Americans are fielding millions of calls from bright, energetic telemarketers, but what they don’t know is that they’re talking to machines. 99% of the people do not know that the agent just shifted from pre-recorded to a live voice and back to pre-recorded audio. All these different measures are part of making the human-cyborg conversation feel “natural,” even though it is anything but.

the title is just linkbait, and the author had to throw in the obligatory “creepy” (we’re supposed to be scared by recorded voices now? what is this, 1860?), but it is still fairly interesting.

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