I had the opportunity to work the Foy Desk a few times during my undergrad at Auburn in the early 2000s - mostly as a volunteer while the regular workers would be in meetings. At the time we had a multi-page list of common questions and answers, the Internet (as it was then), as well as access to university computer systems for things like class schedule lookups.
The most common questions I got then were from other students, most around when a certain class started or where it was located. This is was the early 2000s and, while a lot of this was available via OASIS (the Auburn student system) for any student, many either didn't have the computer savvy to use it or ... didn't have a computer at home at all!
The most unusual call I took was from a student who was lost in Haley Center (the largest building on Auburn's campus - at the time, not sure about now as I haven't been back in decades - and somewhat difficult to navigate if you aren't familiar with its layout). The poor kid sounded absolutely panicked. I actually had to pull up a map and walk the him turn-by-turn until he found the main hallway again.
As an aside, it's neat to see a few other Auburn alums on here. WDE!
Talking about being lost in the Haley center gave me flashbacks to freshman year. I still have dreams sometimes of trying to find the stairwell/elevator bank and the layout keeps changing like the backrooms.
Ugh, yeah, some of those hallways especially in 1st and 4th quadrants where there aren't very many classrooms and not many people can have a very, very liminal space feel to them. I can totally understand how he got lost in there.
Literally nothing about that building makes any sense unless you stand on your head until you almost pass out. :D
800-GOOG-411 was planned to do a similar thing; the difference is that was online for 3 years and unceremoniously shut down, versus this one which is still in operation 72 years later.
It's pretty well understood (and was at the time) that the project was aimed at collecting voice sample data for further voice-recognition and AI work:
"Google Shuts Down GOOG-411" (October 9, 2010)
The service has helped Google build a large database of voice samples and improved the voice recognition technology. Here's what Google's Marissa Mayer said about GOOG-411:
"The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. ... So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up or we're trying to get the voice out of video, we can do it with high accuracy."
""The 411 Parable": Make sure you are playing the same game." (2011)
But just when the "head-to-head" competition was rolling Google announced GOOG-411 was no more... they'd captured all the human speech they needed to train their algorithms and were on to bigger and better things... Huh, voice recognition... algorithms?
Google has squandered so much good will over the years. This is a good example: expenses wouldn't even be a rounding error, and it could have given so many average folks a positive experience with the company.
Aha! Minor blast from the past. I just realised my a/c might still be alive on there and there it was. I think I logged in after 3 or 4 years. Old Reader. I think I had deleted my a/c on Ino Reader. I used to follow couple of niche Hindi blogs and they shut down years ago; some Engish language as well (from all over the world). Most of them were anon. I kept coming back for years but they were gone. That's what killed the RSS/blogs for me, not the demise of Google Reader. It stopped being the place I knew in my own individual/idiosyncratic way.
I suspect something similar would happen to podcasts for me, maybe sooner than I am hoping for. And podcast player apps.
Even their SMS api (GOOGLE) was shut down. That was just an automated google search and didn’t have to be staffed. Used it all the time to ask a trivia question or convert some units or get nearby locations. Like text pizza and my zip code and it would reply with 3 names and phone numbers. It made dumb phones smart.
It would be somewhat niche, but if you have an iPhone and somehow wanted the Hey Google reaction instead of Siri, could still find use as a hands-free information source.
What a fun surprise to hear about the Foy info desk on HN! When I went to student orientation at Auburn, they made a point to call the desk as a demonstration and ask how many M&Ms would fit into Jordan-Hare Stadium. The answer was provided in under a minute.
Back in the early 2010s when I was going to Auburn, the smartphone internet was still pretty young. It wasn't uncommon to call the Foy info desk to settle an argument.
Really makes me want to swing back to Auburn for a visit. War damn Eagle!
I got to know him a little through Rotary in the last years of his life because I had an off and on honor of chauffeuring him to and from meetings in the Grand Caravan. Even got to bring my boy along on the days he didn’t have school.
