potential self-sighting

[KellyHabersham]

*posting this here because I probably would have been a little snippy towards anyone whom I'd gotten on the phone..........and because I'm tempted to contact our bus company about this*

For the background info - the bus company's customer service number uses a voice recognition system, and one of their options is to check for the next arrival of a bus or train.

Anyhow, yesterday morning......the bus which I'd been waiting for never showed up, and when I called to see if it was on schedule/when the next bus was supposed to arrive, I had a VERY hard time getting past the "please name your first cross-street" bit. (The system was hearing "North 64th Street" as "East Fork") And when I finally got through, the arrival times mentioned were way off.......I gave up and looked through my copy of the bus book.

Where I was getting frustrated is that this is not the first time I've had problems with this software not being able to understand anything I say, and I can't move to someplace with less background noise because I need to be able to see the bus coming/have the driver see me waiting. (plus, it was rather hot and humid yesterday, so the extra wait time wasn't much appreciated)

[Rebel1012]

aparantly drunken scotsmen accent works on all automated systems....work on your accent and get some booze in if you want to call them surely!!!

Just kidding...BOFH reference there.....have had issues with voice recognition software alot recently ....a northern englich lad in mid wales trying to say wels place names aparantly cannot be understood by anyone

[PepperElf]

i had that too trying to deal with the microsoft system, on a job issue that came up a couple of days ago.

i eventually gave up and said "human". which actually worked.
that and i stopped trying to use the handheld phone... the system understood me better on the normal line

[KellyHabersham]

Well, I think part of the problem is that I was waiting at a stop near a very busy street, and the automated system was interpreting the sound of cars going by as human speech. (I had no problems with it when I tried calling when I was home by myself, so my guess is that whatever software the bus company uses, it doesn't filter out background noise very well)

[Gizmo]

i had that too trying to deal with the microsoft system, on a job issue that came up a couple of days ago.

i eventually gave up and said "human". which actually worked.
that and i stopped trying to use the handheld phone... the system understood me better on the normal line

I have practically shouted down the phone to a nosy "please state why you are calling" system (I was 4 layers in by this point) "I want to speak to a human!" and immediately it said "putting you through now!"

[wagegoth]

I love the NextBus system we have here. It uses GPS on the buses, so as long as the bus has it, you can get a pretty accurate reading for when it will show up.

[Kogarashi]

I love the NextBus system we have here. It uses GPS on the buses, so as long as the bus has it, you can get a pretty accurate reading for when it will show up.

That's actually how the university transit system here works. They've got a fleet of refurbished school buses and nicer transit buses, all repainted to differentiate from the city's transit system. Each bus has a GPS locator on it, and there's a map on the system's website to track where the buses are so you know how far away the next one is. Even comes in app form, though I haven't used it since we don't have a data plan for our phones.

[Andara Bledin]

The bus system for the city I currently live in has digitized sings at most of their stops that have a display of when the next bus for each of their lines should be arriving. As of last year, they weren't incredibly accurate.

^-.-^

[Ironclad Alibi]

The bus system for the city I currently live in has digitized sings at most of their stops that have a display of when the next bus for each of their lines should be arriving. As of last year, they weren't incredibly accurate.

^-.-^

I know it's a typo, but it caused me to envision bus stops with speakers that sang out the names of the stops, perhaps rap style.

[dalesys]

I know it's a typo, but it caused me to envision bus stops with speakers that sang out the names of the stops, perhaps rap style.

Puts the beatdown on IA.

Transit companies have enough assonant ideas of their own.