Voice recognition in call centres!

I've just subscribed to Sentana Sports on Sky, and I rang up to register. I was greeted by the usual "Please press one to subscribe, existing customers press two, to die a painful death, please press three"

Anyway, after I pressed 'one', I had to go through a whole load of questions which was picked up by voice recognition. It was all fine and dandy and I was pretty impressed, until it repeated my surname as 'Gallagher', when my surname is 'Denathorn' (pronounced as den-na-thorn)!?!

Then, I used Laura's (The other half)) debit card, I punched in the numbers... It didnt even prompt me for her name and it went through! oh er

Its on (The channel feed), they've knackered my name up... and any security stuff regarding paying by plastic/bank account has gone right out of the window!

I could of been anyone!

And that my friends, is why I never use my bank details online... I just use Laura's! ;) hehehe

Very worrying indeed!

Dabz

Dont worry Dabz - sounds like you've just picked up free sports! The whole idea of using speech recognition in call centres is absurd.

Speaking od Setanta, I get it free because I'm a Virgin Media XL TV Customer. Not only that but Virgin Media secured LFCTV and XL TV Customers will get that free too starting in Spetember. :)

Back to the Voice recognition. Watch something called Fonejacker on E4 at 10.30pm tonight. They take the michael out of people phoning in using voice rec.

Now can anyone fix my doovde. :)

There is speec recognition for my gas and electric suppliers when you supply your own reading but it toally works fine. But it's a simple task, not complex.

Yea I used to work for British Gas and they had a voice recognition thing for meter readings. Thing is, when people are talking to it, they tend to talk in a stupid voice. If you just talk normally its mostly fine.

I hate the voice recognition here in the US. usualy have several branches, and then up to 40 minutes wait till you get a human anyway. They don't like english accents much.

Reminds me of that ghost recon game on the xbox where you could give voice instructions, worked best if you used a fake german accent.

GfK. I think you are missing something here: most people talk in a stupid voice ALL the time.

Maybe in Dorset.... :p

lol

Dabz

I used to pay my telewest bill over the phone using voice recognition. I never had any problems with it, maybe it's my accent cause I'm southern. Not sure how they deal with strong dialects.

GfK: So then ... where u from?

I'm from Yorkshire, therefore I have no accent.

haha, yeah right.

Voice recog annoys me...

"Please say 'Bills' for paying bills or 'Other' for other enquiries"
"Bills"
"I heard 'Jam Sandwich' is this correct"
"No"
"I heard 'Penguin'"
"I just want to pay my bill"
"Thank you... Transferring you to personnel..."

I remember once working in a support centre and a gentleman phoned up asking why his voice recognition software was not working.

I had to find a polite way to explain to the gentleman that should voice recognition ever work with drunk people, it would probably still have a job with seriously thick highlands accents anyway.

I barely understood him myself, his software didnt stand a chance.

Even besides accuracy problems, ... I absolutely hate to have to deal with my telephone company, and then spend 10 minutes saying "yes" "no" "customer support" "oranges" "ping pong" "main menu" "one" "seven" "three" instead of just punching a couple of buttons in the apparently outdated "press 1 for ..." model.

Agreed. Major teleco in Aus has voice recog for their answering service. It's the only company I know of that insists on it. Unless you scream down the phone the damn thing doesn't even hear you and by the time you're done correcting it and get through to an actual person it's either in the wrong place or you can't speak anymore anyway.

Even more annoying is when the computer pretends to be a human, and even tries to make *smalltalk* while you're being redirected all over the place.

LOL!! Buy her something nice will ya!

Funny, I thought human beings are pretty good at speech recognition. Now, there's a thought...

Unfortunately they're also more expensive, hence the 'cheaper-and-good-enough' approach of using computers...