It took 3 minutes and 34 seconds to find out that I would have to wait another five to ten minutes before being able to speak to a human being. In fact I had to wait another twelve minutes. My question was only partly answered sixteen minutes after picking up the phone.

 Time wasting

As the tabulated phone call transcript shows, dead time (waiting for a response or action from Fido) accounts for 57% of the call’s total duration, a small but significant part of which is occupied by the voice recognition system attempting to match what I say based on the impoverished range of syllables it has been programmed to deal with. Otherwise, entering digits on the keypad accounts for about 10%, listening to Fido’s preprogrammed messages 28% and my own statements or muttering the remaining 5%. Including the duplicated phone number input, my statements and actions occupy 15% and Fido’s 85% of the time wasted before learning that I had to wait another ten minutes. Who’s wasting whose time?

Apart from the personal inconvenience and irritation of being kept waiting, it is worth calculating what kind of effect a system like this has on the economy. For example, before the voice non-recognition system was introduced I could top up my credit card payment to Fido within about 60 seconds. To carry out the same task using the voice non-recongnition system takes at least three minutes. Two minutes extra per month means 24 extra minutes per year. If the company has only 10,000 users, that means the loss of 4,000 man hours per year. Would Fido, with its silly “cuddly dog” logo, like it if the company’s unionised employees were to demand the right to an extra 4,000 man hours of paid absence (for illness, holidays, etc.) or if they had to waste that amount of time on the phone?

According to Fido, nearly 90% of calls made using their voice non-recognition system do actually get through. They hasten to add that the survey did not investigate if customers were satisfied with the system. After all, I got a partial answer after sixteen minutes (of which the first 214 seconds shown in the table, above) and belong to that 90%, so what's the problem, apart from wasting our time?

The most serious technical limitations are the system’s: [1] inability to distinguish speech from background noise (the cocktail party effect); [2] inability to decipher other variants of English than those it has been programmed to deal with; [3] paucity and rigidity of possible answers to particular questions and the inability to discern threads in conversation.

No cocktail party skills.

Humans can pick up and follow statements from fellow humans not only against background noise but also when several other conversations are going on at the same time. By way of contrast, Fido representatives advise customers to avoid any background noise (even fans and ventilation noise) if their speech is to be “recognised” by the system. Forget conversations going on in the background, traffic on the street, etc! What is the point of such a crude system? For example, I am currently unable, if I’m downtown and, on discovering there’s only one prepaid dollar left in my account, want to top it up without either seeking out a very quiet place (in downtown Montréal?!) or paying to log on at an internet café, if I can find one.

Linguistic ethnocentricity

English, as first or second language, is spoken more extensively worldwide than even Mandarin Chinese. Variants of spoken English are therefore innumerable. For example, in a multicultural city like Montréal, second-language English speakers preferring the English rather than French voice non-recognition system can have, as their first language, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tagalog, Greek, Russian, Polish, Portuguese, Italian, Cantonese, Mandarin, etc. The system even has problems with my (usually clear and correct) British English! Yet we all have to use a system which forces us all to speak with an accent that is not our own.Paucity and rigidity. The system only accepts a very limited number of stock words and statements, to be enunciated in standard North American English (see above), as valid triggers for action on its part, and only in response to one particular prompt at a time. Synonyms, explanatory or polite turns of phrase and any other socially normal conversation strategies are right out of the question. Nor can the system be expected to follow the thread of the most simple dialogue, as can be seen from the fact that it wouldn’t take “no” for an answer when a prompt five seconds earlier had instructed me to answer “yes” or “no”. The system doesn’t even have the memory of a goldfish.It is technically naïve to expect voice activation systems to deal with even the three basic points just mentioned which constitute the simplest examples of normal language behaviour among humans in any culture. So why not just accept that you’re dealing with a stupid machine and do what it wants? The reason is a technical naïvety that is deaf and blind to basic realities of socio-linguistic behaviour

 Socio-linguistic stupidity

The pre-recorded voice speaks to you using the normal speech parameters of diction, intonation, inflexion, accenuation, rhythm and timing. It also presents you with short but complete sentences. You, on the other hand, must not respond using complete sentences or any diction, intonation, inflexion, accentuation, rhythm or timing that might confuse the system. While the machine presents the sound of a human voice — some companies even give the machine a name and an ego (how sad is that!) — you, the human, must respond to it like a machine. In short, the robot is humanised and you, the human, are robotised. It (machine) pretends to be what you are (human) and you (human) must pretend to be what it is (machine). This absurd perversion of everyday habits of conversation make communication virtually impossible. If you do not respond like a machine to the machine that you are dealing with, despite its human pretences (“I”, “me”, normal speech patterns, etc.), you will not pierce its stupidity and gain access to the information or service you require. It is, in other words, a matter of social power because the system can say whatever it likes to you in whatever way it chooses while you can only say what it accepts, no more, no less.

