<\/p>\n\n AP AUDIO: Callers to Washington state hotline press 2 for Spanish and get accented AI English instead\n <\/p>\n
Sound of recording when callers press 2 for Spanish. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt was hilarious to us in the moment because it was so absurd,\u201d she said Thursday. \u201cBut at the same time, it has real accessibility issues for people who call in every day and need to speak in a different language other than English.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Edwards called the number again this month, she found that the error persisted. She posted a video of the call to TikTok, racking up around 2 million views.<\/p>\n
The Washington Department of Licensing said Friday in a statement that it fixed the glitch after determining it was caused by DOL staff. It noted that the self-service option includes 10 languages and runs on a newer, AI-driven technology. <\/p>\n
\u201cDOL apologizes for the error and to its customers for any inconvenience,\u201d the agency said in a separate statement the previous day. \u201cAn unfortunate byproduct of expanding services is that DOL found problems with the self-service option.\u201d <\/p>\n
It was not immediately clear if the issue affected other languages; efforts by The Associated Press to use the phone service in some of the other languages did not prompt additional accented voices.<\/p>\n
As of Thursday morning, the call line still put on the voice after a message, in English, acknowledging that the some translation services were not functioning properly.<\/p>\n
An AP reporter followed prompts for Spanish-language options and was met with a voice speaking accented English that used Spanish only for numbers.<\/p>\n
\u201cYour estimated wait time is less than \u2018tres\u2019 minutes,\u201d the voice said.<\/p>\n
DOL said Amazon provides the platform for the phone service and declined interview requests. AP journalists were able to replicate the voice by using an Amazon Web Services feature called Polly and selecting a voice called \u201cLucia,\u201d which mimics Castilian Spanish.<\/p>\n
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
Associated Press data journalist Aaron Kessler in Washington contributed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SEATTLE (AP) \u2014 Press 2 for Spanish … accent? For months, callers to the Washington state Department of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":360101,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,289,290,18,3334,19,17,8659,167956,20729,82,4077,62138,2709],"class_list":{"0":"post-360100","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-general-news","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-language","16":"tag-maya-edwards","17":"tag-race-and-ethnicity","18":"tag-technology","19":"tag-u-s-news","20":"tag-wa-state-wire","21":"tag-washington"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116145971694783438","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/360101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}