Phonebot vs phonebot

[simont]

Someone apparently sent an SMS to my landline last night, which was very weird. I'd recently heard you could do this, but had been uncertain of exactly how it would work. What happened was that an automated message centre phoned me up and told me I had a message, then offered a menu of options including reading the message out loud. It also offered me the choice of deleting or keeping it, so I assume that if I hadn't answered the phone at all it would have kept it and perhaps tried again later.

Unfortunately, it didn't seem 100% prepared to deal with an answering machine, which is what it in fact got. It seemed to have started reading its automated spiel as soon as my answerphone picked up, which meant that what my answerphone actually recorded cut in half way through the incoming spiel after it had finished reading its outgoing automated spiel. So the first thing I heard was the second half of the sender's phone number, which was less than helpful.

Then it offered me a phone menu (press 1 to listen to the message, 2 to delete etc), and of course my answerphone did none of these things. Fortunately, after a delay it defaulted to reading the message at me (albeit rather badly). Then it gave me the menu again, and after a delay it read the message a second time, complete with the full sending number (aha!). After my answerphone did nothing the third time, it automatically deleted the message from the message centre, and proceeded to advertise the landline-SMS service at me, giving me two phone numbers and a URL. Then it hung up.

So I do know who the message was from (the phone number wasn't one I recognised, but I found out whose it was by typing it into Google, and the answer I got was consistent with what I could make out of the somewhat garbled message itself) and I basically know what it was trying to say, which I suppose is pretty good going. However, I'm mostly very amused at the idea of two machines talking to one another on the phone in English :-)

(Oddly, the text message appears to have come to me via BT Text, which is strange because I'm not a BT customer.)

Comments

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Terminator 3 is on tv tonight. But in general I approve of melding of communication media, if only it, well, worked.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

I've encountered that before - and the first time it happened it was spam. Also BT text and also not a BT customer. It's really very strange listening to a text message from someone you know being read in an alien mechanical voice...

[spaglet.livejournal.com]

There seem to be a number of SMS service centres (both network and/or manufacturer specific, for some bizarre reason), the model being similar to that of mobile phones but-not-quite. They've mangled Caller Display for delivery of the messages, and if the service centre responsible for your line can't accept it as it knows you've not got Caller ID (have you?) might well fall back to poorly automated voicemail stylee.