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MORE tech jobs probably cut at Apple. swell.

you can not repair an iPhone or an Apple silicon Mac at home. your at Apples mercy.

right to repair too expensive and your still at apples mercy for serialized parts that need to be activated to work.

Isn't Apple the only major tech company to NOT have cut jobs? They've only paused new hires?
 
MORE tech jobs probably cut at Apple. swell.

you can not repair an iPhone or an Apple silicon Mac at home. your at Apples mercy.

right to repair too expensive and your still at apples mercy for serialized parts that need to be activated to work.
Apple remain one of very few tech companies to not instigate redundancies so far through this period of layoffs. Some contractors didn't get kept on, but they weren't internal Apple staff.
 
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Hoping that the customer support quality does not reduce due to this. Expecting to see Apple use AI across their software this year.
Apple’s support is totally bullcrap these days. The advisors basically give you the same answers that you can look up on their support website. So no wonder spple wants to replace them with a chatbot. I mean it’s alright if you are lazy to look for dome basic info yourself, but any query of technical nature is just pure hell to go over with them. This used to be so much better experience in pre-covid years.
 
It sounds like a great idea since this is not user facing but just internally serving as a better search engine for the sometimes really dumb employees as it seems.. I like the idea that the engine is giving them all info from a knowlebase where all cases that they ever encountered is stored.
 
Then there should be a massive price cut and a (partial) refund for existing customers.
 
I guess after years of off-shoring tech support to other countries, American tech companies have moved to "off-shoring" it to AI? 🤖
 
Isn't Apple the only major tech company to NOT have cut jobs? They've only paused new hires?
They've laid off a few people in their retail sector, but other than that, yeah: that's it. I suppose if you want to call contractors as "employees," then I guess you can say they've laid off employees, but I struggle to agree with that argument.
 
So I'm supposed to pay for AppleCare and receive "support" from an untrained rep who just types my issue into a chatbot and repeats whatever it says? How about providing support to paying customers from a knowledgable and qualified person? I could just ask Ask myself, or better yet, google search user experience forums and get better results for free.
 
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This is actually pretty smart. it’s a limited set of information so less likely to hallucinate, and being trained on complex, sometimes difficult information, such as a knowledge base, seems like the perfect use for a AI “search” tool. And having advisors review the responses before sharing with a customer reduces the chances of giving wrong information even more.
 


Apple is internally testing a new ChatGPT-like generative AI tool that will enable employees to offer faster technical support going forward.

Apple-Support-App-General-Feature.jpg

Apple recently launched a pilot program that provides select AppleCare support advisors with access to a new tool called "Ask" that can automatically generate responses to technical questions they receive from customers, according to information obtained by MacRumors. Advisors can then relay the info to customers in online chats or on the phone.

"Ask" will automatically respond to a query with relevant information from Apple's internal knowledge base, and advisors can rate an answer as "helpful" or "unhelpful." Advisors can ask up to five follow-up questions per topic. Apple said it plans to make the tool available to more advisors in the future, after collecting feedback.

Apple encourages participating advisors to use "Ask" before using traditional search methods or consulting a senior advisor for info, and it says the tool is useful for solving complex or unfamiliar issues. As the tool is linked to Apple's internal knowledge base, the company ensures that the responses are factual, traceable, and useful.

An example of a query that "Ask" can respond to: "A customer is unable to update their device to iOS 13.7. What can be done?"

Apple is expected to adopt generative AI in a major way this year. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said iOS 18 will include many new generative AI features across Siri, Spotlight, Messages, Health, Numbers, Pages, Keynote, and more, and he was first to report that the AppleCare team would use generative AI to speed up customer support. This is the first time that details about Apple's internal "Ask" tool have been reported.

On an earnings call earlier this month, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company was working on generative AI and would share details "later this year." iOS 18 is expected to be announced at Apple's annual developers conference WWDC in June, and the update should be released to all users with a compatible iPhone in September.

Generative AI surged in popularity in late 2022 when OpenAI released ChatGPT, a chatbot that can respond to text and voice prompts. The chatbot is trained on large language models, allowing it to respond like a human. OpenAI has also developed tools that can automatically generate images and videos based on text prompts.

Article Link: AppleCare Support Advisors Testing New ChatGPT-Like Tool 'Ask
 
I hope this is optional, I worked for Apple for about 5 years and love it. There wasn’t any scripps just a push to always use your knowledge base, but if you got the issue resolved was the most important part and to document how you got there so other agents knew what you did which I loved.
 


Apple is internally testing a new ChatGPT-like generative AI tool that will enable employees to offer faster technical support going forward.

Apple-Support-App-General-Feature.jpg

Apple recently launched a pilot program that provides select AppleCare support advisors with access to a new tool called "Ask" that can automatically generate responses to technical questions they receive from customers, according to information obtained by MacRumors. Advisors can then relay the info to customers in online chats or on the phone.

"Ask" will automatically respond to a query with relevant information from Apple's internal knowledge base, and advisors can rate an answer as "helpful" or "unhelpful." Advisors can ask up to five follow-up questions per topic. Apple said it plans to make the tool available to more advisors in the future, after collecting feedback.

Apple encourages participating advisors to use "Ask" before using traditional search methods or consulting a senior advisor for info, and it says the tool is useful for solving complex or unfamiliar issues. As the tool is linked to Apple's internal knowledge base, the company ensures that the responses are factual, traceable, and useful.

An example of a query that "Ask" can respond to: "A customer is unable to update their device to iOS 13.7. What can be done?"

Apple is expected to adopt generative AI in a major way this year. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said iOS 18 will include many new generative AI features across Siri, Spotlight, Messages, Health, Numbers, Pages, Keynote, and more, and he was first to report that the AppleCare team would use generative AI to speed up customer support. This is the first time that details about Apple's internal "Ask" tool have been reported.

On an earnings call earlier this month, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company was working on generative AI and would share details "later this year." iOS 18 is expected to be announced at Apple's annual developers conference WWDC in June, and the update should be released to all users with a compatible iPhone in September.

Generative AI surged in popularity in late 2022 when OpenAI released ChatGPT, a chatbot that can respond to text and voice prompts. The chatbot is trained on large language models, allowing it to respond like a human. OpenAI has also developed tools that can automatically generate images and videos based on text prompts.

Article Link: AppleCare Support Advisors Testing New ChatGPT-Like Tool 'Ask'
And so the decline of AppleCare continues...
 
Why don't they just bite the bullet and link/pay to Reddit? I get so much more useful info from them than any Google search. AI searches are interesting, they have helped me formulate some medical appeals with citations so I won't say they are useless. But for general and tech questions I seem to get the best answers from real live people on Reddit.
 
They've laid off a few people in their retail sector, but other than that, yeah: that's it. I suppose if you want to call contractors as "employees," then I guess you can say they've laid off employees, but I struggle to agree with that argument.
Off topic slightly, but the IRS has a whole set of rules that help (?) differentiate between who is a contractor and who is an employee, such as where the work is done, who supplies the tools, how frequently the worker does the work, etc.
 
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This is probably similar to NVIDIA's "Chat With RTX", which is basically just an intelligent search engine that can answer questions based on the documents you provide. It can't create anything new. It's pretty cool.
“Just the facts, ma’am”
Yeah, not sure why this is called “AI”.
Because it’s pretending to be intelligent but isn’t. At least that’s my reading of the “Artificial” part.
 
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