Voice nonrecognition

[unixronin]

It's not so much the strip, as the footnote.  Computer voice recognition is so bad that whenever I find myself talking to a robotic voice-recognition menu system, I immediately just start repeating "Just give me a human" until it gives up and forwards me to a human.  If I'm calling one of several potential sources for something, and I hit a voice-recognition menu system, I'll hang up immediately and try the next supplier.

Companies and government agencies deploy computer voice-recognition menu systems because they're convinced it'll save them money and let them reduce the number of humans they're paying.  But at the current state of the art, what it mostly does is lose them customers who are sick and tired of dealing with artifical stupids, and frustrate and enrage the people who don't have a choice about whether to use the AS.

Comments

[ganainm]

Actually, it does save organizations money. It doesn't recognize voice commands as well as a human can, but it recognizes most of them most of the time, which means an entire tier of support people can, uh, go look for more interesting jobs.

Sometimes that means the difference between providing a service and not providing it. The SF Bay area's 511 service uses voice recognition and can be maddeningly stupid sometimes, but most of the time it gives you up-to-date road information, for the routes you're interested in, for free. If it sometimes mistakes "Berkeley" for "Oakley," well, we're none of us perfect, and human operators can be annoying and stupid sometimes too, and if 511 had to employ humans, it wouldn't be there, not for free at any rate.

But that wasn't what made me want to post a comment. I wanted to mention that pattern recognition in both audio and video is one thing humans still do better than computers -- witness www.galaxyzoo.org/. 400 years of computer technology meets 65x10^6 years of primate wetware evolution -- and loses.

I find it comforting, myself. A cheap calculator can calculate a square root before I've even found a pencil; my Palm beats me at chess; but damn few computers can distinguish at a glance a spiral from an elliptical galaxy.

[unixronin]

I personally always consider it reassuring that, so far at least, there remain some jobs that can neither be practically offshored nor automated out of existence.