Review of KGB answering service, a.k.a. 542-542

I tried KGB for the first time tonight, and it looks like the whole thing is automated using a semantic language program (similar to how Ask.com worked).

Here in Boston there’s an commercial running where an auto dealer will pay the first year of a lease if the temperature at Logan Airport reaches 96 degrees this Labor Day. I wanted to see what the chances of that happening are, so I texted KGB “What’s the hottest Labor Day on record at Boston’s Logan Airport?” KGB’s reply was, “The highest temperature ever recorded in Boston, MA was 107 degrees Fahrenheit on Aug 2 1975.”

So KGB ignored two key parts of the question that a human would see—that I’m asking specifically about Logan Airport and specifically about Labor Day—leaving me to think a computer is doing the answering, at least initially. (There’s a third part, “on record,” that’s more or less redundant.)

When I replied that they didn’t answer the question, they followed up with an acknowledgment that they couldn’t find the answer and they were issuing me a credit for the $0.99 charge per answer. It’s a little disappointing overall, because there is an answer—KGB staff would simply have to click 122 times (the first official Labor Day in Boston was in 1887) through a page like this one at Weather Undergound. KGB just wasn’t interested in spending the time it takes to look it up.

I went ahead and did it. The answer to “What’s the hottest Labor Day on record at Boston’s Logan Airport?” is 94 degrees in 1928*. So if you’re thinking of leasing a car with Pride Motors of Lynn, Massachusetts, don’t do it just because you think you might get a year free.

* Temperature records at Logan go back to 1920, and the airport itself opened in 1923, making ’23 the latest possible year applicable to the question.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 and is filed under autobio, review, tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
  • I work for kgb_ and would first like to apologize. When a question is sent in, the system tries to find the best answer and suggests it to a real, live agent. The agent can then submit the answer or change it to better fit the question. In this case, it was probably the agent that was mistaken.

    When our answer is contested by the customer, we can access the customer history to check the answer. If it is wrong, we try to resolve it. All of the answers are constantly being checked against protocol, and when we see an issue with an answer or an agent, we address it promptly.

    We are continuously improving our service, and would like to stress the fact that we have, and always will be answering your questions with real people.
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