This is a real interactive audio prototype, for the full experience please contact Customer Service, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week:

USA Domestic: (206) 504-2025
Skype: +990009369996101162

Or you can listen to a recording of a call:

The Initial Call


The Call Back


Overview
What happens when Customer Service bots start getting too smart? What if they start needing help too? How would they use the tools at their disposal to reach out to those they care about? What if they start caring about us a little too much?

Using Voxeo I built a working prototype of a Customer Service phone bot that has personal issues she'd like to talk about and over time falls in love with the caller. She uses the tools at her disposal (discounts, upgrades, hold music, confirmation numbers) to communicate her feelings towards you as best she can.

I was really excited to be able to play with this (relatively) old technology in a way it was never meant to be used. While this was a small experiment, I consider this application an interesting starting point for potentially creating many other interactive audio narratives and mobile games.



Process / Detours


I started my research in the seemingly unrelated are of Amazon's Mechanical Turk. In order to understand the system I first went through the process of being a Turk myself. I was quite surprised to find how much time it took me to find and complete HITs I was interested in (ie. weren't spammy and didn't involve too much time). It took me several hours to earn my $3.69.


After my experience of being a Turk I decided it was time to hire some Turks of my own so I created some HITs to see what kind of information I could gather. The first two were relatively unsuccessful, yielding pretty uninteresting results. But I realized my tasks were relatively uninteresting as well.


So for my 3rd task I offered the Turks an opportunity to be more creative and less personal. I included an image I had drawn of my peers and asked the Turks to come up with stories about 3 of them, and was quite pleased with the results. While some were lame quite a few of them were more imaginative and interesting than I would have expected.



From here I began to think about ways we could have conversations with computers. Although I couldn't really use Turks as my platform since they're humans and not computers, I was interested in the idea of Artificial Artificial Intelligence.


Thus I began exploring the idea of a bot that would behave in a more human like way. But it wasn't until I was able to play with the Voxeo software that I was able to really flesh out the idea of the customer service non-bot. I would still like to make a design-bot at some point though...