Text enforcer hands out heavy fine: "One of the chief complaints was that one consumer had sent the text 'Stop sending me this message’. The rules are that the Stop command should be interpreted as an indication that the recipient doesn't want to pay for anything else.

Summit's response was their software had seen the word ‘messages’ and interpreted the letter ‘a’ in that word as attempt to answer a multiple choice question where ‘a’ happened to be the correct answer. Yeah, right."

Interesting, and serves as a reminder that people see text messaging as a conversational medium. Whilst the logo and ringtone industry - and TV voting - might have done a fair job in training folks to use properly keywords to talk to SMS services, there's still a need to handle, or at least attempt to account for, the vagaries of everyday conversation if you're building these services.

Comments

[James]

I don't think Summit were lying here, as the linked article implies - "a" is the first character out of a,b and c appearing in the message (and in the word 'message'). An embarrassing bug though...

[John]

Damn right they were lying. The operator code of practices state that if a customer's clear intention is to stop a service it should be stopped - in terms of building this just means that any message which has the word "STOP" in it but either not right at the start of the message or with text that follows should be flagged up to a human operator.

80% of premium SMS users knew about the STOP command after the first 2 months of implementation, so the likelyhood is that this person was being sent unsolicited SMS messages hence his long stop command,

[Robert Hamilton]

Makes me wonder why someone doesn't start a company to create software to handle conversational responses in SMS, or why, if an existing company owns the IP for such software they might not understand how best to sell it?

Oh yeah, *I* did and *they* don't :-(

[Tom Hume]

James: I'm with John here. Even with such a silly bug the service operator should've recognised the STOP code.

[James]

Sorry not to be clearer... Of course the service operator should have recognised the stop command, and not doing so was incompetence. I thought the bug was interesting because it shows how simplistic their approach was. Amateurs!