If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it
About a week ago, my home Internet (AT&T Fiber) went from the ~1 Gbps I pay for down to about 100 Mbps (see how I monitor my home Internet with a Pi). It wasn't too inconvenient, and I considered waiting it out to see if the speed recovered at some point, because latency was fine.
But as you can see around 7/7 on that graph, the 100 Mbps went down to about eight, and that's the point where my wife starts noticing how slow the Internet is. Action level.
So I fired up AT&T's support chat. I'm a programmer, I can usually find ways around the wily ways of chatbots.
Except AT&T's AI-powered chatbot seems to have a fiendish tendency to equate 'WiFi' with 'Internet', no doubt due to so many people thinking they are one and the same.
We were stuck in that loop for about 5 minutes.
It looks like you're having trouble with your WiFi.
No.
After working a few different angles, I finally 'spammed 0'1 by entering some variation of 'connect me to a support rep'.
I'll cut to the chase—after repeating some variation of that about 8 times, eventually I got queued up in the 20 minute line to a human support rep.
Unfortunately for me, the human support rep, like so many in the industry, promptly ignored the data I provided in my first chat message to him2, and told me switching WiFi channels on the device (on which WiFi is currently disabled completely) would solve my issue. At no cost.
Maybe I should welcome our AI overlords?
In the old days of phone support, if you got stuck in the automated menus, you could resort to spamming '0', and in most systems that weren't set up by nefarious managerial overlords, that would get you to a human. Eventually. ↩︎
The entire contents of my message, prior to his turned-off-WiFi channel twiddling: "Hello! I just received and installed the new AT&T router/fiber modem, and ... the Internet speed is just as slow as before. I pay for 1 Gbps symmetric, and I'm getting 8 Mbps down and 6 Mbps up. On 6/28, the average connection speed went from 1 Gbps down to 100 Mbps. On 7/8 the average speed went from 100 Mbps to 8 Mbps. This is all measured both on the device at the fiber, and through a separate monitor I have wired into the 1 Gbps network." ↩︎
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