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Almost all my horror stories from tech support involve a live call with someone whose accent was so heavy as to be almost undecipherable. Either from India or f
by inglor_cz 3y ago
Almost all my horror stories from tech support involve a live call with someone whose accent was so heavy as to be almost undecipherable. Either from India or from Malaysia.
As a non-native speaker myself, I struggled to understand anything, but going through the call was necessary in order to get important situations solved, or at least bumped up to someone more qualified. (Hey Microsoft, you really like to cheap out on support!)
If a robot calls me instead, it will at the very least speak some kind of standard English.
- hulitu 3y agoI don't want to invalidate your answer but a lot of spoken English is non intelligible. Ever heard a scot speak English ? Or an american from midwest ?
- DharmaPolice 3y agoI doubt they'd make the default dialect for a chatbot Glaswegian. Although presumably giving variable accents (based on customers location or even user input) wouldn't be impossible.
- DougN7 3y agoIsn’t the American midwest considered the default? Maybe you mean the deep south?
- slowmovintarget 3y agoIt is. American Midwestern accent is the equivalent of BBC English in the UK. Source: Am from the Midwest, and have heard interviews of actors and newscasters discussing this.
- can16358p 3y agoSame. I'm not a native myself but have a generally good level of understanding English. Those tech support people (and the always-extremely-compressed-level-audio-quality-from-56k-era) are another level: even if they are actually telling me an answer that'd work (which they rarely do), it's almost impossible to understand what they say. No one expects native-Shakespearean-level accent with lossless FLAC encoded audio, but at least a baseline level of English accent and a microphone better than a potato should be a requirement when hiring.