He was an Auburn University legend — the Foy Information Desk was created when they remodeled Foy Hall. [1]
Anyway, ironically Jim graduated from Tuscaloosa despite his Auburn being his familial allegiance. The Boll Weevil drove his parents out of Eufala and to Tuscaloosa for work and so he went to college there.
During the war he flew Corsairs and told me and the boy about bailing out and hanging from a tree as we drove home from a meeting.
He’d been Club president in 1953 and had 100% attendance for about 60 years. And always led the Club in a War Eagle before home football games until he couldn’t.
I am truly blessed to have spent time with Jim and more blessed that my boy now man did.
[1] At the time, the plan was to rename the building, but Google streetview shows that didn’t happen and now even the street is named for Jim. Yeah he was that big a deal.
Somewhere someone is probably still working as an elevator operator too. Like when I was a kid I had a job shoveling coal into a boiler. And someone is still manufacturing buggy whips. The future is unevenly distributed. Call Bunny Watson and ask her, she'll confirm.
I think the GP is referring to manually operated elevators, in which a human inside the elevator pulls a lever to tell the elevator when to move. When I was a kid, my dad worked in a building with a semi-automated elevator that had floor buttons and an automatic return to the ground floor, but still had the lever. There was an operator inside on weekdays, but if you came in on the weekend you had to operate the elevator yourself.
I think it was in Lima, not many years ago (6? 8?) that I saw in a federal building the elevators were manually operated. They had physically disabled persons in charge of them, so I guess it was a way of integrating some of those jobs.
There's probably some high bureaucracy workplace somewhere where only certain people are allowed to use the freight elevator but it needs to be used by others so much they just station someone who can use it there.
I know of an elevator that is also a ticketed access point to a stadium so the elevator operator also scans tickets and gives out wristbands. Very nice for wheeled accessibility.
There are still elevators that you need to be certified to use like mine elevators, and other form of commercial/construction devices so you could certainly see an elevator operator existing in one of those places.
I remember RPI had something like this in the 1990s. I can't remember what it was called though. But I do remember how impressed everyone was: if you call this phone number, they can answer ANY question!
I believe those of us who were around from then to now experienced peak information. We went from having to look things up in libraries to being able to find anything with a Google search. We're on the downward slope now. Business models have changed, spamvertisers are winning the war against search, and generative AI slop is already the dominant source of "content", ensuring the genie can never be put back. This is not an anti-AI rant, it is just an acknowledgement that like so many things, we were foolish to think that access to information was just going to keep getting better. I did not expect that in my lifetime, I would see the best it was ever going to be.
Maybe in the future, calling a trained human for help will be the only way to sort through the mountain of infogarbage to find something. Or we'll have to go back to the library.
I remember “learning to use the library” was a thing growing up in the 90’s. It was funny because we’d come far along enough with the internet stuff that even the adults teaching this basically knew it was going to be a very niche skill. But still, something that every educated person was supposed to know how to do.
That's still an important skill! You might think that everything that can be digitized has been and is easily available online, but that's not the case. Especially so for more obscure books and publications that are mostly relevant to your local area.
When I moved to my current town and visited their library, I very quickly found some books written about the local area for which not much info existed online. It's a great way to spend some time if you're into that kind of thing!
I worked a reference desk around the turn of the century. Your public library probably still has one, though I think they may be pooled across different areas now, I'm not sure.
I went to Auburn just as the internet was beginning. When the internet was only available on Sun Workstations in the basement of the math building using the Mosaic web browser. Calling Foy was our Google.
Haha, I’m on such another plane of technology these days, my initial reaction upon reading the headline was that there was some persistent seismic event near the border of Mississippi xD
We got an old landline big red phone and we had it for quite a while using Magic Jack. It was a fun anachronism to have and use and give out to friends as a number we will always hear if it rings. I'm going to get it again when we move in a few weeks to a new house. As my friend Nick described it when we got rid of it- "It feels like the world lost a bit of whimsy". The world we live in needs whimsy.
