[LINK] Number's up for call centres

[Rick Welykochy]

Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote:

> > The call centre industry's huge growth is about to be stunted by
> > the creeping introduction of natural voice recognition technology,
> > which allows computers to understand human language.

Too bad call centre growth wasn't stunted by customer dissatisfaction.
One of my pet peeves is the call centre on-hold message saying "your
call is important to us ..." for twenty or thirty minutes.  [Odd ... that
never seemd to happen ten years ago when call centres didn't exist,
but trained staff who knew the business did - and answered YOUR call
within the first few rings]

Um ... voice recog. ain't gonna help clear up call queues, unless
they introduce thousands of more incoming lines to the call centre.
Also, I'd like to know what happens when the hapless caller has
navigated the voice recog menu-driven system. Surely, at some point,
a human bean is required to actually answer the questions being poised?!

Also: what is the difference (in time and efficiency) between a human
bean and a pooter answering the phone? The limiting factor here is
the speed of conversation.

Voice recog is one thing, but we are a couple of episodes of 2001: A Space
Odyssey away from software actually comprehending the semantics of a question
and intelligently formulating a response. HAL - your job is safe, for the
moment.

All flames from enlightened AI enthusiasts welcomed ;-)


Cheers
Rick W

--
Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services Pty Limited
"Tired of being a crash test dummy for Microsoft? Try Linux"