It is by such mechanisms that authoritarianism and fascism work. If you get people used to behaving like machines in any way possible they’ll be more likely, as the automata they’ve been trained to become, to obey all orders and follow all “policies” without question. I object strongly, on ethical grounds, to any attempt to demean humans in this kind of way. I consistently tell Fido that I refuse to speak to a machine pretending to be human, and I tell them why. They think I’m a trouble-maker. Wrong! They’re causing the trouble and asking for more of it by forcing people to become machines. People are human beings and should be treated as humans, not robots, while machines should not parade as humans. It’s childishly dishonest (and a waste of time) to pretend otherwise. If you follow the normal socio-linguistic conventions of everyday speech and if someone talks with a friendly voice you’ll probably respond using in a similar manner. That’s standard human behaviour. Therefore, when a recorded voice, as in a voice ‘activation’ system, addresses you using normal intonation, inflexion, rhythm and sentence construction, you’ll naturally respond in a similar way. That’s why systems whose recorded messages require a severely restricted range of standardised vocal responses from the customer should not sound human.

It should be obvious that a robotic voice is much more likely than a human-sounding voice to elicit the kind of robotic response the system in fact needs to work at all. One other solution is to revert to keypad input, yet another to employ more real humans to answer queries and to provide services, another to rethink the provision of services in terms of what customers really want, yet another to subscribe to more phone lines and to allow people more direct access to the particular services they require (see last paragraph, below).

 Finally about Fido

It took me sixteen minutes to find out just part of what I needed to know from Fido, with their expensive voice non-recognition system. Compare that with the 28 seconds it took me to phone up and find the time of the next 161 bus going east from the stop at the corner of my street (click here to hear that!). That’s 34 times faster than Fido to access highly specialised information! Even though there’s just one phone number for information covering the whole of the Montréal public transport system, there’s no fuss: no menu, no voice recognition, no pseudo-human machine fetishes, no farting about at all. The volume is also reasonably constant and every statement totally comprehensible. What a relief! Thank you, STM! Fido should learn from you. Capitalism sucks. Public services rule!

You’re having problems re-registering a paid-for item of software bought from Exasperia.
The reason is that there’s confusion about which string of alphanumeric characters is the serial number, registration key, serial key, license number, license key, product ID, product number, product key, invoice number, receipt number, verification code, etc. that they ask you to fill in on line.

Despite searches among Exasperia’s chaotically posted FAQs, most of which are left unanswered by other users and are misleadingly referred to as ‘Help’, you just can’t find which of those variable names apply to which strings of alphanumeric characters for which purposes in your dealings with the company. There’s no explanation of how those codes and numbers relate to your User-ID, user name, password, access key, customer number, account number, account type, account status, verification details, etc., etc.

Do they mean different things by all of those names for keys, codes, numbers, licenses, identities, types, status and passwords? If not, which variable names are alternatives to which others and what functions do they have? It’s not clear. The only way to find out is to phone Exasperia.

This is what happens.

This call could have been much worse. At around 06:00 you could have pressed 7 for ancillary services and been presented with a submenu saying “You now have another five options to help us better route your call. Please listen carefully as our options may have changed.” Let’s say you choose 5 for “all other enquiries”. You’re transferred to a subsubmenu where you select another option which shunts you round in a circle back to the main menu or to the first submenu. Sound familiar? It’s happened to me several times.

Talking to a human being is what most customers want to do but it’s the last thing the system offers you. You’re just a pain in the corporate arse who has the gall to expect time to be spent attending to problems that are usually of the corporation’s own making. If ‘your call is important to us’ really meant ‘your call is important to us’ you wouldn’t have to wait so long and it wouldn’t be so hard to reach a human being.

However frustrating and cynical this corporate phone treatment may be, never take it out on the human being you might eventually reach if you’re lucky and persistent enough. Just tell your fellow human slaving away in the call centre in Dundee or Delhi how pleased you are that they’re human and ask them to pass on your frustrations to management. If enough of us complain, who knows, it may have some effect one day or another. Until then neither you nor I count. Our time and patience is not an issue unless we insist that it is. Your call is not important to the corporation because you’re really a pain in their arse.

To learn more about these stupidites, watch this short report from Australian TV. Try also this parody on voice ‘recognition’ (“I’m Phil. Did you say ‘Tom Jones’?”).

What really bugs me about all of this

It’s an exasperating waste of my time as a customer. It’s based on a whole set of misconceptions, on short-term greed and on sloppy thinking.

Corporations need to:

• Employ more people (actual human beings) to answer the phone.
• Employ people to answer the phone who come from the same language culture as the customers who phone in.
• Understand that it is infantile, dishonest, hypocritical and extremely offputting for customers to be told how fantastic the corporation is, what a wonderful range of advantages its loyalty scheme offers, what an excellent service it provides, how important your call is etc. while simultaneously subjecting customers to endless menu options and wait times before they can (if ever) talk to a real person.
• Scrap the crude and groundless fetish of voice activation automation.
• Learn the rudiments of socio-linguistics.
  • Stop pretending that machines are humans. They aren’t.
  • Stop treating customers as machines. We aren’t.
• Save customers time and frustration rather than squeeze another fast buck out of customers and junior employees.
• Learn that capitalism sucks and get used to the fact that increasing numbers of individuals around the world are sick to the teeth of it. Voice ‘recognition’, endless menus and wait times are admittedly a very minor irritation compared to the capitalist system’s major lies about freedom of speech, information and expression, but they are significant as lies. They socialise us into negative entities seen as preventing corporations from making money. That means preventing us from being human beings which, in its turn, effectively prevents us from acting in a spirit of empathy and altruism.
• Generally grow up and wise up!