Calling on a Recorded Line

 The calls begin, "Hi, this is [Sue|Dave], I'm an [analyst|advisor] calling on a recorded line for ...". Sometimes there is what sounds like phone room chatter in the background. These are recordings, part of a fairly basic interactive voice response (IVR) system. Perhaps the "recorded line" is meant as quasi-candor; quasi since Americans have had years to get used to messages saying that their call to some company "may be recorded for quality-control purposes." In any case, the careless listener could imagine that a person is on the other end of the line.

When the recording pauses after "Can you hear me OK?", I amuse myself by replying "Who is the president of the United States?" This may get a prompt asking me to repeat what I said, in which case I may go on to "Who is the speaker of the House of Representatives?" Once, since the call was from a political action committee for veterans, I asked for the name of the Secretary of Defense. Sometimes the IVR program hangs up, sometimes it continues and I hang up.

I suppose that at some point the overhead of running natural language processing programs will be low enough that the IVR system will chirp back, "Joe Biden" or "Kevin McCarthy". But are there enough cranks out there to make this worth the expense to the operators?

To Be Avoided

 The "By the Book" page in the Book Review section of today's New York Times has Aleksandar Hemon offering the answers. I was taken by his answer to the question "And which [genres] do you avoid?"

No advice books, least of all self-help manuals, nor any of those middlebrow smartass books that explain humanity and its evolution and history in under 500 pages and a couple TED talks.

I have expressed my reservations before about attributions of brow height, but otherwise I will not complain. I will have to look up the man's novels.

Carpe Librum Is Open This Month

 Last week, I learned that Carpe Librum has a pop-up store at the southwest corner of 14th and I NW. It will remain open through the end of January. I have dropped off a couple of bags of books with them, and have purchased three or four books. Inflation shows up at Carpe Librum, too: a hardback book now costs $6, half again what it would have ten years ago.