Who knew David Cameron was manning phone lines?
That’s an inherent consequence of using the password and CAPTCHA on the same form. Browsers will not save passwords between submissions–this is intentional.
So you have to actually make the CAPTCHA check itself independently, before you submit the form, and that’s more complicated.
Or I guess you could roll your own password field…
I’ve had a couple of these “automated phone system” robots actually admonish me for cussing (after getting frustrated with their maze-like bullshit), then hang up on me.
Listen, robot, I don’t give a fuck if my language is “abusive”. You bet your circuit boards I’m gonna get “abusive” after the umpteen zillionth time you can’t understand my accent (urban Southerner–and not even a heavy one!).
Generally, I’ve found that repeatedly pressing zero will, eventually, make the robot give up and connect you to a human.
I’ve often found that numeric options are implicit in the automated spiel. For instance, if they tell you to say “yes” if you meant such-and-such and “no” if you didn’t, pressing 1 or 2 respectively will send the same signal. Similarly if they say, "You can say things like “pay a bill”, “contact technical support”, or “it’s something else”, pressing 1, 2 or 3 will work.
A positive trend I’ve noticed recently is that some companies will now let you indicate whether you’d rather interact by using your keypad.
I think you said, “confess to possession of child pornography”.
If this is correct, press 1 or say, “no, no, nooooo.”
Ha or your dog barks. My dogs ALWAYS bark when I get on the phone, and I have had their barks trigger the voice response.
Ooh, good pitting.
My automatic reaction to getting through to one of those is to just keep mashing buttons on the phone until I break the robot and it puts me through to an actual person. I have absolutely no time for those systems whatsoever, and don’t usually even try.
I have no problem with the systems that you interact with by pressing buttons; I generally find them to be quite efficient (except for at least a couple of companies I can think of that make me enter account numbers etc before I can get through to someone who then asks me that exact same information :mad: ), but those voice non-recognition systems just drive me nuts. Even if I take care to raise my voice and enunciate slowly and clearly (sounding like a right prick in the process), I find their success rate is about 60-70% at best. Fortunately, the button-mashing escape route normally works and I take that every time. 
The one time that didn’t work was with my old insurance company; they’d sent out a renewal quote that I wanted to ask about. Normally, I could deal with them online, but for some reason the online service wasn’t available in the week before renewal so I had to call them. Fine. Except they had a voice non-recognition system. And it was one that no amount of button pressing, speaking random gibberish, complete silence or anything would make it give up and let me talk to a real person. I must have tried twenty times to get it to recognise my policy number. My wife had a go, and couldn’t get it to recognise it either. I even tried using a text-to-speech program to read it out from my laptop - but no. Close, but no cigar. I literally could not get through to them.
In the end, I had to call the line for new customers only (this, of course, got me straight through to an actual person), explain my predicament and persuade them to put me through to the renewals team. By this point, I was so pissed off that the only thing I had to tell them was to cancel my renewal. I also made it completely clear to them that the only reason I was cancelling was because of their phone system.
It’s a side thing, but recently we’ve been getting spam calls that use a synthesized voice to read out the message - such as the could-be-terrifying one from the IRS about your overdue something or other and fines to $100k and prison and flogging and deportation. I guess the overseas spammers have found a way to get around the lack of a native English speaker in the crew.
But they still need to work on that grammar thing. It’s funny to hear a stentorian, pitch-perfect male 'Murrican voice read out third-grade language flops.
Yep. And sometimes it also works if you scream into the phone: I WANT TO TALK TO A FUCKING OPERATOR!!!
Just a quick note–agree with everything said here, in spades–but “service” this is NOT! It’s automated, and phone, but --definitely…not…service.
Along the lines of computer generated voice pitting, may I add parenthetically the BART announcing voice. That shit creeps me the hell out.
Gracie is a little creepy, but meh.