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!
dabluecaboose · 2h ago
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!
trollbridge · 3h ago
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.
kaonwarb · 2h ago
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.
bigthymer · 2h ago
It probably would have turned into a customer service line for all of their products they notoriously fail to adequately support.
kbutler · 44m ago
This is a good theory and may have been an actual motivation to shut it down.
BMc2020 · 2h ago
I'm still using 2 RSS readers (Inoreader and TheOldReader) that I switched to after Google Reader shut down.
crossroadsguy · 2h ago
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.
Etheryte · 3h ago
The true Google way, someone got a promotion and then the product dies.
icameron · 37m ago
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.
mschuster91 · 15m ago
Yeah but... who still uses dumbphones?
ashu1461 · 1h ago
How about calling 1-800-CHATGPT (1-800-242-8478) now ?
Wonder how many queries which the university is calling can now be automated
jtwoodhouse · 28m ago
Where’s the joy in that? We don’t have to replace humans for everything.
kylebenzle · 1h ago
Cha-Cha was first
delichon · 2h ago
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.
toast0 · 1h ago
Elevator operators are pretty common at arena events. I think to help ensure the elevators aren't under or overloaded.
Of course, observation towers tend to have elevator operators too.
AdamH12113 · 9m ago
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.
sbuttgereit · 57m ago
Here's a song inspired by a real elevator operator that works an elevator at the Chicago House of Blues:
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.
bombcar · 1h ago
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.
theobeers · 2h ago
As recently as five years ago, the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Ave. in Chicago employed elevator operators. It probably still does.
I visited a shopping mall in India in 2019 that still employed elevator operators.
ryukoposting · 3h ago
What a heartbreaking way to end that article... but, what a way to make the message stick.
divbzero · 31m ago
I was wondering if that missing period was intentional…
masto · 1h ago
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.
graemep · 56m ago
Sadly, I agree with you.
More optimistically, I hope doubt about know whether you are dealing with a real person or an LLM will encourage people to be more social offline.
karaterobot · 53m ago
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.
ForOldHack · 52m ago
I have called them,simply, twice only to thank them for their work.
LadyCailin · 3h ago
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
kcatskcolbdi · 2h ago
This is such a lovely read! I might even call the line later today.
timcobb · 3h ago
It's probably voip :/
GuB-42 · 1h ago
So what?
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).
myself248 · 32m ago
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.
toast0 · 1h ago
> 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.
tcoff91 · 14m ago
The main problem is packet switching instead of circuit switching. Internet sucks for voice
choonway · 3h ago
how far is the deep learning stack close to replacing them?
rafram · 2h ago
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.
slyfox125 · 2h ago
By definition, it will never replace "them."
charcircuit · 3h ago
You could hook up one of the voice based LLMs to do this instead of the students.
Normal_gaussian · 3h ago
The value, it would seem, comes from it being precisely not that.
charcircuit · 2h ago
Being precisely not a mobile app. I am saying that they can expose this functionality through the phone system like they are currently doing.
slyfox125 · 2h ago
The point of it all is the human connection - not the answers.
charcircuit · 2h ago
The AI can provide both the human connection and the answers.
jdiff · 2h ago
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.
brookst · 2h ago
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.
jdiff · 9m ago
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.
slyfox125 · 2h ago
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.
greenie_beans · 2h ago
yes let's remove every social bond we have and replace it with a computer
frohrer · 2h ago
You can already call 1-800-242-8478 if you want to talk to a computer, this is not that.
cubefox · 3h ago
Problem with voice based LLMs is that they don't know when it's their turn to talk.
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!
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 suspect something similar would happen to podcasts for me, maybe sooner than I am hoping for. And podcast player apps.
Wonder how many queries which the university is calling can now be automated
Of course, observation towers tend to have elevator operators too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiP0FpY88E4
The song is naturally called Elevator Operator.
https://wgntv.com/news/cover-story/fine-arts-building-manual...
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.
More optimistically, I hope doubt about know whether you are dealing with a real person or an LLM will encourage people to be more social offline.
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 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.
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.
You can call 1-800-CHATGPT if you want, but there’s clearly still a place for this service.