COMPLAINTS were made at a council meeting that a new voice recognition service pilot scheme has gone live in English, but not in Welsh.

Welsh speakers will go through to an advisor if they try to access Powys County Council (PCC) services through Interactive Voice Response (IVR).

Until the Welsh language side is perfect, it will not go live, Councillors were told at a seminar explaining how important a digital first strategy is to PCC’s future “transformation” plans.

Following a presentation on the IVR pilot, Cllr Elwyn Vaughan, Plaid Cymru group leader (Glantwymyn), said: “Where are we with the Welsh language provision on this?

“The reason why I’m asking this is that it’s taken two years to sort out the translation facilities in this chamber. Even today’s list is monolingual (English only) which is against our policies as an authority.

“Is this more of the same?”

David Morris, of the finance department who is leading on IVR, replied: “The Welsh callers get a better deal as they don’t go through the IVR at all and go straight to a Welsh speaking advisor.

“The reason being is the time period for getting the IVR set up and get it translated was very tight.

“We were not going to allow it to start until the Welsh was completely correct.”

Cllr Vaughan suggested that the pilot scheme contact Bangor University who are doing pioneering work on setting up remote language interpreting services.

Cllr Bryn Davies (Plaid Cymru – Llanwddyn) was unhappy with Mr Morris’ answer.

Cllr Davies said: “The IVR programme should have been developed simultaneously in both languages and not tacked on at the end.

“The experience over the decades is that this happens again and again.

“It (Welsh) does not get the same attention or analysis and the standard is not often as high. We’re still English language messages when we’ve asked for bilingual.”

Cllr Davies added that by releasing the Welsh language version later the consequences would be that: Welsh speakers would have started using the English language version and familiarise themselves with that.

When the Welsh version comes out speakers don’t switch over to start using that.

“This should not have been released until they were both simultaneously equally ready, ” said Cllr Davies.

Head of Strategy, Planning and Transformation, Emma Palmer, explained that  the agenda for the seminar had not included a Welsh version of the papers had only been written late on Thursday.