Friday, April 4, 2008

Baiting the Bot the New eSport

Try it, You will like IT!

A recent email from a Buyer on the subject of Live Help:
Buyer "B" says:

I invented a new game the other day. I call it "Bait the Bot." You play it when you are waiting for a response from the Live Helpless rep.

I've noticed that after a couple minutes of silence, they seem to deliver up a "thank you for waiting" message. I also noticed that if I inquired about whether the rep had disappeared I got a similar response that seemed to be picking up on certain words I used, because they were not really answers to what I said.

So I've started playing "bait the bot" by posting nonsense during the silences just to see what responses I would get.

I tried the Gettysburg address once and next time I'm going to use lines from Jabberwocky.

The goal is to get an acknowledging response ("What are you doing?") from the human instead of the bot. When I recited the Gettysburg address, I got nothing but dead silence back. She didn't even say good bye after delivering up the stock "We're aware of the problem and are working round the clock on it."

I replied it had been going on for three days and asked her "how round is your clock?"

No answer.

I said, "I'll take that as a "please go away""

"So I will"

"Bye"

No response from either rep or bot in those last four lines.

I guess the bot doesn't know what to do with keywords of "round" and "clock."


At least it's good for a few laughs.


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