Telstra has had free calls from payphones to Santa for a few years now, but this year they've upped their game and given Santa an AI boost. Instead of an IVR-tree style setup, Telstra is now using "tech built on Google Cloud's Dialogflow CX and the PaLM 2 large language model (LLM) to answer everyone's calls", so it's way more realistic. Gough Lui figured out the phone number the system works on, dialed it at home and spent hours probing the system and making recordings of the output. Regardless of your views on AI/LLMs, you gotta admit this is pretty cool and if you were a 6 year old with a phone you'd have a ball chatting to Santa, even if it is just a computer on the other end.
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