<\/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
Earlier this month, Edwards called the number again and found 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 in a statement that it was trying to fix the Spanish option and figure out how it happened in the first place. It noted that the self-service option includes 10 languages and runs on a newer, AI-driven technology. It was not immediately clear if the issue had affected other languages; efforts by The Associated Press to use the phone service in some of the other languages Thursday did not prompt additional accented voices.<\/p>\n
\u201cDOL apologizes for the error and to its customers for any inconvenience,\u201d the statement said. \u201cAn unfortunate byproduct of expanding services is that DOL found problems with the self-service option.\u201d<\/p>\n
The agency declined to share the name of the AI vendor providing the translation service, referring the question to WaTech, the state\u2019s interagency IT service. A spokesperson for the agency did not immediately provide the name of the vendor following AP voice and email messages requesting it.<\/p>\n
Thursday morning, the call line still put on the voice after a message, in English, acknowledging that the some translation services are no functioning properly.<\/p>\n
When an AP reporter followed prompts for Spanish-language options, he was met with an accented English voice accent that would only say numbers in Spanish.<\/p>\n
\u201cYour estimated wait time is less than \u2018tres\u2019 minutes,\u201d the voice said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SEATTLE (AP) \u2014 Press \u201ctwo\u201d for Spanish … accent? For months, callers to the Washington state Department of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":494271,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,793,7046,226307,3766,74,795,2003,2002],"class_list":{"0":"post-494270","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-general-news","12":"tag-language","13":"tag-maya-edwards","14":"tag-race-and-ethnicity","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-u-s-news","17":"tag-wa-state-wire","18":"tag-washington"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494270\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/494271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}