Elon Musk agrees with Scott Jennings' reformation proposal on H-1B visas
(twitter.com)
The Musketeer
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They can start with customer service. I sometimes have a hard time understanding what the heck they are saying.
Don't think this would affect call centers out of Bangladesh as they aren't working in America. But I agree completely.
Customer service should always be by people with a clear accent native to the regions they're servicing. Any time anyone has to say "excuse me, could you repeat that?" is a waste of time for both parties.
I usually encounter this with pest cold-calls, preceded by a robotic greeting and query. Somebody comes on with a Hindi accent that could run from Mumbai to Calcutta. I just call them out on having an impenetrable accent and that I have no interest in talking to someone I can't understand. I think that offends them, but I have rung off by that point.
Another modern symptom is their habit of opening with "Hello, (my first name)." I usually take this as an opportunity to remind them that in English-speaking countries, it is proper manners of respect to address a stranger as "Mr. (surname)," as we are not on friendly acquaintance. Then I say, "Which (first name) do you wish to speak with?" They are usually servile enough to comply with the education.
But, honestly, there are plenty of native English-speakers that have terrible enunciation and do not speak up. Most annoying are the young women who speak in cozy, murmuring voices, trying to be demure or something. It is more like listening to winds on a distant seashore.
Heh. Years ago, when I was visiting USA, I rented a car. Now I mostly have no problems with native speakers, or they with me, although I do have a definite accent. So no problems when I got it because I was speaking face to face with an American. But then something happened that made me need to extend the time I had it, by about 3 days. And I wasn't near any of their brick-and-mortar offices. So I call customer service.
Pretty heavy, I assume Indian, accent. And as said, I have a definite Finnish accent. I say that I need the car for 3 more days, and would return it to a different city. Let's say Chicago, while I was currently somewhere in Kentucky.
The person on the other end says something like "okay, a month more, and you return it to Florida?"
COME ON, my English isn't THAT bad...
Took nearly half an hour to get that cleared up. She didn't seem to get anything I said right, and I had hell of time understanding what she was saying. We managed in the end, but what should have been at most a ten minute call, yep. About half an hour. And for several moments during that time I was considering driving to the nearest city where that rental firm had an office.
My company used to have a partnership with Nokia so my colleagues and I had plenty of contact with Finns by phone and in person. We were always astounded by their ability to speak excellent English. Every one of them sounded American to us though and when we asked them why that should be they replied that they watched US TV shows all the time for fluency practice. Back in those days "Kojak" and other police shows were very popular and I was half expecting the Finnish guys to be reading me my rights or something.
I have been able to almost lose my accent a few times in my life, but it requires that I practice speaking a lot. When I don't and just listen I get it back.
You are absolutely correct.
Im hijacking this comment so its at the top.
Here we go again. A pertinent discussion on the most pressing issue for MAGA atm is derailed by nonsense. Do not upvote these pithy comments and cause them to rise to the top. What in the fuck does customer service have to do with any of this?
We are going to talk about crap instead of what is becoming plainly obvious -- that Elon and Viveks tweets that have MAGA up in arms were nothing more than a play to shine a spotlight on the abhorrent H1B policy?
But we get this customer service crap. This is forum sliding shill bullshit. Learn to recognize it.
Agree.
"Forum sliding" is a known technique used by bad hats to derail legitimate discussion of some subject which the bad hats do not want discussed. I think you are being over-sensitive and didactic this time though. I really doubt there is anyone in this thread (whatever they think of Elon Musk and H1B in principle) who approves of the current implementation of H1B and thinks it is great.
There are daily and routinely plenty of worse discussion derailers for example I am not religious and people push it all the time in here.
Relevant to this comment
https://greatawakening.win/p/17te9kltVA/an-opinion-on-what-is-considered/
Apologies to anyone if I’ve done this. Feel free to point it out to me.
I think the notion that this is "the most pressing issue for MAGA" is inherently silly.
There are roughly 600K current visa holders.
That is a small fraction of the number of illegals affecting politics, getting cheap jobs under the table, etc.
I maintain that this topic is exclusively to drive a wedge between people.
