced costs etc. Especially impressive is that it's a DIY family-first implementation that seems to be working. It's great hacker work.
But be warned it will erode - in general - the luxury previously associated with your brand, and also turn some customers away entirely.
It means luxury car brands, not luxury service. This is right in the post.
I assume the Op, being a programmer and not a car mechanic, just assumed they mean the same thing.
The entire discussion here about how AI undercuts luxury brands has absolutely nothing to do with the actual post.
In America the normal term is "European", not "luxury".
It would be somewhat odd to specialize in both American and European luxury cars. It'd be significantly less odd to service a RR and a BMW 3er next to each other.
The actual company’s website says European, not luxury. My guess is that the OP wasn’t familiar with this distinction and just figured luxury means the same thing (the car shop is his brother’s as per the link.)
I strongly suspect the use of "luxury" here has more to do with the text being written by an AI than OP being confused.
Admittedly I missed this distinction, but does the point still stand?
A BMW owner has fussier standards (on average) than a Toyota owner. The 'higher touch' a service you're trying to provide, the less welcome these interventions will be. If there's a distinction between a normal-car garage and a luxury-car garage, this probably comes down to some sort of licensing or certification from those luxury brands. Seems plausible to me that luxury brand X could stipulate things like availability of human contact points.
Re: not being a car mechanic, it's true, but I'll have you know that I replaced my own blower motor a few months ago :)
This isn’t accurate. Lots of types of people own older used European/luxury cars, it’s not just a rich people thing. Used BMWs especially aren’t that expensive compared to new cars.
This garage is for those older cars and has no connection to the actual manufacturers, so there is no licensing required.
Appreciate the distinction. Probably 'the thing' I'm referring to applies more directly to dealership mechanics.
Sure and just to add a funny anecdote here: a family member of mine used to own a 1980s Jaguar. Beautiful car and he probably paid $5,000 for it, but it had issues pretty much every month. His reasoning for keeping it was that the monthly repair costs were roughly equivalent to what a new car payment would be.
I agree with you on the dealership dynamics though.
> No idea what `luxury` is doing here, but if I get an LLM receptionist, that ain't it.
Bingo.
You can't get away with AI slop in a service oriented for wealthy customers.
The day my dealership starts answering me with AI they lose a customer 100%.
This solution screams "built by a tech bro with no idea about economics and marketing" which is the VC playbook into modernizing (and failing) businesses they don't understand.
You are right, but this also isn't a luxury mechanic shop. A luxury mechanic shop would be a place that services and customizes Bentleys, RRs, vintage Ferraris and similar. And to your point, the clientele there will be extremely unimpressed if they are asked to speak with an AI. A place like that is as much about being pampered by staff as about the workmanship.
OP's brother is by all accounts running a successful boutique workshop, but the various luxury annotations were completely unnecessary and just detract from the actual project. If they do want to lean into the luxury segment, being cheap with AI receptionists is not the way to go. They need to hire actual staff who has experience with HNW individuals.
The blog post was written by AI. "luxury" is one of the adjectives AI likes to use a lot.
If the mechanic is under the hood all day, sounds like business is well and he can't support any more customers. Time to increase rates.
I understand the other comments in this post, I too would be allergic to this sort of experience - luxury or not.
However, does the regular "joe/jane" feel the same way? I imagine my mom or dad would most likely not notice or care if they did.
If it’s anything like talking to ChatGPT via voice they’d definitely notice. And if it has anything like the failure modes it does, the OP’s brother is going to eat into a lot of the cost savings he’d get (vs using a human receptionist or even an outsourced receptionist) dealing with fires like the AI said my car would absolutely be done today.
Everytime I read or hear "the brain", my brain instantly shuts off.
Ignore the expected negativity, many here have not used the latest gen of voice agents in development. Even if used as a router , prefer that to waiting to get through
I was agreeing with all the nay-saying comments, but yours made me see the idea as good. I guess the word "luxury" ruined it for OP.
But a speech-to-text and text-to-speech system that I know is "understanding" me would be great rather than waiting music. The shop could even sell it as "As a small shop, most of our employees are busy fixing cars, so we are using AI to help with calls" (Although then people who are anxious about AI stealing jobs might hang up). The robot can ask me what I need, and then say "So for [this service], the price would be..." (to tell the caller what it has understood).
If the AI can even look at gaps in the shop's schedule and set an appointment time, the customer might even be happy that they just spent a minute on the phone instead of 10+...
I would rather just be sent to a regular old answering machine. Dealing with an AI is dehumanizing. In almost every single case where I actually need to call a place, its because I need to talk to them about something an automated system like booking an appointment, can't handle.
Congrats..?
A friend of mine worked for a call center that did car rentals, old people would call them and ask to rent a car.
Maybe the AI system should have "Press 1 to talk to AI, press 2 to leave a message" so experts like you can press 2.
brutal market for lemons: the last 100 times they heard robovoice on the phone they had a terrible experience, and any money you spend fixing this is wasted because the customer cant tell your robovoice is actually honest and capable of making commitments because they all sound perfectly confident and correct even the ones who know nothing and will promise anything
Sounds like the typical dealer experience minus the ai
Why not gpt voice directly instead of elevenlabs for voice and sonnet for intelligence?
Honestly great work, but this is very much something where the results matter more than the product. It ends without a single comment about whether it worked in Production.
Great point.
How are they measuring the success rate? It seems like a project like this is a great time to dive into the problem and define the parameters of success. If only to inform how you design the ai’s presentation of the shop. Ie. how quickly does it get customer’s profile and discover their issue.
Thinking about my experiences with mechanics shops—with the exception of dealerships and larger operations—if you’re talking to a principal, the conversation is brief. It’s possible customers will respond positively if the bot is effective for scheduling and if the price communicated by phone, and the final price are somehow aligned to expectations.
clanker != luxury, quite the opposite
> Wired up Claude for response generation — The retrieved documents get passed as context to Anthropic Claude (claude-sonnet-4-6) along with a strict system prompt: answer only from the knowledge base, keep responses short and conversational, and if you don’t know — say so and offer to take a message. No hallucinations allowed.
Claude will hallucinate anyway, sometimes.
I don't think there's any way around this other than a cli or MCP that says "press the 'play prerecorded .WAV file button that says the brake repair service info and prices.'"
I think we can solve this as a society by just making it clear that if you put an AI between you and your customers, you are absolutely bound by anything it offers them.
I admire what you have done, but for a luxury experience, I do not want to talk to an AI that just tells me what is already on the website. If I have gotten to the point where I am calling you, its because I couldn’t find an answer to my question on the website in the first place.
Even at a barebones mechanic shop, I'd wave goodbye and go search one with humans at the reception.
"No hallucinations allowed" :')
This is an LLM generated slop post.
Not a single clip/recording of how this sounds?
Like CMON this is the bare minimum here.
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