Thanks for writing this. I keep seeing all these articles about how wonderful bots are. While they may be new on the web, we’ve had “bot” interactions with voice answering systems for a long time ( as you mentioned ). I can’t think of a time that I ever thought, “Oh I’m so glad that a robot answered the phone and not a real person”.

These systems were put in place to save companies money and limit the access customers / vendors have to real people inside the company. It just seems like the rise of bots that everyone is so excited about is just bringing a pattern that everyone already hates to a medium that doesn’t need it.