Will AI solve this problem?
 

Why do companies have representatives that deal with customers that are difficult to understand because of heavy accents or poor pronunciation skills of the English language? I often reach customer service representatives that I cannot understand and have a very difficult time dealing with these individuals. In other cases, there are many companies where you get trapped in an automated or speech recognition system and cannot speak to a human representative. Do you think with the advent of new AI systems that this will improve or will it worsen? My hope is that the AI will at least speak in an understandable, well pronounced English language.

There are phone apps for translation..........they work well for crappy English into clear English.

Siri has 6 programmable accents today. Pretty safe bet AI will have it covered.

Jobs are outsourced to countries with no minimum wage requirements, where people answering the phone are willing to work for very low wages.

AI obviously can't help with being able to understand thick accents whether they be from a foreign based CSR or native English speaker with a thick accent (sometimes it's Louisiana folks for me. Nothing wrong with LA, but to my ear the accent is tough). Where AI can and likely will help is in the ACD system where you are dealing with the machine. AI learning should help those systems to be able to more clearly understand what you are asking and have the capability of responding to many many more issues than the very few it can today. All of that of course in the accent that it detects that you are speaking, so I get Northeastern US, the guy from LA that I can't understand well gets that LA Cajun English accent etc.

It is unlikely that businesses will be able to afford US staffed CSR systems to handle every call, or put another way, it's unlikely we'll be able to afford the products and services of companies that employ that higher cost labor.

I encountered this yesterday when I called Comcast. I apparently went over my usage allotment. I wanted to know where so I could cut back(have not done this in ten years). I got caught in the loop, of "do you want to speak to someone, can I send you a link?" I repeatedly said "no" and it continued. When I finally got a real person, with an accent, I could not understand her other than she wanted to sell me more data instead of telling me how I could cut back. I finally hung up.

Though I have reservations about AI in general, it could very well be a positive for CSR - customer conversations. It certainly can't get much worse. "Frustrating" is a descriptor that is far too tame when it comes to some of those interactions. The same can be said for the online chat services that some companies provide in lieu of a live phone CSR. At best, you get someone to chat with who is obviously reading "solutions" from a computer monitor. At worst, you could be queued up for a wait that can be interminably long.

Amazon has a pretty nice new service though: "Rufus", an online chatbot to which you can direct written questions about a certain product and Rufus responds in kind. I haven't asked Rufus to help troubleshoot a problem I've been experiencing with a product obtained from Amazon (maybe it can't do that) but it is quite helpful when I have questions about a product I am thinking of ordering. Used it yesterday when ordering an external computer drive and the information provided on the website wasn't sufficient to make sure I was getting an item with the functions I needed.

AI can speak clearly, but don't expect a sympathetic response.
AI is limited to what the programmers anticipated.
Ask about an unrelated topic, and you will likely get a blank.

perhaps, hopefully, AI will improve Air Traffic Control efficiency and safety. Or at least, positively supplement the antiquated systems ATC uses in our US airport towers.

Or hire enough staff, so those won’t be required to work multiple shifts causing an unsafe mental status

HA? They won. You lost.

Any time I get an automated voice I say "representative". Usually works. If the rep is not understandable, I ask them to speak slower. That, also, usually works. You can also ask to speak with someone else (supervisor? ).

I guess none of you have ever had the displeasure of dealing with a hearing-impaired IVR system. It goes something like this:

"Hello, thank you for calling Ace Widgets. Your call is important to us. Please listen carefully to the menu as our options have changed. If you wish to place an order, say "ORDER." If you wish to check on an existing order, say "CHECK ON ORDER." If you wish to make a return, say "RETURN." If you wish to eat my shorts, say "SHORTS."

>OTHER

"I'm sorry, I didn't understand what you said. If you wish to place an order, say "ORDER." If you wish to check on an existing order, say "CHECK ON ORDER." If you wish to make a return, say "RETURN." If you wish to eat my shorts, say "SHORTS.""

>(me, thinking in normal plain English, "GRRR") SHORTS.

"You say you wish to discuss an existing order, is that correct? Please respond with YES or NO."

>No.

"Please say why you are calling."

>OPERATOR

"I'm sorry, I don't understand what you are saying. Thank you for calling Ace Widgets. Goodbye."

<CLICK>

(The above is an example of AI at work. Or rather, failing to work. If it can't understand YOU, then you'll get no help.)

Your first sentence is unclear, but I assume you mean the customer representatives are difficult to understand because of their accents and not that the customers are difficult to understand because of their accents. For a decade or so, many companies have contracted out this work to telephone sweat shops in India. Imagine twenty to a hundred lightly educated Indians sitting at long row as of tables in bare rooms with computers and phones in front of them. You have a hard time understanding them and yell at them, and they just have to take it. Can they understand your accent? I don’t know. But chances are, all they know about the product giving you trouble is the guide on the computer. They have probably never seen the item.

