I got an email from at&t a minute ago and couldn’t help peeing in my pants, laughing. Apparently they have come up with an ingenuous new service called “Voice Dial“. The features of this service, in a nutshell, are:
- you dial ‘*’ + 8 and then say “Voice Dial”
- Operator picks up your call and asks you what you want to do
- you say ‘Call xyz’
- Operator says ‘thank you’ and connects your call
Some background work needs to be done before this service is actually useful. You need to:
- create an online account at wireless.att.com
- add phone numbers and names to your online phone book
- Pay a monthly service fee of only $4.99 for the service
I say *cough* bullshit. What ever happened to the good ‘ol days where you:
- look up the name of your contact in your phone book
- Hit the send/call button
How hard can that be??? An even easier approach is to use the voice dial function of your phone (I know that my nokia phone made 3 years ago has this feature). Why do you need to pay at&t 5 bucks a month for a useless service like this. The only plausible users of this service would be visually impaired people who have a hard time reading the tiny phone screens. Even they (or their family members) have to go through the pain of creating an online phone book.
Check out an even funny audio clip they have online demonstrating the service in action – ah the pain, the horror… hehe. Can they get any lower than this???
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