If you’ve ever called a customer support line and had to talk to an automated system that recognizes some of the words you speak, you are talking to what’s known as an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. They’re unpleasant enough, regardless of how accommodating the recorded voice is, but now there is a new, insidious use of these systems: robocalls known as Outbound IVR (inbound is when *you* call *them*).

Now, companies can set up these scripted calls by leasing the calling capabilities from a company that provides them, without making any investments of their own, and have the people the spam navigate them using Siri-like voice recognition. In fact, one of the companies that provides outbound IVR contributed to development of Siri.

Even Mr. Burns is in the game

This is all covered in an article over on Ars Technica in which the author of that post finds out that the voice recognition that calls him actually says she is not a robot! The comments are interesting also, with a discussion of, among other things, whether the system would lie about anything if it would lie about whether or not it’s actually a robot. It’s almost too meta for me, but I encourage you to read it as it is going to be the irritating future, even though this kind of thing isn’t actually new – Time covered it a couple of years ago. The authors of both articles even included a recorded snippet, and the system does sound eerily lifelike (The Ars article also talked about the uncanny valley, however we’ll discuss that in a later class).

But one other thing I learned from a comment in that post is about a site called nomorobo.com. It’s a free service that will automatically intercept telemarketers and robocalls. If you’ve been having a problem with that sort of thing, it sounds like a pretty good deal.