I just phoned Aviva about my car insurance. Man, that was a barrel of 
laughs!

First of all, you have to sit through a five minute message telling you 
how much easier it would be to do whatever it is you're trying to do 
over the Internet. [Which I already tried, by the way. There doesn't 
appear to be a way to do what I want to do.]

Five minutes later, we get to the part where they actually "welcome to 
Aviva", and get to handling my call. Now usually this is where you get 
read a list of options, and asked to press a number. ("For Animal from 
The Puppets, press ten!") However, this particular call platform wants 
me to *say* what I want.

Summoning all my years of software engineering and AI design experience, 
I take a flying guess at which combination of keywords might cause the 
machine to route my call to the correct department. (Note that Aviva do 
insurance for just about everything - life insurance, house insurance, 
travel insurance, pet insurance... So it's kind of critical that I get 
the correct department.)

Astonishingly, the machine managed to correctly parse my speech. (I 
didn't think about this at the time, but the voice is recorded rather 
than synthesized, so they must have recordings for the exact words I 
uttered.)

Then it wants my policy number. Which is amusing, because there's 
letters in it. Usually they either get a human to ask for it, or else 
you dial it on your phone - but the latter won't work for letters. 
Instead, they want me to *say* the policy number.

By the way: kudos to whoever thought it was a good idea for a policy 
number to start with the letter O followed by three 0 digits! :-P If the 
recording hadn't told me the first character is always a letter, I would 
have never known. There's almost no distinction in the typeface they 
used to print my policy document...

Anyway, I utter the various letters and digits, and in a spectacular 
feat of digital signal processing, the machine actually understood what 
I said correctly. At this point I'm astounded. [Then again, I did say it 
in the tone of voice you might talk to a toddler with.]

Next it wants to cross-check. So it asks for my sirname. Now this is 
entertaining. Given that the relationship between the characters making 
up a name and the actual way you pronounce it is vague at best (Mrs. 
Bucket? It's bouquet!), I'm left wondering how the hell the software 
actually manages this cross-check. Still, it didn't complain.

Then it asks for my date of birth. Stop and think about this for a 
moment: 1980. While most people would read this as nineteen eighty, it's 
also quite valid to utter one thousand, nine hundred and eighty, one 
nine eight zero, or even just eighty. The software presumably has to be 
able to handle all of these. Also, one might utter the month as March, 
three, ow-three, zero-three, or third. Again, the software seemed happy 
with what I said.

Finally, at long last, it says "I'm transferring you now".

This is immediately followed by "we're helping a lot of customers today. 
I'm sorry about this." Uh... I'm not sure that's exactly what you meant, 
eh? ;-)

Then I get the whole "you know, you could do this online much quicker". 
Again.

Then they say "we would like to offer you a choice of what music you 
listen to while you wait". FOR REAL??! OMGWTFBBQ! "We're put together a 
selection of different types of music." Oh God, they're not going to ask 
me to *say* a selection and try to guess which canned music matches what 
I uttered, are they?? "So, press 1 for some traditional jazz, press 2 
for classical, pr-" I pressed 2.

Oh, what a surprise. A relaxing piano concerto is too quiet to trigger 
the compander on the mobile phone network gateway. Gee, couldn't have 
seen that one coming. So what I get is a lot of stuttering and 
drop-outs. (For those who don't know - and apparently a lot of people 
don't - the purpose of hold music is to reassure you that you are still 
actually connected. If there was just silence, you might think the link 
had dropped.) Also, apparently data compression codecs designed for the 
human voice don't compress piano very well. It sounds very gurgly. 
Presumably the human voice doesn't have so many high partials.

*Finally* I get through to some woman in India. (Why is it always India? 
Why to companies not comprehend that if you're employing somebody FOR 
THE EXPRESSED PURPOSE OF TALKING TO PEOPLE ALL DAY then being able to 
speak their languages is KIND OF CRITICAL?) Anyway, I could just about 
understand what she was saying over the crackly telephone link. 
Eventually I got the quotation I wanted, but they can't give it to me in 
writing. Gee, that's really helpful, right there.

So, a triumph for DSP, and a bit of a failure for customer service...

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