Thursday, February 7, 2013

I was fooled into thinking I was talking to a human being when it was just a pre-recorded human voice able to respond to my responses.

Edit update, April 10, 2019 3:59pm. Just wanted to point out that this Article about fake real voice sounding phone call solicitations was was written and posted eight months before Time Magazine covered the issue. end of update.

I was called by a company out of Minnesota called Stepping Stones Entertainment. They wanted to know if I was interested in supporting family entertainment films.

The person who originally called me said they would be less than a minute and asked me three yes or no questions. I then agreed to a call back the next day so that a representative could give me more information about their quality family entertainment films. 

Just as promised, I received a call the very next day. After a couple of minutes of conversation, I realized I was interacting with a cleverly constructed human voice that had been pre-recorded and was simply recognizing my yes and no responses and moving on to the next pre-recorded sales pitch, but all done in a very convincing interactive tone.

After I had my Soylent Green, "oh my gosh, its pre-recorded people talking to me," moment, I paid extra close attention to make sure my suspicion was correct. When the pre-recorded human "voice" heard me answer "no" to their final offer, I wanted to test my hypothesis that I was indeed talking to a human recorded voice. 

I asked the human recorded voice what they thought of the super bowl. The voice did not have an answer and simply responded, "What did you say"?

I asked again in as clear and concise voice as I could muster, "What did you think of the Super Bowl", and the voice still did not understand, and then quickly said goodbye and the line disconnected.
The rammifications of this pre-recorded human sales voice technology are damming beyond initial comprehension. 
It is one thing to have "Siri", a computer generated voice, respond to a human being. It is quite another to have one's time occupied by a pre-recorded human voice pretending to be a real human, and getting away with it and actually generating credit card sales!

Most Ponzie schemes eminate from the concept of, "If we could only ask enough people to purchase our product or service, and have it cost us as little as possible to communicate with them, we win".  

As bad as ponzie schemes can be at times, when one adds in that the product being pitched is digitally replicable at pennies per copy, it becomes a ponzie schemer's ultimate wet dream if they can digitally generate tens of thousands of sales call interactions automatically, by paying a human being to record their voice reading various script response combinations, once.

In the next few years there could be literally hundreds of thousands of actual living, breathing telephones sales people being replaced by  pre-recorded interactive human voices. 

Many times phone sales jobs can be so stressful to have that at first glance it might look like not such a bad idea to take the human being out of the equation, unless you happen to be that human being and like your job.

However, the bigger victims are going to be the american consumer, and eventually the worldwide consumer, who will have to wade through never ending and ever increasing pre-recorded interactive sales calls while the actual company spends virtually no money per call hawking their product or service. We will be fooled, and deluged, whether we like or not.

If you recently made fun of Notre Dame football player Manti Te'o for being tricked into a relationship with a fake girlfriend who didn't actually exist, your karma points may soon expire and you could find yourself being tricked by a real human voice.

Another few hundred thumbtacks thrown in front of the consumer in the ever cluttering freeway of life.

Please Consider signing the Debt Neutrality Petition I started on Change Dot Org. This petition gives millions of consumers a fair chance to pay down their debts by freezing the interest rate charges, penalties and fees once an alleged credit card or student loan default has occurred.

If you are planning on creating or broadcasting a commercial and want an objective, outsiders point of view about your commercial, contact Alessandro Machi about his consulting services at...
info at alexlogic.com
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