As noted in the comments there, some of these are going to be meat robots – people who have been told that if they ever go offscript they’ll be dinged for it in their performance ratings, and who have been made to believe it by spot-testing and such.
It’s hard to tell a human running a stupid program from a machine running a smart one.
(The long pauses before responses do make me suspect it’s a well-programmed voice response unit. But it could also be someone muting while they make a snide comment before going back on script.)
