A Timaru café has been inundated with phone calls—but instead of customers looking for a toastie, many are trying to reach a doctor.
Google’s Gemini Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool was reportedly providing the phone number for Sopheze Coffee Lounge when users searched for Timaru Hospital.
Staff at the café noticed a sharp rise in wrong numbers and hang-ups.
“People would say, ‘Sorry, wrong number,’ and hang up, or people ringing… asking for radiology. I had one yesterday who wanted to confirm his appointment with me,” Sopheze Coffee Lounge manager Vanessa Keen said.
“We get about 15 to 20 phone calls a day.”
Keen said it took a couple of weeks to identify the cause of the problem.
“Then it clicked … I said to this lady on this phone, ‘Where did you find this number?’ and she said, ‘Google. I googled Timaru Hospital and this is what came up.’ I asked her to send the screenshots through to me, and I sent them through last week to the local health board.”
She said it appeared the correct contact details were shown when searching for “Timaru Hospital”, but users searching “Timaru Hospital phone number” were being directed to the café’s number instead.
Keen said the calls were a disruption but also raised concern about the stress it could cause people trying to reach the hospital.
Andrew Lensen, a senior lecturer in AI at Victoria University, said errors like this were not uncommon in AI-generated summaries.
“Sometimes it’s because when Google has gone through and scrapped these websites, their algorithms – their AI models – have got a bit confused or mismatched two pieces of information together. Sometimes it is what we call a hallucination where the model makes things up,” Lensen said.
“It is a bit strange, but my best guess is that maybe these phone numbers were listed in a similar place, maybe a Timaru website or community page, and the model has mismatched that association.”
He said AI-generated summaries should be used with caution. “It’s just a good reminder that the summaries are often wrong. It even says that at the bottom of the summary.”
Health New Zealand – South Canterbury alerted people to the issue and requested that Google fix the problem. However, Lensen said correcting such errors was not always straightforward.
“These big tech companies tend to be quite hard to contact in terms of these types of errors. They are not overly concerned about it, to be frank.”
There might be a contact form on Google’s website, but it could be just a matter of waiting for the contact information to naturally update, he said.
Google said in an emailed response that the issue had now been fixed. It also said users could give inaccurate information a downvote.