Interactive phone tech creepy, sad
My childhood friend Chris Kopet and I always grew bored this time each summer. So we made prank calls. We didn’t settle for the usual – Is your refrigerator running? Better catch it. We called reference librarians and asked them if poodles had eyelashes and if chickens had lips.
We thought we were hilarious.
Monday, in the name of research, Chris and I prank-called again. We phoned an Amtrak ticket agent named Julie, who speaks in a human voice but is actually a computer program. In technology lineage, she is the “granddaughter” of the recorded voice who once told us the time on the phone and the “daughter” of the women and men who have told us for years now to Press One for …
Julie is part of the “hot” IVR generation, short for Interactive Voice Response technology.
IVRs pretend to hold conversations with humans. They say “OK” and “No problem” and “My mistake.” My friend Chris, who mimics voices well, spoke to Julie first in the voice of Apu, the Indian Kwik-E-Mart owner from “The Simpsons.” Then she called back as the British “Mrs. Doubtfire.” I called next, faking an Italian accent.
Julie tried her best to understand. She kept asking, “Train status or schedules?” We mumbled bad replies in worse accents. Julie never blamed us. She blamed speaker phone echoes or weak cell phone connections. She said, “Sorry, I still didn’t get that.”
Finally, Julie said, “I think you said ‘I want to talk to an agent.’ “
We hung up. We weren’t hilarious. The experience was both sad and creepy.
More and more IVRs answer phones now. Over the weekend, I called Delta Airlines. An IVR with no given name, let’s call her Delta Woman, asked the city I was flying from, and the city I wished to arrive in. I heard in the background what sounded like human fingers on a computer keyboard.
Companies insist IVRs serve the consumer, but they also exist to replace human workers with mechanical ones. Delta Woman did save time for me, because when she transferred my call, the real agent had my flight request right in front of her.
Delta has used IVR “agents” since January. Avaya, a New Jersey-based company, set up the program. Steve Feldman, an Avaya sales director, told me that choosing the perfect IVR voice is “part art, part science.”
Some companies prefer men’s voices, others prefer women’s. Accents are usually nondescript, though as the technology grows, the voices will become specific to products. Feldman said a pizza business, for instance, might use a thick, exaggerated Manhattan accent to evoke the quality of New York pizza.
The voices are tested on focus groups, Feldman said, and they belong to human beings who work for talent agencies. Julie’s voice has a slight East Coast accent. Delta Woman sounds no-nonsense, like those reference librarians Chris and I harassed 40 years ago.
There are tricks to quickly moving from IVR to human being. You can say “agent” at any time and Julie will transfer you to a person. Unlike Julie, who gave me that tip from the beginning, some IVRs never reveal the magic exit word. Stuck in a credit card IVR system once, I yelled “Help!” It didn’t help.
Another trick: Talk back with irrational requests. You’ll soon be transferred to a real person.
Experts say the next generation of IVRs will be even more efficient. Part of me welcomes this. Monday, I happened to call a live human being at a phone company. The woman, who sounded young and confused, left me with little faith that my request was processed correctly.
Still, my best conversations for this column took place with “real” public relations people at Delta and Avaya. They laughed when I told them about prank-calling Julie. They told me it was humid in New Jersey, like Spokane. No, I said, you’re thinking of Seattle. We have dry heat in Spokane.
If I’d told that to Julie, she would say, “Sorry, I still didn’t get that.” And, you know, she never will.