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

Apparently for some months, if you called the Washington state version of the DMV, known as the Department of Licensing (DOL), and tried pressing 2 to interact with the phone tree in Spanish, it may have felt like some kind of Family Guy gag was playing out 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 a Washington state resident named Maya Edwards went mega viral, attracting millions of views.

According to Mark Hanrahan of the Spokane CBS News affiliate KREM, the DOL acknowledged the problem, and said it was seeking to fix it and figure out how it happened in the first place.

But it may not be much of a mystery how it happened. The Associated Press figured out that the voice itself is from the Amazon Web Services text-to-speech platform Amazon Polly. This particular voice is called Lucia, and it’s designed for speaking European Spanish—Castilian, in other words. Listen for yourself:

Likely someone at, or contracting with, the Washington Department of Licensing mistook Amazon Polly’s text-to-speech software for translation software, and pasted in English text. This would have been fine if the Spanish voice option were designed to turn the English text into Spanish. Instead, the voice reads the English words as one would if they encountered them while speaking Spanish. This would explain why the voice pronounces the text “Please press 1” as “Please press uno.” It stands to reason that it would pronounce numerals in Spanish.

Gizmodo reached out to the Washington State Department of Licensing to confirm that this was the nature of the goof-up, but did not receive a reply.

According to the AP’s report, there were discrepancies about whether the problem had been fixed. As of Thursday, their reporter was still encountering the problem when they called the DOL. GIzmodo tried the phone tree Saturday and found no prompt for a Spanish option available at all.