Voice-controlled phone systems are hugely rage-inducing for me. I am often in loud setting with background chatter. Muting my audio and using a touchtone keypad is so much more accurate and easy than having to find a quiet place and worrying that somebody is going to say something that the voice response system detects.

The problem here is that if it's something a voice assistant can solve, I can solve it from my account. I'm calling because I need to speak to an actual human.

One problem is once you’re in deep building a phone IVR workflow beyond X or Y (yes, these are intentional), callers don’t care about some deep and featured input menu. They just mash 0 or pick a random option and demand a human finish the job and transfer them - understandably.

When you’re committed to phone intent complexity (hell), the AI assisted options are sort of less bad since you don’t have to explain the menu to callers, they just make demands.

Well, the future is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbDnxzrbxn4