The Washington Department of Licensing said in a statement that it was trying to fix the Spanish option and figure out how it happened in the first place.
reading between the lines: they didn't fucking test it at all before rolling it out.
“Your estimated wait time is less than ‘tres’ minutes,” the voice said.
yeah bro AGI is right around the corner bro I just need like 10 or 20 billion more dollars to buy more GPUs trust me bro it's gonna be awesome
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.
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
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.
This is hilarious, but in a I can’t believe how fucking absurd and stupid way.
They didn’t even bother QAing the pre recorded messages by listening once.
Damn that is comically absurd
Before long, we wouldn't need The Onion anymore with all this nonsense!
“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”
Well…I laughed. I’ll just see myself to hell now.
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 😭
My kids' elementary school had the opposite sort of message, the principal saying, in a flat slightly southern US accent - si quieres Espanol oprima el numero dos, like such an accent I am not sure anyone who spoke only Spanish would know what she was saying.
See
Kee-yer-is
Ess pan ohl
Oh pree muh
Ell
Noo mur oh
Dowhs.
"trying to fix the problem"
Oh dear God that is frankly horrifying.
U.S.S. Ford is going to get sunk, isn't it? "we're trying to fix it" you motherfuckers
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.
Always grimly funny when you can basically suss out the lazy-ass prompt: "Now do the same message, but Spanish."
Cheech Marin, perhaps?
If I ask my Home something in French, half the time it reads off English text with a French accent. It's so bad
So Spanglish instead of Spanish, whoopsie!
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