But it’s not just India. I remember a decade ago needing to ask questions of a real person in the IRS. A lot of the people answering IRS customer assistance phones at the lowest level are in Philadelphia, and they often have strong African-American accents that are nearly as difficult to understand as English spoken by less-well-educated reps in India. They also tend not to know much about tax questions. If your question is too difficult, they send you eventually to a supervisor who may be of any ethnicity (I don’t care) but speak standard, understandable English.

And then there are the horrible phone answering systems proliferating, and now there are computers that “chat” with us but really just waste out time. If we ever do reach a real person, chances are we will have to be transferred, be put on hold again, and the call will be lost. The worst offender I’ve come across recently is Verizon Prepaid. After hours of trying to reach a person, over several days, I finally went to the company-owned Verizon store on 441 (the others in the area are all franchises that are limited in their ability to help you) and canceled my prepaid Verizon contract and got a regular Verizon plan.

I remember 20 to 40 years ago buying a lot of the family clothes at Lands End and L.L. Bean. They both had outstanding phone reps. The spoke standard English. They seemed educated and interesting and sympathetic and knowledgable. Every order was done right and every question was answered. I wanted them all to become my good friends. Those were the days! But they lived in Dodgeville, Wisconsin or Freeport, Maine, where there are Americans who speak standard American English.

If the government sincerely wants to make America great, it should make it a criminal offense for companies to not have customer reps who speak good English and live in the U.S.and know what they are talking about and are easy to reach. Long times on hold should be a criminal offense that leads to automatic reimbursement to the customer, as with planes that leave late or overbook. All companies should be required to have easy to reach real people to answer questions. (Ever tried to reach a real person at Amazon or eBay? Not going to happen!) Companies are allowed to waste millions of hours of our time every year without recompense. People, this is why we need a strong Consumer Protection Bureau. Don’t think of it as government waste stymying business profits. Think of it as helping YOU get what you need in a timely manner,

AT&T uses AI and AI fix the problem right within minutes

Don’t think the answer is another government agency or expanding one already in place.

Artificial Ignorance
 

Yeah, my dermatologist's office has AI for making appointments.
Took a long time to get thru the press this, press this, press this, , ,
Then I got the AI rep.
Every time it was my turn to speak had to rephrase 2 or 3 times.
Every time I gave any reply there was a long pause x2LONG before AI would answer.

When I finally got an appointment, there was only one choice.
NO
Took probably 5 more minutes to (seems like) trick the AI into giving me another choice.

This office was already on my marginal list. I'm gonna ask my regular doc for a new referral.

Yes, AI will get better. Until then keep it in the laboratory.

I use the chat feature whenever it's available. This usually works, but sometimes you still have a machine at the other end, so I may resort to typing in "live operator".

"lightly educated Indians"

Seems their education system is better than ours.

And here I am happy when I get a good ol’ Loozana person on the phone!😂

As a software developer, I work with AI (ChatGTP and Microsoft copilot) every day and I'm here to tell you, it's nothing short of amazing. It can actually anticipate code I am writing. I have also found that when I'm searching ChatGPT to solve a problem, I almost always find the correct answer immediately instead of wading through dozens of webpages. It has largely made google search irrelevant to me. You can also be very specific in your question.

If it can do that when it's still in its infancy I'm sure it could, at a minimum, handle answering questions, which is why most people call a helpline. Mapping speech or text to an audible voice is already well on its way.

The one thing to remember about AI is that it is not really "intelligence." It's basically an algorithm that scours the web or some other source for information with a high level of specificity. For it to be effective with a helpline, there would have to be a robust, highly detailed set of data backing it. That would take time and effort for a company to develop and maintain.

You can install the ChatGTP app on your phone. Try it out sometime. It's amazing the questions that it can answer. Just remember to be smart never put personal information in it. If I'm not mistaken, it actually warns you that they make no guarantees about data privacy.

That said, I can think of a couple problems I have noticed with AI generated content. First, you do sense the loss of human connection. When I am looking up reviews of a product on YouTube and I come across AI generated content, I almost always abandon it. I want to hear a real human being talk about the product and give me their personal opinion.

Another problem is eventually someone will figure out how to monetize it. Think of Google search. Most of the results that you get at the top of your search are paid for. It wasn't like that early on. Enjoy it now while it is still relatively free from that.

I can understand why some companies cannot afford English speaking customer service reps. For example, if you are selling a $20 computer software program, and a customer, who doesn't even know how to turn on their computer, calls for help, the company will definitely lose money on the product.

