[tt] [NSG] Jott brain-farm

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Steve Witham <sw at tiac.net> -----

From: Steve Witham <sw at tiac.net>
Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 22:49:22 -0400
To: Nanotechnology Study Group <nsg at marshome.org>
Subject: [NSG] Jott brain-farm
Reply-To: Nanotechnology Study Group <nsg at marshome.org>

http://Jott.com is a service where you call a number, speak the name of
a recipient and a message, and a transcribed text (and an audio file) are
sent to the recipient.  One recognized recipient name is "myself."
It's free right now.  You have to sign up in order to set up recipient
email addresses or cell phone numbers.

The user interfaces (voice, text, email, more) are designed to be
very simple.

In contrast, the implementation is a human brain farm.  A teleoperation.
Your message gets recorded on a disk.  Voice-recognition software
figures out the recipient.  Then the message waits in a queue
for the next available translator in India, who types in a translation
and hits send.

Human components of a vast machine, like in Metropolis or The Machine
Stops.  Like salesment and support people who follow a script on a
screen.  Like the people I imagine are out there typing in CAPCHA
answers hour after hour to enable spam.

But more interesting than those.  I wonder what it's like dealing with
such a stream of trivia, brainstorms, and personal details?

There's a similar industry where you can volunteer to be a cold-call
candidate promoter or contribution-call taker for the candidate of
your choice in your home, and the candidates are competing in the
smoothness of their call-crosswiring systems.

I remember when I read "The Diamond Age," it seemed an advanced idea
that the voice interaction with "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" was
farmed out to freelance actresses on the internet.

So this is another entry in the human / cyborg / robot competition.
Once an almost-complete set of AI functions get coded up, humans can be
used as plugins--implants--to fill in the not-yet-coded functions.
Leading to, you know, work stoppages in the V1-V2, auditory
hallucination strikes, quality-control issues in the hippocampus.

This article in Technology Review focuses mainly on the client side and
gushy promotion, but at least it mentions how it's done (I guess satanic
mills aren't technology worth reviewing).  Other similar or reminiscent
services are mentioned for comparison:

http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=specialsections&sc=telecom&id=18462&a=

or http://tinyurl.com/6lnnrk

 --Steve
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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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