Considering an idea, don't have an opinion yet. Context is Google Duplex, which impersonates human behavior down to emulating umms. It's rude to impersonate humans with a machine. Is it also rude to demand small businesses install and understand REST endpoints to get business?

We know people hate dumb IVR (Interactive Voice Response). Operator Operator Operator is a thing. Would people hate smart IVR as much? Would they possibly like it more than dealing with a CSR on a rigid script?

We know we hate calling into an IVR. So a dumb IVR calling us would obviously be 100x as annoying (and this happens with some frequency, at least to me). But a business lives and dies on inbound. "Can I give you money" is a more welcome call than, like, other.

Again, don't have an opinion yet, just an array of incomplete elements.

I know tech has deployed a bunch of systems people hate, and another bunch of systems people would protest loudly if they disappeared tomorrow, and that there's overlap between the two. I wonder where Deep IVR fits into that, and I actually don't know.

One thing I'm considering: The "umms" aren't saying the false thing ("I am human") as much as the true thing being attempted ("You won't get zapped for saying a complicated thing to a machine, it is my responsibility to be as understanding as a human").

The thing we hate about speech recognition, and honestly not just, is the space of things that totally should work but for whatever obscure technical reason don't. Like, we have a mental model, and it breaks, and importantly it stays broken.