Washington State Residents Pressed 2 for Spanish. The Bot Spoke Spanish-Accented English Instead

Apparently for a few months, if you called the Washington state version of the DMV, known as the Department of Licensing (DOL), and tried to press 2 to interact with the phone tree in Spanish, it might feel like some kind of Family Guy gag was going on in real life. Instead of Spanish, the text-to-speech voice on the other end of the line spoke English with a Spanish accent.

A TikTok post about this by Washington state resident Maya Edwards went mega viral, garnering millions of views.

According to Spokane CBS News affiliate KREM’s Mark Hanrahan, DOL acknowledged the problem, and said it is trying to fix it and figure out how it happened.

But it can’t be any mystery how it happened. The Associated Press discovered that the voice is from Amazon Polly, an Amazon Web Services text-to-speech platform. This special voice is called Lucia, and it is designed for speaking European Spanish-Castilian, in other words. Hear yourself:

Presumably someone at or contracting with the Washington Department of Licensing mistook Amazon Polly’s text-to-speech software for translation software, and pasted in the English text. It would have been fine if the Spanish voice option was designed to convert English text into Spanish. Instead, the voice reads English words just as one would encounter them when speaking Spanish. This would explain why the voice pronounces the text “Please press 1” as “Please press Uno”. This is because it will pronounce the numbers in Spanish.

Gizmodo contacted the Washington State Department of Licensing to confirm this was the nature of the glitch, but did not receive a reply.

There were discrepancies over whether the problem had been fixed, the AP reported. As of Thursday, their reporter was still facing problems when he called the DOL. Gizmodo tried Phone Tree on Saturday and found no indication of a Spanish option being available.