HILARIOUS footage has captured a Scot’s increasing fury as the voice-controlled phone system in his car refuses to understand his accent.
Paul Lees, 43, was driving his wife, Frances-anne, home from a hospital appointment when the voice command system in his Ford S-Max failed to understand his Glasgow brogue.
Covert filming by Frances-anne captures the hysterical difficulties her husband experiences whilst trying to call a local garage about his beloved Mini Cooper.
Paul, a telecommunications office, repeatedly asks the car to call “Re-Nu-It”, a garage in Falkirk, Stirlingshire, yet the car does anything but, instead trying to call his friend “Beege” or telling him it’s “not possible”.
As he becomes increasingly incensed during the trip on the M8 in Glasgow, he tries to slow his speech down and speak as clearly as possible but to no avail, as the says the number requested is “not recognised”.
The exasperated father-of-five takes his glasses off as he battles with the voice controls and says he’s “not doing it anymore” before calling it a “wa**er of a machine”.
Frances-anne revealed that their voice-activated misery was made even worse when the machine cranked the heating up full blast despite Paul only wanting to make a phone call.
Paul even adopts a comical cockney accent to ask the machine to “call re-nu-it mate” but that doesn’t work and even starts arguing with his sat-nav, telling it to “fork off” when it tells him to “keep left at the fork”.
The four-minute clip was taken on September 21 and Paul’s wife, Frances-Anne, admits her husband was grappling with the voice system for “a good ten minutes” before admitting defeat.
“The situation could have been resolved by me punching in the numbers for him but the point was the hilarity,” she said.
“It didn’t even pick him up when he used the English accent. It was good ten minutes of him trying after we left the hospital.
“We’ve had the car two years but it does it to me as well, which is annoying. It seems to go to every person but the one you want.
“He almost got the radio station he wanted later on but we couldn’t hear anything. It also ended up blasting the heating up as well so we were sweltering.
“He’s not been back in the car since. But he has watched the video himself and couldn’t stop laughing himself and realised they were actually really funny.”
It’s not the first time that cutting-edge voice recognition technology has had difficulty picking up the Scottish accent.
In 2011, it was revealed that the iPhone 4s, developed in California, was having difficulties picking up broad Scottish pronunciations.
Since the development of the software, it’s difficulties picking up the accent has become a well-documented feature in Scottish culture.
One of the most famous sketches featured in hit BBC Scotland comedy, ‘Burnistoun’, shows two Scottish men losing their minds in a voice-activated lift which fails to comprehend what they’re saying.
