Koala Dynamics

The Australian slang your AI receptionist has to understand or it will lose the call

An AI trained mostly on American English will mishear an Australian customer. In a service business, mishearing the job is worse than not answering at all.

Talk to us

  1. Arvo, servo, bottle-o and the rest

    Australian English shortens almost everything and adds an o or a y. This afternoon becomes this arvo. A customer booking for the arvo has given you a time, and a system that ignores it has lost the booking.

  2. A ute is not a truck

    Utility vehicle, and the single most common trade vehicle in the country. Getting this wrong in a quote for vehicle signage, servicing or fit-out produces a nonsense price.

  3. Esky, doona, thongs and singlet

    Cooler, duvet, flip-flops and tank top. Retail and hospitality customers will use the Australian word and expect to be understood, not corrected.

  4. Reckon means think, and it is not informal here

    What do you reckon is a normal way to ask a professional for their opinion in Australia. An assistant that treats it as slang to be deflected reads as cold.

  5. Heaps and a fair bit are real quantities

    Heaps of water damage and a fair bit of rust are descriptions a tradesperson will act on. They need to be captured, not discarded as vague.

  6. She'll be right is not agreement

    It usually means the customer is downplaying a problem. A system that logs it as resolved will miss a job that was about to be booked.

  7. Sparky, chippy, brickie, tradie

    Electrician, carpenter, bricklayer and the general term for a trade worker. These are the words used to book work, not the formal titles.

  8. Place names are the biggest failure point

    Wagga Wagga, Woolloongabba, Coolangatta, Kalgoorlie and Toowoomba are all routinely mangled by speech recognition tuned to American English. Getting the suburb wrong routes the job to the wrong branch.

  9. How to actually fix it

    Australian-accented voice models, a custom vocabulary of your own service area's suburb names, and your trade's terminology loaded in deliberately. This is a configuration problem, not an unsolvable one.

Talk to Koala Dynamics

Talk to us about this

Tell us what you're trying to do and we'll reply with how we'd build it - no obligation.