There has never been a less consequential "innovation" in the online era.

how does this differ from Fiverr?

Oh comb ON. Too many buzzwords.

At least it didn't explode on the drawing board

I designed the Wildfire Assistant in the early 90s. "She" (I never could abide by efforts to neuter her) was an voice-driven electronic secretary (messaging, voice dialing, call routing, etc) that was in the telephonic cloud.

My code was static and ordinary, but well conceived. I had the huge advantage of having my girlfriend as the voice talent and I did the studio work myself, editing down about 2-3,000 voice prompts to create a wonderfully human-like helper.

The personality of Sesame's "Miles" (for instance) is competitive with what I achieved, but freed from the rigid framework of my application-oriented code. He pours the sort of personal interplay Wildfire could only serve in chunks.

It's a good thing money cannot influence our government

Wow. You made this exchange needlessly persnickety.

Exactly. Journalists make mistakes. But old school journos make small mistakes by human error, not in pursuit of an insidious, profitable agenda.

This is irrelevant - the users take this information as convenient gospel. They aren't reading newspapers.

Maria Ressa is a classmate of Jeff Bezos, Princeton University, 1986.

is this where we are directing our tax dollars?

I haven't enough information on this to determine what went wrong or if a helpful suggestion was delivered that the user wasn't ready to hear.

Operator Terror?

AskJeeves? Altavista?

I clicked through to suggest invoking FCC clause AGM-88, and you beat me to it.