I very often listen to Classic FM in the car. It may be annoying with their stupid jingles (“Ahh, relaxing classics with Classic FM” – grrrrr), but at least the music is good. The adverts are a bit of a pain, but they seem somewhat less irritating than the poposity of Radio 3.
Occasionally though, they’re interesting. The other day there was an advert by Octopus energy, proclaiming they were better than everybody else because you always got to speak to a real person. That sounds good to me, because I seem to spend far too much time in call queues being told my call is very important to ‘them’, when clearly it isn’t because if it was they’d have more people to answer.
This advert was then followed by a message from the NHS, who were proudly telling us that in order to reduce call times and overall efficiency they were going to introduce AI systems to answer the telephones in their GP practices.
Lets think about this. The private sector, having tried to make automated call answering systems work, have given up and agreed with the customers that they’re a bad idea. Meanwhile mandarins in the NHS have bought into the idea that AI is the going to transform the way we all work and, presumably, lead us into utopia.
I smell another expensive pulic sector scandal just around the corner!
We’ve already had experience of an AI answerbot at a GP practice. It was impossible to access the care required because the machine didn’t understand the concept of calling on someone else’s behalf (an elderly relative in this instance). I reckon they will spend more man-hours trying to sort out the mess than using real people in the first place.