When Automated Me Comes Back to Haunt Me

It was pretty early, and I was very groggy, but there was no mistaking it:  it was me on the phone. I was in Dallas and scheduled a hotel wake-up call for 7 a.m. When I picked up the receiver it was… me waking me up. About a year before that, I was working away at home one day and received an automated call from our local cable company saying they were working in the area and  service might be disrupted. It took me about a half an hour to realize  I had voiced that greeting a couple of weeks earlier.

It’s one of the hazards of being a professional telephone voice.

Friends and associates tell me all the time that they get automated calls from me regularly or encounter me while on hold. A Digium staffer recently came up to me at a convention and said, “Yes, Allison, I received my Yellow Pages! And no, I don’t need additional books!”

It’s only inevitable that I should encounter myself in my “automated form” at some point, and I find it hard to conceal my frustration in not knowing any better than a lay person  how to maneuver efficiently through even IVR trees that I’ve voiced.

It’s particularly disconcerting when I’m trying to communicate with a voice-driven system that can’t understand me when I’ve voiced the prompts for the system. Case in point: I call a large wine distributor in California to order a thank-you for a client. It’s me on the system, greeting me, and asking me what I can do for me today (it gets worse). I say, clear as day, because that’s hopefully what I’m good at, “Place order.” There’s a dramatic pause, and then “I” say (to ME, mind you..), “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that. Let’s try again. You can say ‘marketing,’ ‘warehouse,’ “accounts payab — ”

“PLACE ORDER!” I yelp. Another significant pause.

Automated me sounds slightly pleased when I come back on the line, as I say, “OK! I think you said: (pause) ”Overseas Distribution”.

Gah!

Another well-documented incident in which my own voice totally let me down (and actually seemed like it was plotting against me) was when I voiced the IVR for Unwired Buyer, the feature of eBay that calls your cell phone to let you know when you’ve been outbid. It’s no secret that I’m a big eBay-er, and it was only a matter of time before I’d “get the call.” My cell went off one afternoon, and it was “me” telling “me” I’d been outbid on…probably a handbag. I quickly text in what I think will be a sufficient bid and smugly sit back. I come back on the line and say, “You’ve entered: seventy. five. dollars. and. fifty. cents…however, you are NOT the highest bidder!”

Did I just sound slightly…taunting? Perhaps evil? I know I didn’t have it in my mind to do it that way when I voiced it, but in this context, I sound positively lofty!

Frantically, I enter another bid, which is again shot down by me, this time with the admonishment, “Hurry! Your item is about to get away!” Trollop! Don’t pressure me! Exhausted, nerves shot, I enter what I’m convinced will be the victorious bid, until I come back on the line and say, “Sorry, bidding has closed for this item. You have been outbid. Better luck next time.”

Did I just sound….smug? Like I was, dare I say, dismissed? By me? It’s like my telephone persona was rooting for this other woman to walk away with my handbag. (I even suggested to my client at Unwired Buyer that we re-record the fail prompts to sound gentler and more encouraging. He replied, “No! We LOVE them! People get mad and enter bids all day long!”)

My voice has almost become a separate entity—something that has an existence without me, and as I’ve illustrated, regularly comes back to bite me.

Allison Smith is a professional telephone voice, having voiced platforms for Verizon, Qwest, Cingular, Bell Canada, Vonage, Twitterfone, Hawaiian Telcom, and the Asterisk Open-Source PBX. Her website is www.theivrvoice.com.