Beyond chat and voice: Realistic real-time video avatar with dynamic UI

[AbrahamJaffar]

As a software engineer, Imma be homeless in less than a year due to AI. So before AI comes for my job let me join forces with it to create something cool.

I looked around the market of AI and nobody has done the hard job of redesigning the UX beyond a chatbot or voice. Both are replacements, not true innovations. What if the user is too lazy to type? What if the user is too scared to call and give up their number? You have used blackberries of AI till now. Let me introduce you to the iPhone.

Introducing Samantha, (loom video demo) from caravatars.com

Samantha is a real-time realistic video agent that greets visitors on your website. It can dynamically change UI to fit queries from inventory, trade-in, financing and booking. Oh and unlike a voice AI call where the user can't see the info they are giving and chatbots where they have to type it manually. This tech breezes through everything like a BD person would. Except its faster than them and can actually show people their cars and options visually.

And the best part, the user consents clearly to talk to an AI, the expectation of talking to a human and the mistrust when AI replies is flipped directly on its head. Not to mention sidestepping the telemarketing laws entirely. Instead of getting a form filled and nurturing it. Nurturing happens before any information is ever committed with arguably the smoothest UX experience you could ask for. When you hold hand of a buyer through the process from step 1, there is no way they will buy from anyone else.

That was me being super excited about it. But we are at very early stages so skepticism and critical feedback is really needed. What do you think? Will it achieve results or just be another gimmick?

 

[MattCopley]

We built these almost 3 years ago and tabled the project. In the AI space you're going to encounter a lot of moments of "just because we can, does it mean we should?" My sense is shoppers want human connection more than another layer of automation... and it's hard to deliver a value proposition other than replacing humans and reducing institutional knowledge.

 

[AbrahamJaffar]

We built these almost 3 years ago and tabled the project. In the AI space you're going to encounter a lot of moments of "just because we can, does it mean we should?" My sense is shoppers want human connection more than another layer of automation... and it's hard to deliver a value proposition other than replacing humans and reducing institutional knowledge.

Thank you for your feedback, the value proposition for buyer is easier and more intuitive UX and for dealership is more and warmer leads.

Did you achieve this quality of responses and flow? the llm's were quite new back then and their tool calling ability was abysmal. Today you can setup a full audio visual journey of a user. Do you think that's simply not valuable and users won't like it?

 

[MattCopley]

Thank you for your feedback, the value proposition for buyer is easier and more intuitive UX and for dealership is more and warmer leads.

Did you achieve this quality of responses and flow? the llm's were quite new back then and their tool calling ability was abysmal. Today you can setup a full audio visual journey of a user. Do you think that's simply not valuable and users won't like it?

We had ours trained to do some pretty amazing stuff and had them grounded in a wide array of data. We're just trying to remain focused on how we amplify people vs replace them. If you look at engagement analysis broadly across social platforms people tend to prefer humans vs avatars, and we found the closer we got to a truly human experience it drove trust erosion with humans starting to question the synthetic experience. I imagine this will get traction and I'm not trying to dissuade you. These are rolling out in every business vertical right now and fairly commoditized in many... it just came down to an ethics question for us.