We talk pretty one day

Voice mail and voice recognition systems are ubiquitous in the US
but many parts of the world (including "Old Europe") continue to shun the practice. This is particularly true in business environments where first contact (Picard) must be made by a human, regardless of how disinterested they may be. Advances in research at Stanford University however, will likely render those toll-booth-operators of the communication world obsolete — after-all, "soon the androids will speak better than we do." On their
quest to (further) render humans useless, Stanford is discovering some interesting gender and cultural anomalies: male voices are more persuasive than female, although male voices are more likely to antagonize — in Germany, men did not like receiving driving directions by a female voice, so the system was taken off the market — old people take advice more readily from young whippersnappers. The technology has reached such a level of sophistication that Stanford is now working on an in-car navigation system that adjusts the voice (from soothing to direct) based on your level of road-rage. Integrate this with some external Herbie the Love Bug effects and you've got a winner.