Happy Birthday Diane!! (And, how not to use an auto-attendant system)
In honour of my sis-in-law Diane’s birthday, I decided to pull up a sound file from a year or so ago… It’s the birthday girl navigating our speech recognition system at work. Well, *trying* to.
By the way, yelling at the speech recognition system doesn’t make it work any better 
Goofball!
So, enjoy this quick clip. Everyone in the office did. Hahah!!! CLICK HERE TO HEAR THE BIRTHDAY GIRL!
ps: It’s almost as bad as my Dad trying to navigate our system, which is a barge-in speech rec. system and getting frustrated because the system kept telling him that they didn’t understand who he was looking for. Turns out, instead of saying my name, he was saying: “Tanya, please.” We actually re-designed how our front-end auto-attendant works after hearing that. Too funny, guys!
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stupid auto attendant… great way to drive your customers mad.. MAD I SAY!
too funny about your dad. i guess the system didn’t anticipate polite canadians.
Ha! That’s halarious Donna, because that’s the exact system we were belittling last night when talking about auto-attendants over martinis. What can I say, we’re weird. …For the record, OUR systems are really great, and you can choose to use touchtones, -or- voice navigation.
can you blame her? Voice recognition attendants suck sweaty goat balls.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve been on the phone with Translinks — usually on a busy street corner wondering how long I have to wait, with lots of background noise.
“I think you said ‘One Way Ticket to Hell’. Is that correct?” Aaaaaah.
Great post.
As a speech developer I’m constantly fighting to create better apps and at the same time train users on how to interact with a speech app. Screaming at it does not help the situation. Glad your people are pro-active and fixed your system.
Hi NetChick, great story. I work in speech recognition and I hope you don’t mind me linking.
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