Absolutely Bananas: Seattle mom blog

She listens but doesn’t hear me at all

One of the many excellent features of The Awesome Minivan is that it has cutting-edge voice recognition command capabilities.

(minivans are so high-tech)

In theory, it works like this.

The driver pushes a button and states a command.

“XM radio on.”

As if by magic, the XM radio turns on.

When I learned about this feature, I was really excited. My minivan is on-par with Knight Rider. A talking car? How cool is that?

Only, as is too often the case with these types of new-fangled devices, the voice recognition is a little, shall we say, glitchy.

I say, “XM radio on,”

And the robot in the dashboard responds with a very confident, “High beams on!” and turns on my headlights to full brightness.

I look at Jay. “Seriously? That doesn’t sound at all like what I said!”

He shrugs.

I try again. “XM RADIO ON!” I shout.

(shouting works for people who don’t speak English, so it must work for car robots. Right?!)

“Passenger mirror defog!” responds my ever-so-helpful but rather misguided robot friend, and the mirror starts to heat up.

“NOOOOO!!!!!” I howl, “XM RADIO! ON!”

“I’m sorry, I do not understand. Please repeat your command.”

Apparently this robot wasn’t programmed to understand Hysterical.

I take a deep breath.

“Maybe you should try something else?” Jay suggests.

Ok, whatever.

I push the button and say VERY CLEARLY, “Change station to 103.7 FM.”

“GPS home position set to current location.”

I bang my head against the steering wheel. WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! and somewhere in all the banging, my forehead hits the magic voice recognition button. WHAM! WHAM!

“XM Radio On!” shouts the robot.

And, as if by magic, my XM radio turns on.

If you’re feel like it, head on over to Seattle Mom Blogs and check out my latest Essential advice for new bloggers post in which I give many tips for Fitting blogging into your life without losing your mind, relationships, and waistline. Now if I could only figure out how to follow my own advice!

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