Is it just me, or is HAL (the UA phone robot) much worse at parsing spoken responses now than he was several weeks back?

My last three calls have necessitated me repeating myself over and over; HAL doesn't even seem able to recognize "YES" without me drawing it out into a 3-second-long pronunciation.

It took four tries to get to "Existing Reservations"--HAL kept saying, "Book a flight--if you don't want to book a flight, say, 'go back,' now." I tried just "existing" (which worked under PMUA's IVR) in case the "reservations" bit was throwing him off, but that got a, "Sorry, I didn't understand that," response.

He seemed to have no issues recognizing "go back," at least.

This was on my home phone in a relatively quiet environment. I fortunately haven't had to call while in a noisy airport terminal yet (which always caused problems for PMUA HAL--I can't imagine how much worse it will be now).