Terminate these bots

摘要

Did holiday shopping - or post-holiday returns - find you, like me, cursing at a computer over the phone? If so, you were not alone. The growing number of customer-service lines with computerised speech systems spread little joy. Normally I try to avoid calling, but could find no alternative after a website botched a software order. The voice that greeted me identified itself as a computer, but sounded almost human, and I could hear a keyboard as I tried to explain the problem. For a moment, I was almost fooled into thinking a person was on the line, pretending to be a robot, but realised the simulated typing was too even to be real.