Do you mean it is not analog and latency is higher as a result? Then yes, it matters. I hate latency in voice calls, I already went into arguments because of that.
I remember in a remote work meeting, we had a frantic discussion, with some disagreements and strong opinions, but it was productive and purely technical, nothing personal. But then someone angrily told me "stop interrupting me!", the thing is, I wasn't, and then, I realized that the latency was messing with us. Because of the latency, from her point of view, I interrupted her, and from mine, she interrupted me. That's when I realized how much it mattered, we simply can't have a normal conversation with high latency. Either we deliberately take turns, as if it was a traditional 2-way radio communication, or we may get these awkward situations, neither feel natural.
High latency can be as little as 100ms (corresponding to about 30m of distance in real life).
It still bothers me. Analog and TDM voice was magical and we didn't appreciate it until it was gone. VoIP was so much cheaper, the latency became the norm, and people who've never known anything different simply have no idea what was lost.
It used to be that if you had two landlines in a large room, you could call one from the other, and your voice would go into one phone, electrically go across town into the switch, back out the other line, and out the other phone, before the soundwaves traveled the length of the room. It was _so_ good.
There's an old linguistics tale, AFAIR fuzzily, of Inuit kids going off to boarding school, and upon return, having lost interest in hearing from adults. The kids believe the adults have little to say to them. ... Because the kids' conversational turn-taking invitation pauses had shortened, and were going unrecognized.
> as if it was a traditional 2-way radio communication
If there was a low-latency side-channel for the end-points to coordinate, they might provide mic clicks and carrier noise for awareness? Like an electric car playing engine rumble.
> Do you mean it is not analog and latency is higher as a result?
Digital teleophony doesn't imply significant latency. PRI calling (T1/ISDN) is digital, but the sampling delay is minimal, and it's sent one sample at a time, so there's no packetization delay.
VoIP tends to run a codec with sampling/encoding delays, and tends to be at least 20ms packetization, and then you have a jitter buffer and probably input and output buffering too.
They were already “replaced” by the internet decades ago, but people keep calling. As the article explains, there are still people in the US without access to the internet or knowledge of how to use it, as well as a lot of people who just want to talk to a human being.
You can call 1-800-CHATGPT if you want, but there’s clearly still a place for this service.
It is a severe reach to say that AI can provide human connection. At best, it can provide the illusion, for some. And for those people, I'm not going to say that that's not valuable or legitimate for them. But it's pushing it one step too far to imply that that's a good idea for everyone.
God help us if we determine there is nothing special about human cognition. A lot of people are putting a lot of faith in what amounts to the soul. I’m not at all sure it exists.
Both can be true. There can be nothing physically or metaphysically "special" about human cognition, and at the same time, we can also be very, very far away from creating even a holistic facsimile. We've got echoes of it in statistical, predictive models, though, and that's shoved the idea into the discourse far before its time.
I agree. My point is that if there’s no mystic soul, it’s probably a mistake to say AI can’t provide the same actual connection that humans do. Today’s AI can’t, for most people, but it’s a statement about maturity of the tech, not human special-ness.
I also maybe agree with “very very far away”, in the 20ish year range. Farther than some people think, closer than others do.
If and when we get to a place where AI reaches that holistic facsimile, I’m not sure what I’ll think of humans who reject the idea and insist that we are qualitatively different because (insert biological or spiritual rationale here). I suspect it will feel like seeing someone mistreat a call center employee because they happen to be in India, or sound like a disliked minority.
It cannot because it is not human. It can emulate the experience but it will never be genuine. Generally, if a caller ever became aware that it wasn't truly a person on the other end it would lessen the interaction. Whether that is justified or not is debatable, but it is nonetheless the case and thus the end result is not the same.
