I just ordered a prescription refill by talking to a Robocop. Perhaps not as quick as a quick-witted human, it still managed to get through the whole transaction without having to restart, repeat, backtrack, or even wander off into some useless byways. The cherry-on-top was that the prescription I needed was first on their list, which meant I didn't have to wait for it to go through it's spiel for all the ones I didn't need. How did it know? Did it look at the last time it was renewed and use some logic to decide which one to start with it? Or did it default to whatever internal order their database has them listed in, and it was just blind luck that they got the right one first?
Of course, the speech recognition is the hard part from the standpoint of computer programming, but once you have it working, you can make all the copies you need. The logical flow of the interview is relatively simple, but some people still have a hard time with it, even people like programmer's, who should be able to reduce a logical equation to its simplest form.
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