I spent the morning chatting to a robot!?
I spent the morning chatting to a robot!? It’s a +31 number that rings. Which is Netherlands, where my girlfriend lives, so I was eagerly expecting her sweet voice, but got something just a tad far to the right.
“Hi, are you Sean (heavy Taiwanese/American combination used with perfect prose) Lange (not so good this time but sounding like Bernhard so ok…)?”, goes the female voice on the other end of the line.
“Yeah”, slowly figuring it’s not my girl.
The voice goes on, “I am something-something from Horizon Investments based in Tokyo…”
Ok, so two strikes already; firstly I am not Shaaan Langer, and secondly the number rang out of The Netherlands. But I like to play these games, so long as they are not extracting any juice from me. ie. bank details, ID, credit card…which are the obvious, but then there are the hidden – income bracket group, occupation, family details, financial details…this is the juice they (the baddies on the far Right) use, to build profiles of us. This information they can then use to target us with their wares.
And then the punch line – “So what exactly do you do at MYDO Fishing?”. Out the park! How the hell they know that? My suspicions were well aroused now.
“Dogsbody.”, replied I suspiciously. She laughed nicely and said, “I don’t understand?”. “Oh”, I said, “ok, I am the owner and marketing manager right now.” As I haplessly divulged more company information.
They already knew my number, my name, and where I work. One of my jobs anyway. They knew a lot about me. Obviously an easy task since we are all, all over the interweb. And now they were profiling me with every word I was saying. I had admitted I was the owner. That we had a few staff. That we were manufacturers. That we an active business with a possible chance of investment outlook.
After a while it started getting ugly – “So, Shaan, would you be interested in an investment opportunity of $10 000?”
“Nah, I’m from a small town in Africa lady. I am not interested in investing $1. But how is the weather outside?”. And I repeated the exact question a few times. Over and over. “But how is the weather outside?”.
She started laughing and responding – “I don’t understand?”, but each time, exactly the same, this could have gone for years. It’s what we call a loop and is the vulnerability point of many AI applications.
Gathering of information, and manipulating programmatically on the spot and in an instant, is in our faces right now. The future of marketing banditry is here. There are new technologies on the block. They take potential customers very, very seriously. Programmatically marching into your life. With other programmes researching beforehand specifically, they are given a profile of you to work with. Populating databases with the right questions. Very right questions. Delivered in a theatric environment. Discussed and tuned. Trying to win your trust.
These flow charts must be incredibly complex although it is not much progression to take an existing telesales clerks flow chart and automate with Articial Intelligence. These guys literally climb into your mind with vague mention of riches to be earned, sweet voices, and confusing accents. They control much of your attention during the call. They paint a world with theatrics and send it to you via an entertaining fresh and perfect voice to imagine where they are and what they are doing. What they look like. These are all strategies, or tricks, to be exact. Using people with different accents as the target. Appealing to all kinds of emotions – being analysed by software produced by a team of shrinks making on the fly decisions. Millions per second kind of thing.
The resources for AI powered speech robots to be used in sales applications have existed a while now. It’s just been a matter of time before this happened. Imagine the cost of sale savings per target? Instead of a living breathing breeding sales person, you buy a programme of the shelf, and double click!
It’s not all bad, conditional marketing has been around for ages. But when it starts calling you up with a robot and engaging you in your valuable time and they don’t even know you, is. It really is. And when they start asking the exact right questions from a robot programmed with artificial intelligence start specifically focused on perfecting the manipulation of people via prose. Appealing to emotions. Painting them up. Extracting information. Age of desperately aggressive marketing tactics.
Anyway, I started to play the game and turned it around, asking this woman personal questions, and telling her she was a robot.
Same reply. An eerily innocent and genuine sounding laugh. Over and over again.
So I left her in cyberspace laughing. And wrote this story.
Whistlebower!
Then the phone rang again, and trues nuts, she tried two more times. Eventually I got mal and hung up twice.
The phone rang again. 15 minutes into the story. Also from Netherlands. A young cheerful Indian sounding chap, asking the exact same questions. Saying the exact same things.
At least I got a story out of it. Imagine how many people they hit in a day? Gethousands.
Don’t be one of them!
Unless they are selling Mydos! 🙂
