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It's creepy because it's pretending to be people. Phone trees suck, and now a phone tree is calling you and we don't expect phone trees to call us. Now you have

It's creepy because it's pretending to be people. Phone trees suck, and now a phone tree is calling you and we don't expect phone trees to call us. Now you have to wonder when you get a call wether you are talking to a person or a robot. At the minimum they should announce themselves.

nfoz 8y ago
Also, they recorded this call and are using it for their internal dataset and also sharing it publicly with hundreds of thousands of people. Should the recipient be informed of this data collection, much less have a say in it?
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Either the calls given in the example were staged, permission was solicited outside the bounds of this call, or they did it outside of California's jurisdiction. Recording calls without both parties' consent in California is illegal.
baumandm 8y ago
If you can't tell, does it matter? The reason people don't like phone trees is not because they are robots. Rather, because they often make it difficult to get the help you need or reach the right department. If a live human read the script of a phone tree to you it would be equally (more?) infuriating. If I called a companies number and got a conversational bot masquerading as a person instead of a phone tree, that would be a dramatic improvement.
- tlb 8y ago
  Yes. Because if I'm having a bad day and I'm rude to the caller (not knowing it's a machine), I will feel guilt afterwards. The guilt will be unnecessary, because no human was offended. That may be a trivial case, but more generally our social contract is that we owe a duty of politeness and consideration to fellow humans. When you're interacting with another human, a big part of your brain is actively engaged in following social norms. By masquerading as human, machines co-opt this part of your brain and extract a duty that they don't deserve. I think every machine caller should be required to identify itself as such. Restaurants will still be happy to take reservations from them. If one calls me to sell me something, I can tell it where to go without any guilt.
- candiodari 8y ago
  The problem with phone trees is not that they suck at getting you to the right department, it's that the options required mostly aren't there. It's that it makes it soooo cheap for the company implementing the phone tree to waste your time just to improve the metrics of some low-level idiot manager at the company. Voice will make this a LOT worse, not better.

nfoz 8y ago

Also, they recorded this call and are using it for their internal dataset and also sharing it publicly with hundreds of thousands of people. Should the recipient be informed of this data collection, much less have a say in it?

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
Either the calls given in the example were staged, permission was solicited outside the bounds of this call, or they did it outside of California's jurisdiction. Recording calls without both parties' consent in California is illegal.

baumandm 8y ago

If you can't tell, does it matter? The reason people don't like phone trees is not because they are robots. Rather, because they often make it difficult to get the help you need or reach the right department. If a live human read the script of a phone tree to you it would be equally (more?) infuriating. If I called a companies number and got a conversational bot masquerading as a person instead of a phone tree, that would be a dramatic improvement.

tlb 8y ago
Yes. Because if I'm having a bad day and I'm rude to the caller (not knowing it's a machine), I will feel guilt afterwards. The guilt will be unnecessary, because no human was offended. That may be a trivial case, but more generally our social contract is that we owe a duty of politeness and consideration to fellow humans. When you're interacting with another human, a big part of your brain is actively engaged in following social norms. By masquerading as human, machines co-opt this part of your brain and extract a duty that they don't deserve. I think every machine caller should be required to identify itself as such. Restaurants will still be happy to take reservations from them. If one calls me to sell me something, I can tell it where to go without any guilt.
candiodari 8y ago
The problem with phone trees is not that they suck at getting you to the right department, it's that the options required mostly aren't there. It's that it makes it soooo cheap for the company implementing the phone tree to waste your time just to improve the metrics of some low-level idiot manager at the company. Voice will make this a LOT worse, not better.