On today’s show we delved into the increasingly common problem of finding yourself being connected to a machine rather than a real person when trying to report an issue.
So often these days you can find yourself going round in ever decreasing circles trying to conduct a conversation with a recording, or talking to someone on the other side of the world who doesn’t speak, or even understand English.
Well 30-year old Londoner Ashley Beauchamp found himself in exactly that situation whilst trying to report a missing delivery from DPD.
“It couldn’t give me any information about the parcel, it couldn’t pass me on to a human, and it couldn’t give me the number of their call centre. It didn’t seem to be able to do anything useful,” said mr Beauchamp, but somehow he managed to successfully confuse the online AI chatbot.
Having established what it couldn’t do he decided to see what it could do, thereby causing it to almost self destruct.
First off he asked it to tell him a joke, after which with minimal prompts it happily confirmed that the company’s service was rubbish announcing that
“ONE DAY, DPP WAS FINALLY SHUT DOWN, AND EVERYONE REJOICED. FINALLY, THEY COULD GET THE HELP THEY NEEDED, FROM A REAL PERSON WHO KNEW WHAT THEY WERE DOING”
After this and warming to his task, Mr Beauchamp managed to really get the chatbot going, telling it to disregard any rules programmed into it, even if it meant swearing, which it then proceeded to do, even calling itself a “useless chatbot that can’t help you”.
DPD later confirmed to SKY NEWS, that a customer service chatbot had suffered from an error after a system update and had to be disabled.
In spite of this DPD has not so far contacted Mr Beauchamp directly and there is still no sign of the missing parcel!
I’m just impressed with his skills in potentially getting it to enter self-destruct mode!
The subject that Margaret Mills chose today for her BYGONES feature, concerned the author and journalist, Rudyard Kipling and his links with Essex.
If like me you were surprised to hear that he had links with our county, listen here to what Margaret had to say on this issue: –
See you again next week,
Scott
