A follow-up post to the earlier one about Time‘s Michael Scherer seemingly being contacted by a telemarketing robot that was programmed to deceive him and deny being A.I. It may have not been a robot but a human telemarketer trying to hide a foreign accent by choosing pre-recorded answers. Alexis C. Madrigal of the Atlantic did a nice job in (perhaps) unraveling the mystery. From his article:

“The theory I heard — and keep in mind it is just a hypothesis to explain a perplexing situation — goes like this:

Samantha West is a human being who understands English but who is responding with a soundboard of different pre-recorded messages. So a human parses the English being spoken and plays a message from Samantha West. It is IVR, but the semantic intelligence is being provided by a human. You could call it a cyborg system. Or perhaps an automaton in that 18th-century sense.

If you’re reading this, you must be wondering: WHY?!?!

Well, while Americans accept customer service and technical help from people with non-American accents, they do not take well to telemarketing calls from non-Americans. The response rates for outbound marketing via call center are apparently abysmal.

So, Samantha West, could be the rather strange solution to this set of circumstances and technical capabilities.”