The post-human call centre

I have been playing with the Ster Kinekor booking engine just for the pure beauty of it. Ster Kinekor is one of the latest adopters of voice recognition technology and you can spend hours trawling through movie information and show times without ever needing to speak to a human being or punching a number.

It is far less frustrating to repeat the exact same command to a computer five times in a row than it is to tell the same story twice to three different human operators.

Phillip de Wet, Journalist, ITWeb

Oh joy! To be freed of the tyranny of surly call centre operators with accents so thick it can stop bullets and a need for speed bred of productivity monitoring that has heard of customer satisfaction but doesn`t hold with it.

For Homo Internetus, the call centre is the last bastion of human interaction. Especially in SA there is a limit to how much you can do online and eventually you are forced to phone somebody to order a new chequebook or buy a house. There is a far more severe limit on the amount of interaction possible by punching at your keypad, never mind the frustration it brings.

But the good men and women who are bringing voice recognition ever closer to perfection are on the brink of making the call centre devoid of life for good. If nobody has thought of erecting statues in their honour, now is the time to start designing.

Make no mistake; the systems are far from perfect. They require split-second timing, no background noise and the Queen`s British to recognise what you are trying to say. Yet somehow, it is far less frustrating to repeat the exact same command to a computer five times in a row than it is to tell the same story twice to three different human operators.

Even better, every time you phone back you are guaranteed to reach the same computer you spoke to the last time. Ever tried to achieve that with a call centre staffed by humans?

The post-human call centre is upon us, and I cannot imagine a better use for technology.

Oh, I have some neo-Luddite colleagues who find themselves unable to speak to a machine and tend to figure out the quickest way to get around the filters and immediately reach an operator. In my book, these technophobes are simply throwbacks unwilling to face the reality of technology advancement - it is no coincidence that they are all over 30.

For all its obvious worth and inevitability, the post-human call centre does raise some serious issues that will need to be addressed soon. Sure it will take some rather large advancements in artificial intelligence before you can oust the humans completely, but already less people are needed to man the telephones than before.

Even as the demand for call centres continues to increase, such technology will reduce the number of direct jobs it generates. How do we handle that in SA, where we are counting on hundreds of thousands of jobs created in help-desk hellholes?

Also, how long should companies accommodate my Luddite colleagues and keep humans on staff simply to amuse their primitive instincts?

However, there is one question that drowns out all these petty concerns. When, oh when, will all the voice recognition users in this country standardise on using that husky Cell C voice artist?