Voice nonrecognition

[unixronin]

It's not so much the strip, as the footnote.  Computer voice recognition is so bad that whenever I find myself talking to a robotic voice-recognition menu system, I immediately just start repeating "Just give me a human" until it gives up and forwards me to a human.  If I'm calling one of several potential sources for something, and I hit a voice-recognition menu system, I'll hang up immediately and try the next supplier.

Companies and government agencies deploy computer voice-recognition menu systems because they're convinced it'll save them money and let them reduce the number of humans they're paying.  But at the current state of the art, what it mostly does is lose them customers who are sick and tired of dealing with artifical stupids, and frustrate and enrage the people who don't have a choice about whether to use the AS.

Comments

[mrakg.livejournal.com]

I'll second the vote for http://gethuman.com/ -- the simple EXISTENCE of such a website is an indictment of the VR AS mania.

I need to find an actress friend's blog entry on this. The ONLY way she has found to get the various VR AS systems to process her request was to use her "Illiterate, Drunken Hillbilly #2" voice. (The fact that she has more than one such voice in her professional arsenal terrifies me...) She found that the more distinctly she spoke, the less accurate the idiot machine proved to be -- "Prim, Proper English Professor" proved to be the least successful, with "BBC Standard Received" a close second.

Since she and I exchanged views on this, I've cultivated an "Uneducated Inner-City Man" voice for VR AS systems on the East Coast. My success rate in navigating VR AS systems has improved markedly.

While she and I are only a pair of data points, the implications are far from encouraging.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

Mrak, Alaric is English...

[mrakg.livejournal.com]

I know. :) I was pointing out that the VR systems are skewed toward "uneducated American".

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

I was thinking more along the lines of you had ~3~ data points... ;-)