DailyDirt: Fooling Some Of The People Some Of The Time...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There's a sucker born every minute -- if you like to believe unverifiable statistics. Usually, if it's too good to be true, it ain't true. But as technology gets better, sometimes it's hard to distinguish sufficiently advanced algorithms from magic. Here are a few scams that successfully fooled some folks for a while. By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.
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Filed Under: chess, fraud, marl, nobel prize, penn and teller, sec, siri, statistics


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  • identicon
    Rekrul, 7 May 2012 @ 5:34pm

    Creating a fake computer with voice recognition in the late 1980s fooled this brilliant physicist, but nowadays Apple's Siri is in TV ads all the time doing nearly the same routine.

    Just recently, I was in a doctor's office and the woman next to me in the waiting room was trying to get directions to some service station using Siri. She kept referring to it as "she", as in "She's usually pretty good." Of course it completely failed to find the specific business that she wanted.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      Michael Ho (profile), 7 May 2012 @ 6:31pm

      Re:

      The TV commercials for Siri do seem to suggest that Siri is much better than "she" is... I wonder if people would be more upset with Siri if "she" had a more manly name and voice? (I vaguely remember some study where GPS directions given by an artificial female voice was more irritating than if it was spoken by an artificial male voice.)

      link to this | view in chronology ]

      • identicon
        Rekrul, 8 May 2012 @ 10:08am

        Re: Re:

        (I vaguely remember some study where GPS directions given by an artificial female voice was more irritating than if it was spoken by an artificial male voice.)

        I want a GPS programmed with William Daniels's voice. :)

        link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 7 May 2012 @ 5:37pm

    Obama fooled the entire Nobel committee who gave him an award for not being as evil as Bush, or so they thought.

    Maybe they should have waited.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      abc gum, 7 May 2012 @ 6:34pm

      Re:

      Possibly one might look deeper into occurrences in an attempt at greater understanding - but then again, maybe not.

      link to this | view in chronology ]


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