Beware of falling iguanas

This story about hibernating iguanas falling from trees is my favorite story of the year (so far). There's even a video. I used to live in South Florida, and some of the stories I tell on the place people just don't believe. I really have seen a lot of iguanas during my last couple of trips back there, so this doesn't surprise me at all. Tip: don't throw frozen iguanas in the back of your station wagon, because they'll wake up and jump on your back.

My last blog entry about Florida had something to do with finding an alligator in the kitchen, if I recall correctly.

Alligator in the kitchen

The Holy Grail for IVR designers is a natural language application that can handle a significant percentage of calls to a service desk. 911 call centers are a kind of mission-critical service desk: you call with your problem and address and hope that help arrives before things get much worse. In order to get natural language to work you'd need to anticipate what callers will say when they call (or at least have categorized a number of previously recorded similar calls).

Unfortunately, there is just no way a VUI designer is going to craft a system that will recognize "alligator in my kitchen" as a legitimate problem call. Even human 911 operators have difficulty with the phrase, as you can hear in this recording.