There are some genuinely great uses for AI outside of the weird fascination of replacing artists with a machine that can’t feel or think on its own or be creative without wholesale stealing from someone else. AI will and already is revolutionizing scientific, medical, and archaeological research. Perhaps even better, a guy used AI to definitively determine he was overcharged for a pint of Guinness in Dublin.
After paying €7.80 for a pint, Matt Cortland created a system to make sure it never happened again. According to Fortune, that system ended up calling thousands of pubs across Ireland.
Cortland, a 37-year-old AI startup founder, found out that Ireland’s government had stopped officially tracking pint prices more than a decade ago. Using an AI voice agent built on the ElevenLabs AI voice generator system, he created an AI agent named Rachel, a machine that sounded convincingly human, with a Northern Irish accent. Rachel then autonomously called more than 3,000 pubs across Ireland to ask whoever answered what the price of a pint of Guinness was.
This Guy Created an AI Voice That Called 3,000 Pubs to Track Guinness Prices
The responses were fed into Claude to create what Cortland brilliantly dubbed the “Guinndex,” a live, crowdsourced index of Guinness prices across Ireland. The results show an average price of about €6.01.
This means that Cortland Guinness was absolutely overpriced, and now he had the cold, hard data to back it up. Assuming the data is correct, considering that there’s a very good reason every AI chatbot service has a legal disclaimer on it, reminding its users that it can get things wrong. There’s also the matter of Rachel itself, which the initial Fortune article says was created as an “homage” to a real-life woman, Rachel Duffy, the winner of the UK version of The Traitors. This BBC article seems to clear up some confusion I had about whether he trained an AI to clone a real person’s voice without her consent. It appears he didn’t, and instead used Rachel Duffy’s voice more as an inspiration than a one-to-one AI ripoff.
That said, Cortland found that most people Rachel spoke to didn’t seem to mind or even notice they were chatting with a robot disguised as a human. Some of them even offered discounts to what they assumed was just another human customer calling to complain.
The whole project seems to have had some practical real-world impact. One pub owner reportedly lowered prices after seeing their listing on the Guinndex. Cortland says that he wants to apply the same tech and methodology to every other consumer product to keep prices in check.
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