{"id":30,"date":"2005-02-11T10:26:08","date_gmt":"2005-02-11T14:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/snarl\/2005\/02\/11\/voice-nonrecognition\/"},"modified":"2005-02-11T10:26:08","modified_gmt":"2005-02-11T14:26:08","slug":"voice-nonrecognition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/2005\/02\/11\/voice-nonrecognition\/","title":{"rendered":"Voice (Non)Recognition"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Sometimes, it’s just easier to deal with a human being. I had forgotten to contact my life insurance policy carrier (Prudential) when I moved in December so I tried contacting them yesterday to update my address. Using last year’s premium statement, I dialed the 800# and got their automated system.<\/P>
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First things first – I love automated systems. They make things easier and can often times make the phone call quicker instead of having to deal with a cubicle-dwelling drone who, at the end of the call, tries up up-sell you on something (platinum card status, travel club, magazine partnerships, additional insurance, theft protection, etc…). But wouldn’t you think that changing your address would have to be done with a live person?<\/P>
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Apparently, Prudential doesn’t think so. After going through a billion prompts (without the opportunity to press zero for the operator), I finally reached the change of address option. Surprisingly, the prompt stated that it works by voice recognition and that I should speak my address clearly. They even gave me an example by slowly saying “123 Main Street”. <\/P>
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Now, I’m not going to give you my mailing address here, but I will say that part of the street name is Thacher. That sounds easy enough, right? <\/P>
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WRONG! I stated my complete street address and the automated system repeated the street back to me as ” F*cker” in that computer generated voice. It asked if that was correct and I said “no”. Then it asked me to repeat my street addess. I did it slower and once again, it said “F*cker”. It got the street number right but kept the street name kept coming out as “F*cker”. We went through this three or four times before the system finally said “it appears that you are having trouble entering your street address.”. Instead of directing me to a human being, it cycled me back around to the beginning and, once again, I spoke my street name VERY slowly…yet every time it told me I lived on “F*cker”.<\/P>
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It seems that this system can’t differentiate between a “th” sound and a “ph” sound. Nor can it distinguish a “ch” sound from a “ck” sound.<\/P>
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For a second there, I thought I might be on that TV show, Crank Yankers, where they do prank calls. But, this was all too real.<\/P>
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Finally, I just sent them a letter in the mail.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes, it’s just easier to deal with a human being. I had forgotten to contact my life insurance policy carrier (Prudential) when I moved in December so I tried contacting them yesterday to update my address. Using last year’s premium statement, I dialed the 800# and got their automated system. First things first – I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}