Original story
Sociology Today - 3.2.2011
Artificial personalities clear gridlock in videotelephony services - employees lobby for limitations and conditions
In the last two or three years the use of artificial personalities has spread into several fields. In videophone service functions they have only been in operation for a couple of months, but already the harsh critical reaction has surprised many analysts.
The artificial personalities used to man videophone service switchboards are autodidactic programmes designed specifically for this task. The basic configuration is carried out in the manufacturing plant prior to delivery. The programme learns in the workplace, by listening to calls arriving at the service desks, since in the majority of services almost all questions are standard enquiries. After a fairly lengthy acclimatisation period the artificial personality learns to recognize stock questions, however they may be phrased. It also learns how to respond with follow-up questions to determine details that may be necessary, and sets its onscreen expression to match the individual situation - showing compassion, worry, determination, etc. as required. Artificial personalities have been taken up by vidiphone service providers primarily on cost grounds, as they are cheap to buy and run. Equally, it has now become difficult to find sufficiently service-minded staff to fill the vacancies.
One example is offered by the Glasgow-based dietary specialists Health and You PLC, who launched vidiphone counselling services 11 months ago using human operators. The company had great trouble attracting staff, the lines were undermanned, and from the outset there were long waiting-times and complaints from customers reached a point where the company’s image was beginning to suffer. Health and You turned instead to MacPeach, and ordered 120 of the company’s ARTISAN artificial personae. They have now gone through basic training, and the first started work yesterday.
The response has been very mixed. Health and You are satisfied with the way the experiment has gone so far, and are hoping to recoup some of the losses of earlier months, but employee organizations have demanded that the use of APs - as they have been called - should be subject to a number of conditions and restrictions. The most significant condition, and in fact a relatively long-established demand, is that companies should reduce AP strength on the workforce when the employment situation worsens. Unions have also called for companies to pay a form of social welfare contribution for the use of artificial personalities, and that this would be set aside to cover redundancy settlements in the case of downsizing, or if the company goes into liquidation.
Interestingly, the public reaction has also varied greatly. Some people are simply happy that they can get through more quickly, while others complain that in certain instances the AP does not understand the question, particularly if the caller has a thick Glaswegian accent. In these cases, the customer has to wait until a member of the human staff becomes free to answer the query. Some clients have grumbled that the artificial personalities do not understand humour or irony, but will lock up for several minutes trying to parse the caller’s enquiry and find a suitable behavioural response model from their files.
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