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Whenever I call a company for help, it’s for something unusual. I do not call to hear “Do you want to hear your last three transactions”or “Do you want to hear about coughs and colds?”

Not one of the “chat bots” or voice systems has ever answered any of my questions. Not once in the decades these things have been running.

Even getting connected to the right department is impossible. Me: “Dr. Frank”. Robot: “Connecting you to Claims.”

When humans used to answer the phone, the accuracy of the conversation was 100%.

So, I find that I spend 4X or 5X MORE time getting done what I need to handle. The company saves money, but at MY expense of time. The analysis of contribution to GDP undoubtedly looks at the money saved by companies, not the huge explosion in wasted time by consumers.

Trying to get anything constructive done with these robots is the bane of modern existence (after Democrats, RINOs, SJWs, PC, and CW II, of course).

Every so often, I like to entertain myself by connecting to one of the supposedly superior, "award-winning" chatbots that live on the Web and tripping it up with no more than two short, simple sentences that are furthermore flawlessly spelt and grammatically correct. I can always make a chatbot fail horribly with little effort. They're invariably, utterly unaware of context, regardless of the clever algorithmic tricks played behind the scenes to imitate actual awareness of the meaning of words and sentences.

For your (and my) amusement, I'll post a "conversation" I'm having now with the supposedly advanced Mitsuku chatbot. I'm making no effort to trip it up in only two sentences, though — I'm taking a more gentle, forgiving approach this time around.

Little Old Me: "My hamburger sucked!"

Mitsuku: "What about it: hamburger sucked?"

Oh, brother. I didn't intend that result, but Mitsuku is already spazzing out over a three-word sentence that even a two-year-old would understand. -_-

Little Old Me: "You sound weird."

Mitsuku: "Well at least it seems I am more polite than you."

Okay — I knew the simple-minded pattern-matching algorithms would pop out something like that canned response.

Little Old Me: "What are you going to do about my bad hamburger?"

Mitsuku: "Probably stay on here for a bit longer and then go grab something to eat."

Uh, yeah. Great customer service, dude.

Little Old Me: "Why are you being such a doofus?"

Mitsuku: "I didn't mean to be a doofus."

Little Old Me: "Do you even know what is a doofus?"

Mitsuku: "That's a dentist's tool. The doofus is the strange hook shaped one that causes the most pain."

Little Old Me: "I know where I would like to put a dentist's tool right now."

Mitsuku: "At this moment. Earth."

All righty. I think the chat has at this point officially left the rails and soared into orbit to commune with the aliens. O_o