In this 
Technology Review article they say
If computers could understand and respond to [...] routine natural-language requests, the results would be win-win: airlines wouldn?t need to hire so many agents, and consumers wouldn?t have to struggle with the confusion of touch-tone interfaces that leave them furiously tapping the ?0? button, vainly trying to reach a live operator.
When I called Amtrak the other day, I got to talk to a computer that asked me a series of questions about the travel arrangements I wanted to make and understood all of my answers flawlessly. Of course, it didn't solve my problem -- my problem was that over a half-hour period Amtrak had raised the price on the ticket I wanted to buy by more than 30% and I wanted to talk to a human being about it. They did respond to email quickly, anyway, but only in a very unempowered sort of way. I want to say that talking to a computer is worse than talking to a person, but it will probably be better. It will respond consistently and won't have a horrible accent or disability. (Not to be rude, but once I accidently washed a couple hundred dollars in travellers checks and when I called American Express, I got a customer service representative with a profound speech impediment that greatly complicated filing my claim). And even if you were talking to a person they would probably be so unempowered that they wouldn't be able to help you with a problem anyway, so why bother. You might also worry that it would cost jobs -- and it will. Not so much in this part of the world, though -- most of the phone-banks have already relocated to developing countries anyway. Still, depressing wages for anyone, depresses wages for the rest of us too.
When I was a kid, there was a lot of fear of "automation" and "being replaced by a computer". Woody Allen had a joke that when his father was fired because he'd been replaced by a little device that "could do everything he did, only better", his mother ran out and got the same device. Computers have transformed a lot of the things that people used to do. A lot of those things were horrible jobs anyway: entering banking data from checks, for example, but a lot weren't. My dad pointed out, when we did the contour maps for the Atlas of the Breeding Birds of Michigan in 1989, that at one time you would have had a professional cartographer draw the maps and create the contours. Instead, a graduate student (me) used a clunky program called MacGridzo to create the contours (which took forever on a top-of-the-line Mac SE) and then used Illustrator to superimpose the contours over the basemap. The job had been deskilled. Being a cashier in a grocery store used to be a real profession because you had to be skilled. Now the computer has all the skill and the employees are interchangeable.
There are people who want to do the same thing with teaching. So far, this hasn't worked very well, but there is likely to be increasing pressure to have "intelligent" software that tracks student "progress towards mastery". The fallacy, of course, is that a real education requires creativity and computers are really bad at evaluating creativity. By putting computers in charge of education, we tell students that creativity is of no value. Thank goodness we still have some real teachers out there. This morning was my son's parent-teacher conference. What an awesome teacher he has this year. She has nurtured his interest and enthusiam and helped him to direct his energy into his learning and its really paid off. His reading, which he struggled with last year, has flourished. He's making progress on everything. And he loves to go to school.