Sweet Spot

Okay, typical scenario: you’re stuck in an airport. Your flight has been cancelled. You’re trying to rebook, and the line is huge. You call the airline’s toll free number. You get the typical voice recognition software; ‘Please say ‘reservations’ if you’d like to book a reservation, ‘flight status’ if you’d like to check the status of a flight…’ and so on.

BUT you can’t communicate with the thing on your cellphone because the loud public address system keeps confusing the voice recognition. In fact, I’ve had this problem even driving around in a car with the radio off. Wind and road noise are enough to confuse the computer.

Some simple suggestions:
-ALWAYS allow touch tone input as an alternative. I’ve found this actually works on many voicemenus even if the prompts don’t suggest it’s possible.
-If somebody starts using touch tones, the voice recognition should stick to touch tone mode. Don’t listen to the speech input, and change the succeeding prompts
-Mobile phones should have a mute button so you can conveniently block external noise out.
-This is a terrible workaround, but might appeal to some users: publish a touch-tone-only number.
-Worst case, if the voice recognition software is getting input it can’t process, it should forward you to a human being. MOST voice recognition systems instead simply hang up on you.

It’s bad enough that I’ve considered getting a TDD program for my laptop so I can dial the telecommunications relay service for the deaf. Unfortunately, airports seem to be the worst case scenario for many of these voice recognition systems even though it’s a _very_ typical context of use.