The new “AI” of one of Czech providers is super annoying.
“Thank you for calling. To make sure it’s you, use your keypad to enter your numerical password.”
[6 DTMF beeps]
“You entered 123456 [they say it way too quickly but OK, I have a feature phone so no butter finger errors]. Is that correct?”
(At this point, you cannot proceed until you say “Yes”. Typing the number again (or anything else) will not help, you’d just hear “We couldn’t hear that. Can you try again? To make sure it’s you, use your keypad to enter your numerical password.”)
“Yes”
“Thank you for verification. Please tell us what your problem is-”
“Human”
“We couldn’t hear that. Can you try again?”
“Human”
“Are you sure you want to talk with our operator? The average wait time is 5 minutes.”
“Yes”
(2 minutes of awful music and nagging to press 1 to reconnect to the bot)
“I have a question about your ToS since your website is down. Also, I don’t ever want to speak to the bot again, can you bring the USSD text service or voice keypad menu back?”
Holy shit! That’s not a new Czech thing, that is what every single business in the Untied States has. The pharmacy, the post office, the school, the corner store, the furnature store, the mall, the phone store, the store where they sell human souls, the taxi service, the bank. Everything has this robot voice. Welcome to hell.
Thankfully, it’s just the mobile providers and central directories of big companies (like railway operators, hospitals) here, very few others get the number of bot-serviceable phone calls to justify that. And they only recently started to ditch keypad-navigable systems and require you to speak, probably due to the state of Czech TTS (our language is phonetic so it’s technically easier than English but with just 10M speakers, only recently did Big Tech really invest in Czech TTS, driving up the reliability/price ratio).
But American businesses at least take care that their website is up-to-date and not a 502: Bad Gateway page, right? So you barely need to make calls, right?
The new “AI” of one of Czech providers is super annoying.
“Thank you for calling. To make sure it’s you, use your keypad to enter your numerical password.”
[6 DTMF beeps]
“You entered 123456 [they say it way too quickly but OK, I have a feature phone so no butter finger errors]. Is that correct?”
(At this point, you cannot proceed until you say “Yes”. Typing the number again (or anything else) will not help, you’d just hear “We couldn’t hear that. Can you try again? To make sure it’s you, use your keypad to enter your numerical password.”)
“Yes”
“Thank you for verification. Please tell us what your problem is-”
“Human”
“We couldn’t hear that. Can you try again?”
“Human”
“Are you sure you want to talk with our operator? The average wait time is 5 minutes.”
“Yes”
(2 minutes of awful music and nagging to press 1 to reconnect to the bot)
“I have a question about your ToS since your website is down. Also, I don’t ever want to speak to the bot again, can you bring the USSD text service or voice keypad menu back?”
Holy shit! That’s not a new Czech thing, that is what every single business in the Untied States has. The pharmacy, the post office, the school, the corner store, the furnature store, the mall, the phone store, the store where they sell human souls, the taxi service, the bank. Everything has this robot voice. Welcome to hell.
Thankfully, it’s just the mobile providers and central directories of big companies (like railway operators, hospitals) here, very few others get the number of bot-serviceable phone calls to justify that. And they only recently started to ditch keypad-navigable systems and require you to speak, probably due to the state of Czech TTS (our language is phonetic so it’s technically easier than English but with just 10M speakers, only recently did Big Tech really invest in Czech TTS, driving up the reliability/price ratio).
But American businesses at least take care that their website is up-to-date and not a 502: Bad Gateway page, right? So you barely need to make calls, right?