The latest message on my answering machine starts with a "beep" common in call centres, "Hello" from the operator, a few secs of confused silence and hangup.
My answering machine must have had a productive conversation with the marketing robot, but their operator was left out of it. Ha.
I suppose that's where we are headed, robots talking to each other in human ways, for ultimate interoperability. It's already happening: web scraping, phone trees with speech recognition, Google Duplex…
All the more amusing is that my answering machine's greeting addresses telemarketers first and then invites everyone else to leave a message. In a broad sense, it's working... 🤔