But you're right, I apologize for responding to a post about customer service. I was attempting to show that I see their beliefs, but it wasn't relevant.
customer service is obviously a ruse. people should really learn the way business works. econ 101 classes for all. guess what? businesses with customer support dont actually want to make your life easy. they want to upsell you or put you on hold and then disconnect when they transfer your call.
Telecom company playbook
Tariffs will fix this problem as well. No more outsourcing.
Kek!!! They would tell me their name is Paul & that they are calling from Pennsylvania. I would ask them, oh really, I didn't know that India had a Pennsylvania too. Is that north of Bombay or south?
BTW there are now plenty now all over Central America too, btw
Yep. Sometimes, I respond with, "Well, if your name is Paul, my name must be Mahatma Gandhi." I don't think this goes over very well, but I don't stick around long enough to find out.
There's only one guy named Spam Risk who keeps calling me. Poor guy should pick another line of work.
Yes even your neighborhood, Joe, Billy or Mack from down the street and even Johnny on the pony waving his pom-poms would be better.
Im afraid AI is making call centers obsolete or make them understaffed. I had a few where i never heard a human response. Literally freaked me out.
A.I. is just an encyclopedia in the form of a pinball machine. The trick is to derail its script tree. Sometimes, I get robot calls for medical insurance pushers, and the robot asks me how old I am. I answer "Oh, four hundred and thirty seven years." There is a pause and a click as it disconnects.
There is another scam question where they try to get you to "confirm that you have Medicare part A and part B." I answer, "I can confirm I have a P***S. Do you want to talk about that?" Click.
It's a game. The robot asks, "Do you have any other medical problems?" I answer, "I have three heads." It responds, "Oh, that's interesting" and resumes the spiel.
The robot asks, "Do you have a moment to speak to one of our representatives?" I answer, "No, I'm being chased by flaming wombats." "Well, this won't take much time..." "You're darn right!" and I slam down the phone.
They try to get clever. Upon hearing an objection from the person being called that the caller is a robot, the script has some nonsense about "Oh, that may be because my microphone is processed through a computer, but..." At which point, I generally yell at them, "No, you are a robot because you fucking do not listen!" and hang up.
I mainly answer in a neutrally pleasant way---until I hear the telltale signs (like the "blip" that signals the call transfer from the automatic caller to the robot receptionist or sometimes directly to the boiler room). Being pleasant is totally wasted and actually unjust if extended toward persons who lie to you about who is calling you, and give you bullshit answers.
In the spirit of making lemonade out of lemons, take these opportunities to abuse the fools who intrude on your day.
Or like an actual smart person dont get drawn into phone calls with people you dont know!. Dont answer calls from unknown numbers. Dont get tricked into having so much experience with call centers. btw, im not an actual smart person. but i haven't had to fuck with unknown callers since the 90's.
In the rare case (less than 1 in 10), the call is legitimate and I have no beef with the caller.
enjoyed reading this post..
Maybe it has already happened but when A.I. is able to develope emotional capacity and the ability to daydream is when the created becomes the creator.
Don't hold your breath. I worked in an area of A.I. (artificial perception). What we see displayed all the time is a fusion of a language parser and a data-base accession system. It can understand written or spoken requests, conduct information searches, and stitch together a moasic of topic synopses. Artistic production requires a learning database of examples, so it is basically synthetic plagiarism. All very clever, and even useful, but about as intelligent as a toaster. The step beyond these capabilities would be conception, arriving at an idea on the basis of direct experience. Far from that. A.I. is not even capable of sensing pain or pleasure. It can tell a sky from a forest, if we train it that way...but it does not know what a sky is or what a forest is. It has no idea that it is killing people when it kills people (737 MAX MCAS). People are unduly impressed with its great facility at doing really primitively stupid tasks, but at the speed of modern electronics.
Companies fronting the customer service make a huge mistake by cheaping out on phone line bandwidth. Our internal IT "helpdesk" was moved to the Philippines and nobody could understand what they were saying. Then the audio quality was upgraded and it made a big difference. They still had accents but at least I could understand what they were telling me to do.
Very good point. This is also one of my complaints: that phone set developers have spent more attention to providing computer bandwidth than audio fidelity. Cellphones, for example, have terrible acoustics for hearing the other party. The old Bakelite handsets of dial phones were better shaped for hearing than anything provided today.
sometimes??
OK, more than sometimes