One Abnormal Girl

I’ve been following Lifehacker‘s articles for a while now. Seems to be just my kind of blog, bringing me new and cool ideas for using technology for neatness and efficiency. Recently one of their writers posted about Jott, which is a new(ish) Web service where you can call their toll-free number and speak a message either to yourself or someone in your Jott contacts, and Jott, after transcribing it to text, will text/e-mail your contact, or if you Jotted yourself, keep the note for you (or even in a folder if you tell it to).

More complicated than pencil and paper, yes, but I’m willing to bet we have our cell phones on us more often than pencil and paper, and I always have a hard time keeping those impromptu slips of paper safe for later retrieval. It’s also handy for keeping track of unposted expenses without you having to collect–and keep–receipts. And if you use Twitter, you can now avoid texting to the service and its many third-party applications (like Google Calendar and Remember the Milk) by using your free minutes to speak your appointment or task instead. Cool.

I was pretty intrigued by this service. Technology has come a long way, and I love anything that uses automation to make life just a little bit easier, or maybe just my idea of cooler. And its voice transcription was supposed to be spot-on, too. I was enthused.

But when Jott gave an example of a voice message you might leave with a difficult name contained within it, in which you would pause and spell that word, I wondered how voice recognition software, even a really smart build, could recognize that 1) you were spelling a word and 2) which word you were spelling for it.

Well, the answer is that Jott has the best voice recognition currently available to us: the human brain.

Yes, that’s right, they’re not submitting your message to a computer for deciphering, they’re just feeding it to a call center, where your message is transcribed by another person.

. . . I am so creeped out by this.

It’s not an issue of confidentiality for me. I know it’s confidential. I fully trust that whoever is listening to my to-do list, or the lyrics I need to look up when I get home, knows nothing about me (other than my gender and maybe my age, depending on what my voice sounds like) and that my voice is essentially disembodied and that we’ll never meet. The only embarrassing thing about the sort of messages I’d be sending Jott is how mundane they are.

But that’s the thing. These messages are miniscule, unimportant, the fringe of my soporific life. I don’t want to belittle another human being by making them write it down. Yes, they’re being paid for it, but I can’t get over the shock. I like using technology to take care of my annoying tasks; I’m appalled at the idea of using actual people for such a thing.

And now that I think about it, the voice transcription for Livejournal used to be conducted by a person on your friend’s list, if you allowed it. Then it went automated. Was their service also outsourced to real people?

There’s this plot device that one often seen in anime, movies, and television that’s meant to make the viewer sympathetic to a character.

Here’s the situation.  The heroine, or sometimes even hero, is in love with someone who just isn’t very thoughtful, but they can’t help the way they feel.  The two agree to meet at a certain time and place just to hang out, or have lunch, and our heroine is very excited.  She shows up, early, even, and the minutes tick by.  But the other doesn’t show.  Time passes, minutes flow into hours, and still she is alone, until finally, late at night, half a day later, she finally gives up.

At this point, the viewer is supposed to feel awful for her.  I tend to hate her.

Let’s look at what might have happened, and its consequences.

Anyone who stays after a reasonable amount of time is just looking for sympathy, either from the person in question, or from their friends when they tell them what happened.  Have some self-respect.  Go home.

(I don’t know if anyone actually does this, but it seems to show up in plots everywhere.  I do however know people who wouldn’t surprise me if they did this.)