Jon Udell blogs his experience with an answerbot. The tech I'm always on about is already here it seems, it's just that no one has gotten it all working as one yet.

Talking to Julie. A couple of months ago I called Amtrak to book a train and was astounded by the performance of "Julie," the IVR (interactive voice response) agent at 1-800-USA-RAIL. My colleague Tom Yager had the same reaction to the unnamed IVR agent who handles flight, schedule, and gate info for American Airlines at 1-800-223-5436. ... [Jon's Radio]

To me the next trick would be to allow a text to speech interface so that the bot can reply to instant messages as well, thus completing a large part of what I was going on about yesterday.

11:28:14 PM