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.
keiferski 19 minutes ago [-]
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.
pschastain 14 minutes ago [-]
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.
keiferski 8 minutes ago [-]
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.)
pschastain 4 minutes ago [-]
I strongly suspect the use of "luxury" here has more to do with the text being written by an AI than OP being confused.
epolanski 33 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
short_sells_poo 28 minutes ago [-]
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.
JasonADrury 18 minutes ago [-]
The blog post was written by AI. "luxury" is one of the adjectives AI likes to use a lot.
pbmonster 33 minutes ago [-]
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...
simianwords 16 minutes ago [-]
Completely agree. I think the whole thing can fit in context.
jbverschoor 3 minutes ago [-]
Everytime I read or hear "the brain", my brain instantly shuts off.
faronel 9 minutes ago [-]
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!
zdkaster 20 seconds ago [-]
Agreed. Typical HN.
mamonster 22 minutes ago [-]
>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.
maccard 17 minutes ago [-]
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.
truetraveller 13 minutes ago [-]
£150/mo for each? Do these receptionists actually answer? Has he "tested" them with test calls? Any recommended site to get this?
mamonster 8 minutes ago [-]
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.
tehwebguy 6 minutes ago [-]
Plus if he’s too slammed to answer the phone he’s too slammed to take on the missing work, most likely.
keiferski 4 minutes ago [-]
That’s not true at all, for any service profession. A barber that stops to answer the phone ever two minutes isn’t cutting hair very efficiently.
jorisboris 16 minutes ago [-]
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.
dismalpedigree 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
wartywhoa23 36 minutes ago [-]
Even at a barebones mechanic shop, I'd wave goodbye and go search one with humans at the reception.
yuppiepuppie 23 minutes ago [-]
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.
robotswantdata 20 minutes ago [-]
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
netsharc 3 minutes ago [-]
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+...
QuadmasterXLII 7 minutes ago [-]
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
simianwords 18 minutes ago [-]
Why not gpt voice directly instead of elevenlabs for voice and sonnet for intelligence?
laurentiurad 36 minutes ago [-]
clanker != luxury, quite the opposite
moritonal 20 minutes ago [-]
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.
komali2 17 minutes ago [-]
> 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.'"
pschastain 18 minutes ago [-]
This is an LLM generated slop post.
aricooperdavis 22 minutes ago [-]
"No hallucinations allowed" :')
AKSaathwik 1 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Bombthecat 37 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
FlowPagesVael 31 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 11:23:32 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I appreciated your post and have some takeaways around text formatting for TTS in my own projects. Thanks!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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+...
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.'"