The thing is doing what it is intended to do. Stop people from getting through to customer service. For everyone who wades through the infuriating process to actually get someone, three people give up in frustration. They reduce customer support costs by 75%. Simple.

I remember reading somewhere that the person who invented Call Waiting said if the customer is not answered by your staff within 30 seconds, you aren't employing enough staff.

Swearing is probably now filed under "Perfectly normal human response to "A.I." systems".

Absolutely infuriating.

In my experience, sadly, cussing a lot doesn't work anymore. Trust me. I've tried. 🤬

Haven't tried that, although this one gave me so much to swear about.

It actually said to recite one number or letter at a time. So, I did. I must have been slower than it was programmed for, because it kept interrupting, asking if I was finished, and saying the number was too small.

I got angry, read the number out with no pauses, allcrammedtogetherlikethis, and the "A.I." accepted that and put me through to a person...

...who asked me to read out the number.

Ah! But, the manual says, you can ask the appliance for its numbers using the app, so no need to be able to read the labels!

Which will be ... how much use, exactly, if the appliance fails and won't talk to the app any more?

So having spotted this in advance I've printed all the numbers off from the app whilst the kit is still working. But really.

First off, it wants you to describe what you want to do, but is looking for extremely specific vocabulary. Luckily you can press 9 to get to a familiar call tree.

And two of only three validating prompts are your birthdate and your zip code. It almost always gets these wrong, to the point that I just type these with my keypad.

Imagine if an AI decided the quickest and most efficient way to resolve a complaint, was for the customer to never be given the opportunity to raise a complaint…