Don’t get bot hurt.

Bot Talk

Meta gives its AI agent a human backup

Apparently, that includes talking on the phone.

Meta has been testing a human backup for Muse, its new AI agent designed to do things on your behalf, allowing some phone requests to be handed to trained call center workers, according to internal company posts reviewed by 404 Media.

Muse can make calls to businesses on a user's behalf. During the internal test, some requests were instead routed to actual humans who made the calls.

Which means we have now automated calling a human by hiring another human to call the human.

The future is here.

Please hold.

Human x Bot

There's a human in the loop

The funny part is that the human backup might actually make the bot better.

Phone calls are messy. Businesses put people on hold. Conversations go off script. Sometimes getting something done still requires two humans to talk to each other.

And from the user's side, that may be exactly the appeal.

You don't necessarily care whether the bot made the call itself, handed it to another system or found a person who could finish the job. You asked it to do something because you didn't want to do it.

But the experiment raised another question inside Meta.

According to 404 Media, employees questioned whether users would know when their request had been handed from Muse to a human worker. In one internal exchange, an employee said the tester didn't realize a human had handled the call until afterward.

That's where the relationship changes.

We're accustomed to being told when we're talking to a bot. Increasingly, we may also need to know when we're not.

A human fallback could make an AI agent considerably more useful. But if you're telling your bot why you need to dispute a bill, change a reservation or make some other awkward phone call you'd rather avoid, you may not expect another person to suddenly enter the conversation.

Final Bot Thought

The question isn't whether humans should help the bot.

It's whether the human should have to knock before coming in.