[PaddyCorry]

Nice article, thanks.

My first job out of college was in a support centre, supporting voice recognition software: an early ancestor of Siri if you like! One weekend without our knowledge, the parent company stuck a prior version of the software onto a free bundle cd that came with a PC magazine in the UK... a great marketing move sure, but the amount of calls we got as a result of that free software was incredible. People can get irate when voice recognition software doesn't work as well as they expect (for a variety of reasons, generally either hardware or accent related!), but with this free version, people really lost the run of themselves altogether... some of the calls we took that week were from some very angry people indeed!

The writer of this article summed up this confusing paradox quite well by offering a refund... for this free item... which was a gift!