The Washington state Department of Licensing on Friday announced that their AI-automated phone system’s “Para Español, oprima numero dos” is now finally actual Español rather not English with a Castilian Spanish-sounding accent that would say “Your estimated wait time is less than ‘tres’ minutes” and similar absurdist nonsense to callers needing DMV services, the AP reports.
“DOL apologizes for the error and to its customers for any inconvenience,” the agency said in a statement just before the fix was confirmed. “An unfortunate byproduct of expanding services is that DOL found problems with the self-service option.” Officials admitted to the AP that home-state megacorporation Amazon was the culprit behind the ridiculousness. Reporters later replicated the voice testing out AWS’s AI product called Polly and selecting an option named “Lucia.”