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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

The other thing is the interaction needs to be fast and practical. Like many IT departments, the internal IT support at my employer likes to follow the latest fad more than being useful, and replaced the dial in menus in the phone helpline with a voice recognition system where you have to describe your problem to be directed to the right area. Of course you don't know what kind of sentence it expects, particularly for a complex problem, and half of the employees are non native english speakers and the damn thing doesn't do foreign accents...

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If you work for ANZ, godddamn. Even if you don't please stop it. This is probably one of the most annoying processes I've had to go through and made a 2 minute call take about 15 minutes while I argued with a robot that can only handle very specific phrases.

Whenever I encounter those I just say, 'operator' over and over (though I suspect saying anything it doesn't recognize works work too) until I get a person.

I've had to work on making these voice recognition systems before. We originally allowed for people to just say operator pretty much anywhere in the app, and the client got upset that so many people asked for an operator and got sent to their agents that they had us restructure it so the person had to try pretty darn hard and be overly persistent before it decided to transfer to a person.

I felt a little bad doing it, especially after listening to the actual calls where people would just sound so annoyed and frustrated as they continuously asked for an operator, but the client insisted that less people actually reached their call centers.

I'm fairly sure it was Bell Canada that would reply with "Alright, it sounds like you're having problems, let me transfer you to an operator.." when you swore. (Not sure if it still exists, it's been years since I've been a Bell customer).

It was actually brilliant because it was responding to real frustration in a useful way, and it was disarming because it was a humorous thing for an automated system to do.

These days, I've noticed hip phone menu systems hang up on you when you try to destroy America chanting this obvious codeword to commence the attack.

Automated telephone systems should be required by law to respond to "shibboleet" and take the appropriate action. Or, at the very least, should be required to let me press 0 for an operator.

Well, most automated systems are that way because the company doesn't really want to talk to you. You can't legislate good service if the company has decided that they don't want to provide good service but want (as evidenced by their actions in e.g. phone systems) to provide either cheap service or no service. I mean, having a person that says "fuck you, don't call us ever again" and hangs up the phone without listening would be a technically valid solution to a law that requires "to let me press 0 for an operator".

Honestly, I'll take that over the phone robot telling me "we care about your call" for the 152nd time. At least they're being honest that way.

With most voice-recognition systems if you blow a couple raspberries down the receiver (or rub your finger on the mic or otherwise generate some noise) they'll give up after a couple of tries and take you to a human.

Some just hang up on you when they give up. Quite awful

I usually just tell them "sales" (because sales treats callers the best of all the departments, as they usually want your money) and then wait for the actual person to transfer me to the appropriate department.

...and then wait for the actual person to transfer me to the appropriate department's automated voice system.

* fixed that for you

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