For months, callers to the Washington state Department of Licensing who have requested automated service in Spanish have instead heard an AI voice speaking English in a strong Spanish accent. The agency has since apologized and says it’s trying to fix the problem.
AI is putting threatening to put The Onion out of business, not because The Onion articles can be written by AI, rather AI has just made this kind of satire nearly obsolete. The Onion is forced to retreat into existential screaming into the void humor, which they have done magnificently in the face of an unstoppable foe. The Onion will prevail and outlive AI though, mark my words!
My friends got a funnier version of this. The local elementary school has a service that translates automated phone messages for parents into any language.
She’s bilingual, but her mother only speaks Russian and shes been teaching the kids Russian. So she gets each message, 2x, once in english, and once in Russian. But, whenever the system hits a loan word, or word that is the same in both languages, (superintendent was the word it hit when I was driving with her thw other day)
it gets derailed, and finishes in english with a really over the top Russian accent.
Not the same Russian voice mind you, it switched from a woman speeking fairly fast to a man speaking english slowly and angrily, with a Russian accent, like it was trained off of cold war movie 'Soviets or something.
That’s so fucking weird! I wish we could hear a recording. That’s amazing.
Roger, Roger.
What’s your vector, Victor?
Over, Oveur
Do you like watching gladiator movies, Joey?
This is hilarious. I work on translation software and know exactly what’s wrong. They’ve selected a spanish voice, but not translated the content to spanish. I was playing around with these settings in our software and produced exactly this result.
Damn that is comically absurd
Before long, we wouldn’t need The Onion anymore with all this nonsense!
It’s nice to know that AI can still give us that good old human touch in the form of blatant racism.
Somebody go ahead and shoot me, please. I want off this mother loving ride.
So all aboard for the American tour
And maybe you’ll make it to the top
And mind how you go, and I can tell you, 'cause I know
You may find it hard to get offYou may find it hard to get off
Thanks antidepressants :(
The agency has since apologized and says it’s trying to fix the problem.
Something about “says it’s trying to fix the problem” is really funny to me 😭
Yeah, as if that kind of thing could be done by accident. Or maybe it can IDK.
“Hey fool, we heard you like, want a license to drive and shit. Press uno if you only have one card left, hahahaha just kidding just kidding calm down. Press numero two if you want to drive. Press numero three if you’re a cabrón and have to reschedule a failed test, or press numero four if you like, wanna talk about your feeling or some shit. If you want to repeat these options press that hash homie, and thank you for calling the Washington state Department of Pendejos that get to decide that yours truly has to ride a fucking bike everywhere in the wet-ass rain. *whistles good bye”
I think you can hear an example here: https://www.spokanepublicradio.org/regional-news/2026-02-26/couple-asks-wa-dol-for-spanish-speaker-and-gets-a-recording-in-accented-english-instead
🤣 priceless!
You know there are vibe coders who don’t even try to run the code before uploading it. Apparently, those very same people make phone services too. Just do everything with AI, and ship it without checking anything at all. Full steam ahead, never look back.
And they get paid the same amount as normal developers. And probably get paid to fix all the mistakes they make.
That doesn’t sound like an AI voice in that it used generative AI. It sounds like someone just fed the English into a Hispanic voice on a regular text to speech engine. I could be wrong though.
Or maybe somebody wrote an AI prompt that said “hey make this voice file sound Spanish”.
Well…I laughed. I’ll just see myself to hell now.
“It was hilarious to us in the moment because it was so absurd,” she said Thursday. “But at the same time, it has real accessibility issues for people who call in every day and need to speak in a different language other than English.”
We are all going there together.
