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I gave up on it all when Google released that feature that can call a phone number for you to book a table or cancel a service or whatever else it can all do.

I gave up on it all when Google released that feature that can call a phone number for you to book a table or cancel a service or whatever else it can all do. And then I realized that in a lot of cases the entity answering the phone on the other end would be a machine as well. So now you have 2 machines talking to each other in text-to-speech English over audio, then having to do speech-to-text on each others audio streams, and then natural language processing to understand the message etc. When all we needed instead was a simple API endpoint over the internet for the business where a machine could talk to the other machine with just a few bytes of information to convey the same information and process the same transaction. Instead we are wasting bandwidth and tons of cpu cycles and electricity making the machines emulate a human analog conversation.

sh34r 3y ago
The friction of the phone call was a feature, not a bug, from the service provider's perspective. They wanted to make it harder to cancel the service for obvious reasons. They wanted to make it harder to book a table (so you'd be less likely to no-show). It's 2023, there really aren't that many businesses left that don't have basic functionality online out of sheer incompetence. It's a deliberate, willful choice, seldom in the consumer's favor, and I'm all for disrupting the hell out of this. I'd rather waste compute cycles on this nonsense than human beings' time. Maybe in the not so distant future, the AI agents can have a shibboleth which cuts the human gobbledygook short, and reverts to speaking in dialup tones.