There has been a discussion lately on the Webdesign-L mailing list about the sorry state of customer support these days.
One list member posted this transcript of an incredibly frustrating chat with someone at MSN Tech Support. Read it; it’s like Kafka for the 21st century.
It’s probably just some overworked, underpaid guy at a call centre who isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. But what if…
What if it’s actually a chatbot?
The conversational style does remind me quite a bit of A.L.I.C.E.
True, there are some typos, but maybe they’re thrown in at random to divert suspicion. Could it be that it actually passed the Turing test?
Probably not. More than likely it’s just a human being endowed with only the most annoying and infuriating traits of an automaton. It’s not so much a case of passing the Turing test. More like failing the IQ test.