Holy Cow

[DrPizza]

I just had a call from HSBC bank offering protection services, yadda yadda yadda... I'm 90% certain that it wasn't a human being I was talking to, but it took almost 2 minutes before I was that sure. I'm amazed at how far the technology has come. I called microsoft's xbox site for tech support the other day (ring of death) and could very easily tell that the phone system was automated, almost to the point of being annoying. But this HSBC call... the only reason I suspect it wasn't a human is because the guy was too cheerful. But, it responded correctly to everything I said, even when I interupted it.

 

[Demon-Xanth]

There's been a few times where I've wanted the person on the other end of the line to stick me on the automated system.

 

[Madwand1]

It's much easier for humans to seem as if they're machines than the other way around. If I was trying to contest Turing's test, that's the approach I'd try first. (Of course, it's almost certain that Turing ruled out this approach.)

 

[Born2bwire]

Back in high school, I was in a stock investment club and we had some reps from Lucent come out to talk with us about what the company was doing (we had some of their stock and they had large offices in town). They showed off the automated telephone system that they were developing. That was one of the first systems that had voice recognition and the demo was Moviefone. That was back in the late nineties, maybe ten years ago. It's amazing how far the systems have come since then.