Getting a phone call from a robot is common these days.
Peapod Inc., the Skokie-based online grocer, for instance, arranges for customers to get automated notification when weather problems will delay or cancel deliveries.
Flash and Dart cab customers in Chicago usually get an automated call just before their taxi arrives.
Online travel agents arrange for robots to call customers to announce that their flight is on time or cancelled. Sometimes it’s the first one, then the other.
The City of Chicago has joined the trend through a program that enables its Office of Emergency Management to place calls to hundreds or thousands of phones within a defined area in a very short time frame.
The automated calling technology is supplied by SBC Communications Inc. and Intrado Inc., a company based in Longmont, Colo., that specializes in such things.
If a truck overturns on an expressway, giving off a plume of noxious gas, the city can place phone calls to residences and businesses for blocks telling people to close their windows and stay indoors, said Larry Langford, spokesman for the emergency management office.
The city maintains a siren system to warn people about tornadoes and can go onto television, radio and cable programs to disperse other emergency information over a wide area, Langford said.
The automated phone system is intended to provide emergency messages quickly over a targeted area.
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“We won’t overuse it,” he said. “We won’t put out messages about missing children, as some smaller municipalities do with these systems. We don’t want this to be something people don’t take seriously.”
The city has run four tests of the new system and found it works well, Langford said.
“We can really target our audience with this,” he said. “We could, for instance, send a message to every phone in Sears Tower.”
Every wired phone, that is.
At present, the system doesn’t communicate with cell phones, although that may change once technology to pinpoint the location of wireless phones improves.
Because the emergency system deals with matters of life or death, it is far more sophisticated than similar systems that send robotic calls to Peapod customers, said Scott Fincher, a marketing manager for Intrado.
“Our system keeps track of who is contacted and who isn’t,” said Fincher. “We keep a record that tells when the phone is answered by an answering machine and when it’s answered by a human.”
SBC rematch: Look for some kind of rerun this spring of last year’s phone wars between SBC and its rivals over wholesale rates set by government authorities.
SBC argues that wholesale rates it is allowed to charge in Illinois should be doubled and hopes to pry a significant raise out of the Illinois Commerce Commission. It might also take another run at the Illinois legislature similar to what it did last spring.
Any SBC success will be met by strong opposition, warned David Dorman, the chief of AT&T Corp., in a recent speech.
“Millions of Americans today enjoy the lower prices and improved services that only competition can bring,” Dorman said in a speech at the New America Foundation. “They will not sit idly by if policymakers were to reverse course and place the interests of four giant phone monopolies ahead of the consumer interests.”