:BigApplause::BigApplause::highfive::highfive::hig hfive::highfive::clap2::clap2:

luv it!!! :BigApplause::BigApplause:

Play the game in reverse. Can't understand them-oops I hung up and called back. You ask for A Name in case you need a follow up and they refuse or tell you, you can't call back and find the same person. So when you hang up and call back, hopefully the new one speaks English-actually American. We need to teach the English to speak English..

Ask for US representative
 

Some but not all companies will have US based people you can talk with. If you feel you have reached an overseas support center, as to speak with a US Based representative. With any luck, they will transfer you. As an IT tech, I had to deal with one of the largest computer companies in the world. When I would call in for assistance, I would ask for a US Rep in Atlanta. (Oh gee, I just gave away the companies name). I always opt in for the "Brief Survey after the call" and slam them if I got a overseas rep that I could not understand. "Hello my name is Randy. How can I help. Hey dude, your name is not Randy, it's Rashid.

I highly agree with you about CoPilot and ChatGPT. I use it all the time instead of googling in a browser. What amazes me is you are having a normal conversation with someone. Ask a simple question, they ask another question related to the previous one to dig deeper and you get great answers. It even gives you two answers if the answer is more of an opinion. Not only does it give you an answer to a question like how much salt do I put in my pool, it gives the actual calculation on how it got there.

Next year, no one will be Googling stuff, they will just ask their AI app.

Ajvgte
 

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AWSEDC POIVCX LODECS WESDRE.

TANKS 4 KELLING, HOLD 4 A SURFEY:cus:

I love it when people vent their frustrations. Makes me feel like I'm not alone.

What we have heah is a failure to communicate!

Right! I estimate that AI cuts down my R&D time, (which is a significant aspect of my job) tenfold. What used to take me 30 minutes now takes me 30 seconds. I kid you not. It is a game changer for sure.

Yes I LOVE AI! Btw, “ai” in Mandarin is the word for “love”.

I paint and I asked ChatGPT to give me hints on how to improve my art. Loaded up a photo of my painting of the golf course at Alamanda. ChatGPT gave very useful suggestions on how to improve it and orally too as if I was talking to a friend. A relative has written a story but in difficult, convoluted language - it’s hard to read - and I asked DeepSeek to translate it into simpler English. I tested this on one paragraph. Very nicely and readably translated. Then I asked DeepSeek to translate it into Spanish and French. DeepSeek did a wonderful job, no editing required. Both of these AIs are free apps on my iPhone.

And the code (at least mostly for DeepSeek) is public - anyone can build on it like when Pythagoras shared his theorem, or Einstein his formula for the speed of light. And now Sam Altman is consider doing something similar for ChatGPT. For me, this is really an exciting time to be alive.

I hate comcast with a passion so I'm working hard on dropping them completely. Going to give T-Mobile internet a try. As for AI I have hope that applications like Siri and Alexa will be improved 1000%, and speak in a language the caller requires. Whether they will solve our problems is yet to be determined

why?
 

Off shore customer service is cheaper than onshore customer service. When customer service is off shore it is an indication that the company doesn't really care about their customers. AI will not help. What will help in the meantime is for people to become more patient, with accented language, whether Asian or Southern USA.

AI
 

AI, always confused if means Artificial Intelligence or Actually Ignorant.

You can ask AI its thought process, how it determines its language. For example, ask,”is hotdog a sandwich” and just watch how it goes through the analysis of what a “sandwich” is first. The citations it looks into, like wiki and even more than Google. And I can talk to AI in my native European language too. Win, win, so far.

This is not the same thing as talking with “Chat” on Xfinity, for example, etc which has a very limited number of possible responses.

From LA here. LOL. I get it.

It's even worse if one has hearing issues?
 

Firstly, not everyone uses a smartphone - especially when they're at home. Secondly, several of the Customer Service Representative (CSR) issues are not only strong accents - but, also extremely rapid speech. I have hearing aids and have a difficult time understanding ANYONE on the phone - English speaking, or otherwise. I always request that anyone with a strong accent "please speak louder and more slowly". Even that doesn't work oftentimes. I wish there were a way around this issue, too.

I tried to order from Applebee's on the phone, because their website ordering system forgot the option to select a side with a steak special and we didn't want mashed potatoes (the default). It stuck me into the IVR system and said I could order via that. So I started out telling them what I wanted, and it didn't understand me. I read off the menu, SLOWLY, enunciating the words, and it still didn't understand me. So I tried to 0-out to get someone there, and it thanked me for calling and hung up.

I ended up driving there and ordering my take-out in person. Waste of an hour, because I had to deal with the 10-minute failed call, then waiting for someone to notice I wanted to PLACE a take-out order (not picking up one that had already been placed), then place it, then sit in my car and wait for them to bring it out (they didn't have any place for me to wait inside).

Horrible horrible experience, and all because of AI.

AI
 

Why ask us to press one for English if the person you get to help has trouble speaking English.

They were speaking it first...