Phone robots are awful. Just this morning I had to call Fidelity, and their phone robot made me type out my 50 character randomly-generated password on a 10 key. It then asked me to state my question, it guessed wrong, and the support agent had to re-ID me anyway just to transfer me to _another_ phone robot that again requested me to enter my password on a 10 key phone.
If GOOG can actually make this process better (like in their example, if they could have texted me the buried link on fidelity.com that I could do what I wanted to do) than I'm stoked. Less stoked since this seems like a weird product for Google to build, and a prime product for them to try & shut down 18 months from now.
They don't have to be awful; most of them are just poorly designed. Another Area 120 startup, Chatbase, is a service for designing voice bots that are much smarter and versatile than the norm by anticipating what questions people ask based on precedent (and all the different ways they ask them). Most voice bots can't do that.
If GOOG can actually make this process better (like in their example, if they could have texted me the buried link on fidelity.com that I could do what I wanted to do) than I'm stoked. Less stoked since this seems like a weird product for Google to build, and a prime product for them to try & shut down 18 months from now.