So I'm on the phone to EDF Energy, I'm used to dealing with tired-sounding underpaid people who sound like they'd like to strangle you with the phone cable or having to keep taking the phone away from my ear to key in numbers. Not with EDF, they seem to be running a shiny voice recognition system. Either that or their phone droids are chowing the happy pills like there's no tomorrow and are very rigidly scripted. Either way it gets confused if you add please and thanks on the end of things. I guess that's not an input they're used to. The system doesn't seem to mind my habit of pronouncing nine as niner, thankfully it doesn't decide I'm a { psychotic killer, jarhead, gun nut, etc} and start being sickeningly polite unlike the minimum wage variety of phone-droid seems to be prone to doing.
But the best bit has to be:
And how much would you like to pay
the 'ole fscking lot (in my best 'miserly old man' voice, (which is too awful to be in amy way comic))*
Just to confirm that's [$total_due]...
So either the system was designed to accept people being abusive, or it just defaults to the whole lot if it can't understand what you're saying. I might have to investigate this and see what happens when I feed the system nonsense... And see what the system thinks of festival (or other text to speech program...)
* You can tell I've been writing code today? Must stop the nested parenthesis **
** and the superflous footnotes.
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