| Topic: | Re:Parking machines and robot voices | |
| Posted by: | Richard Greenhough | |
| Date/Time: | 05/05/23 16:02:00 |
| "It is blatant discrimination for this council not to provide a choice of ways to pay to park your car in this borough, other councils do it..." Last week I went to funeral in Cheddar (Somerset) and the car park there required either a mobile phone app or the right collection of coins, neither of which I had, so I had to walk along the road to the nearest shop and buy something with a note to get me the change I needed, hoping that a warden wouldn't happen by in the meantime. So it is not just LB Hounslow making life difficult for those who prefer to pay for parking by credit (or debit) card. My other beef is where there is an issue on a website and when you try to phone up to sort it out you get what seems like about five minutes of robot voice telling you that you can do whatever it is you need to do on the website. Yesterday I was trying to download my monthly credit card statement and the screen message was telling the blatant lie that there had been no transactions in the month and the account was inactive, so I rang and went through the usual robot nonsense before finally getting a human being who said sorry, try again later. I suggested that it might be helpful if the website message was more accurate and said something like "statement not yet ready" if that was the case. I don't know whether these robot voices are out to soften us up for the eventual takeover by AI (perhaps MCB News could tell us ?) but if so, they are not doing a very good job of it. |