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Today is one of those rare "busy news days" that makes life almost as hard for a lowly columnist as the "slow news days" do.

So, am I going to talk about the successful arrival of the second Mars rover mission on the surface of the red planet? No, but do check out the pictures and story linked in the headlines section below.

Am I going to talk about the fact that the Queen, in all her wisdom and sensibility, is going to give Bill Gates a knighthood (I kid you not!)? No, Sir Bill's story will have to wait for another day.

What I would like to talk about though, is the NZ Government's apparent loss of commonsense in respect to this story

Putting aside my own "encounters" with the IRD for a moment, I must still really wonder whose bright idea this was.

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I'm sorry, but despite the fact we can land radio-controlled buggies on the surface of Mars and even perform remote diagnostics, reboots and a little reprogramming from 90 million miles away -- computer speech recognition is still very much the stuff of science fiction.

Anyone needing proof of this needs only look at two recent TV programmes -- an episode of The Osbournes when Ozzie just about had an apoplectic fit trying use the speech recognition system to turn off the radio in his new BMW -- and a recent episode of Top Gear when Jeremy Clarkson spent many hours trying to train a similar system in another brand of vehicle, with an equal lack of success.

No, the reality is that computers just aren't very good at recognising what humans are trying to say.

Of course there are ways to improve the hit-rate such as only asking multiple-choice questions, thus limiting the range of responses, or by having the computer "learn" the characteristics of an individual's voice.

However, it would appear that even under "ideal" circumstances, computers are just plain lousy at this game -- so imagine how much worse it becomes when they try to recognise previously unheard voices that have also been mangled by the limited bandwidth and noise associated with a telephone system.

It would seem that the folks over at the IRD are not about to let facts get in the way of a good business-case though, and they're about to pour a cool $1 million of *our* money into this folly. What's more, and this is the most ludicrous of all, they honestly believe that they'll be able to use such a system to identify callers by their voices.

The story on Stuff claims that a similar system is already in place over at the Ministry of Social Development on their "Service Express" line -- so I thought I'd give it a go and see if it worked. It took just a couple of minutes to track down a web page that offered a number for the Express Line service (0800 33 30 30)

So, at 8:30am today (Monday) I rang the number and, in what can only be an outstanding example of bureaucratic idiocy, I got a recorded message that said:

"Welcome to Work and Income service express. This service is available Monday to Saturday, 7am to 10pm. Please phone back during these hours. Thank you for using Service Express."

Excuse my ignorance - but what on earth is the use of having an automated speech recognition service if it's not available 24/7?

Now, given the really bad reputation the IRD has with their interactive voice response system, how on earth is adding a layer that attempts to recognise the human voice going to help? I suspect that, after the 20th attempt to get a stupid computer to recognise what you've said, it will drive some "customers" to distraction.

But hey -- this is the IRD here, you have no option but to fight your way through the system or get your backside kicked. And what's a million dollars to a government with a surplus of over $5 billion worth of your money?

And people wonder why I object to paying more tax?

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