Charles on… anything that comes along

Dug up another great article by Simon Caulkin over on the Observer’s business pages: To lose a customer, please press….

All great, and here’s the meat: Computers are great at routine and hopeless at variety. People, on the other hand, are wonderful at variety and bored and demoralised by routine. So what does IVR [interactive voice recognition] do? With the utmost perversity, it uses both people and computers for what they are worst at. It is therefore not surprising that it irritates the hell out of customers too - a full house of dysfunctionality..

More of his stuff via this Guardian archive search. I know, I know…

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• If your IP address is 208.252.68.66, your machine has a Trojan that's annoying me (23 September 2004; score: 140.49%)
• FUBAR on a Mac: Powergen's web site (24 September 2004; score: 53.88%)
• Incomplete web feeds, the bane of aggregated life (18 November 2005; score: 35.95%)

Remember all the fuss about those claims by Chatnannies? And how Jim Wightman, the person behind it, said he’d win the Loebner Prize (a Turing Test) this year? (It’s in the first link.)

Well, guess what. The list of this year’s entrants to the Loebner Prize is up. And… no Jim Wightman.

I wonder what the excuse will be this time?

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Factoring: test your speed! (6 September 2004; score: 46.3%)
• Patience, please.. (30 July 2005; score: 26.57%)
• "The world is likely to pass its maximum point of oil production in a matter of weeks" (16 December 2004; score: 25.67%)

I’ve previously commented on how aggregating isn’t as good as browsing (though I should mention that it’s a lot faster, in a world where we always seem to want to skim the surface). Now glassdog’s “What’s Wrong With: Feed Readers” goes into more detail about how things could be. I agree with him, though less angrily:

Why can’t I rank feeds or categories higher than others? Why can’t I rate items and let the cumulative ratings over time determine feed rankings? Why isn’t there some statistical combination of each of the above to put what I’m actually going to care about at the top of the list and the discussions about which syndication protocol is best at the bottom? Why isn’t there an archive, to throw useful-but-read items somewhere other than the to-do list and trash?.

And plenty more food for feed thoughts.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Netimperative: what's wrong with government telling us about technology (12 February 2005; score: 46.14%)
• Browsers vs aggregators: why browsing's better (25 August 2004; score: 45.88%)
• Unintended consequenceRSS (9 September 2004; score: 43.37%)