Washington State Spanish
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"Callers to Washington state hotline press 2 for Spanish and get accented AI English instead", AP News 2/27/2026:
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.
A recording:
DCBob said,
February 27, 2026 @ 8:51 pm
I knew there was a reason to move to Spokane!
Sarah C said,
February 27, 2026 @ 11:39 pm
In addition to being NOT Spanish, it sounds quite odd. I'm not sure it sounds like a Spanish accent to me, not the ones I hear in San Diego. Maybe the artificial speech timing weirdness is throwing me off.
Abbas said,
February 28, 2026 @ 2:05 am
@Sarah C: you are right, the accent correponds to standard Spanish from Spain, anyway it sounds funny. This voice is frequently heard in automated responses in Spain. I think this synthetic speech is based in a real voice actress and locutionist.
Peter Cyrus said,
February 28, 2026 @ 2:40 am
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lQFIZw9qog
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foT9rsHmS24
JMGN said,
February 28, 2026 @ 3:54 am
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Spanish_pronunciation
Isn't /c̠͡ç̠/ (or /k̟͡x̟/) the voiceless affricate counterpart of /ɟʝ/, instead of /t͡ʃ/?
Viseguy said,
February 28, 2026 @ 4:02 am
@Peter Cyrus: 😂
Philip Taylor said,
February 28, 2026 @ 4:35 am
I may have reported this here before (in which case I apologise) but when I lived in Chislehurst (Kent, UK) an English friend introduced me to his French visitors by affecting a marked French accent but using (almost) standard English vocabulary ("Ah, Feel, zees are my French friends Christophe et Marie"). And he did not do so in jest — he really thought that it was a valid substitute for speaking French, and was therefore respectful to his French visitors (who were, in reality, amused but not offended).
Philip Taylor said,
February 28, 2026 @ 4:37 am
P.S. (having now listened to the audio recording) — well, she did say "please press uno" and not "please press one", so there was at least a vestage of Spanish in her utterance.
번하드 said,
February 28, 2026 @ 7:14 am
@Philip Taylor
Ah, like this?
https://youtu.be/iHv2idIJcOI
David Marjanović said,
February 28, 2026 @ 7:45 am
Sound systems are rarely perfectly symmetric. And the pronunciation of /j/ varies particularly widely between different kinds of Spanish.
(I've corrected the slashes for phonemic transcription to brackets for phonetic transcription.)
Doctor Science said,
February 28, 2026 @ 11:09 am
Raya, a commenter on Bluesky recognized the problem, from their knowledge of how corporate phone systems use screen readers:
So what they did here was:
-wrote an English script
-set it up to read in the SR [screen reader]
-attached an AI Agent that would real-time translate the script
-It only real-time translated the numbers
-The SR read everything with a heavy accent and only used Spanish on the numbers.
QUITE LITERALLY if they had spent, like, fifteen minutes creating a script IN SPANISH and forgone the AI Agent entirely, this NEVER would have happened. JAWS [the screenreader] would have read the script perfectly in totally understandable and accurate Spanish and this wouldn't be a story.
Due to most SRs being INTENSELY memory heavy, I would bet cash money that they had the AI Agent running in-house instead of via the cloud on the same machine they have their SR running and the Agent hit a membuffer and died before fully translating everything.
Chris Button said,
February 28, 2026 @ 4:25 pm
I'm actually a little confused by this because I don't see any absolute reason for not treating /ɟʝ/ as a phoneme.
I recommend taking a look at Castilian Spanish in the Illustrations of the IPA.
Rodger C said,
March 1, 2026 @ 10:38 am
Shouldn't a phoneme be represented by a single symbol?
Philip Taylor said,
March 1, 2026 @ 11:18 am
Well, is there a Unicode symbol for LATIN SMALL LETTER J WITH CROSSED-TAIL AND STROKE ? It doesn't look at first sight if "Latin small dotless J with stroke-J with crossed tail ligature" had made it into the Unicode standard.
Chris Button said,
March 1, 2026 @ 7:29 pm
@ Rodger C
I would say a phoneme needs to be as simple and as representative as possible.
The ɟʝ combination is just an affricate in the same way that tʃ (or indeed cç) is an affricate.
The more affricates that can be supported as ligatures in unicode the better!
M. Paul Shore said,
March 4, 2026 @ 8:24 am
This whole situation reminds me of the scene in the 1971 Woody Allen comedy Bananas in which the Woody character, Fielding Mellish, an American who’s become the president of the Spanish-speaking Latin American nation of San Marcos, pays a state visit to the United States and is greeted by a government official and an interpreter, with the latter merely repeating in heavily Spanish-accented English everything Fielding and the official say (in English) to each other.