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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

> free one-tap access to Google Experts for help with any Google consumer product and service.

This is huge. Together with having removed ads that scanned your e-mail from consumer Gmail, it looks like Google's consumer offerings could actually be changing course from "you're the product" to "you're the customer" -- or at least be giving you the choice.

Of course, you could always get a single-seat G Suite for business account for $5 or $10/mo. with 24/7 phone support too, but it was a little too complicated and inflexible for most consumers.

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I agree. And I think the branding here of "Google One" implies that this could be the start of a large change of course, since it's not specific to any one product.

While gmail support is notoriously awful, I've been extremely impressed with my call-in support for my Google Fi, Nexus phones, and Pixel buds. So when you pay for the product, they do (/can) support it well.

I would love a general paid-Google (a la Amazon Prime) plan, which aligns incentives a little better.

Anecdotally, I've been extremely unimpressed with Google's Fi / Nexus / Pixel support.

I had a Nexus phone on Fi that -- while I was holding it in my hand texting -- it went black and never turned on again, for no reason. I assumed the battery died -- even though the UI displayed that I had most of my battery still. No, it completely bricked. Coincidentally and non-conspiratorially, it might've been ~2 weeks after my 1-year warranty expired. But after the whole iPhone planned obsolescence thing, I was skeptical.

Still, I called into Fi support. Not only were they completely unapologetic for the phone bricking, but they also had literally only one phone available for sale -- the new $700+ Pixel XL. I didn't want that phone. They offered no discount. Their answer was "you can wait a month until we get new phones". I had to buy a phone (grudgingly) from Verizon.

Overall, one of the worst experiences I've had with a Telecom company -- and it's not like I've had any experiences I would describe as "jolly".

I am a Project Fi customer that bought a Nexus 5X through them. After abotu 16 months of use, I ran into the well-documented "bootloop" issue that went along with these phones. They replaced the Nexus 5X with overnight shipping.

I experienced the same issue with the replacement device about 2 months after the original warranty expired. They replaced it out-of-warranty, with overnight shipping, for free.

Each time, I interacted with Project Fi support via web chat.

Sure wish I would've got this experience. Maybe I just got screwed because they were out of the 5X.

This is actually the exact experience I had, although I got 2-day shipping since they shipped to Ireland for me the first time, and Croatia the second time. It was exceptionally good service that I've yet to see paralleled anywhere else.

I've found them to be excellent the few times I've contacted them. They even debugged some networking issues within a few hours when my phone was having trouble switching to a Japanese data network, all while keeping me updated on their progress. The Fi vs every other carrier delta is the primary thing keeping me from an iPhone. I've been a bit less impressed with the hardware reliability of the Pixel, and Android's software experience isn't quite as good as iOS'.

"I had a Nexus phone on Fi that -- while I was holding it in my hand texting -- it went black and never turned on again, for no reason. I assumed the battery died -- even though the UI displayed that I had most of my battery still. No, it completely bricked. Coincidentally and non-conspiratorially, it might've been ~2 weeks after my 1-year warranty expired. But after the whole iPhone planned obsolescence thing, I was skeptical."

I had the same exact issue with my Pixel XL. I did buy it used, so yeah I know. I just set the phone down, it looked like it froze and rebooted, but the screen just turned off and that was it. That was a month after the warranty expired. I'm on my second one, so we'll see how this goes.

There is always a reason for everything with Google. They didn't provide support for years. Considering what they showed lately with restaurant booking, what I think is actually happening is that Google want a huge data set for support calls/chats to use it as training data for their ML systems. Then they will present fully featured customer support product based on ML.

You're wrong. There's nothing nefarious or underhanded about this decision.

Why would scenario in GP be nefarious?

according to many people - especially here on HN - any data collection is nefarious.

imho, creating new data sucking pipelines (no matter whether for advertising or model training) under the guise of a consumer service is at least slightly nefarious.

Like with google recaptcha?

I've heard the "this call is recorded for training" message for decades. Now it's training a machine algorithm instead of a human one. Nothing really changed.

This was my first thought as well. Not a bad way to go about it, too. Maybe they'll get some data about which knowledge base articles aren't helpful, too.

Maybe the Google experts are actually Duplex bots.

I'm more curious - as someone who works in Cloud Support - what kind of "Experts" we are talking about here. The Google product space is massive.

Yeah, I'm quite surprised by this, they're not just offering support for Google One but ANY consumer Google product? There's like, thousands.

Google one isn't a consumer product, just a payment plan, so it seems unlikely that the support is only for "google one". Google Drive is still Google Drive, not Google One.

> Google one isn't a consumer product

It's a paid consumer product whose core element is storage space for use with other Google services.

As long as there's a guaranteed path of timely escalation for cases of data loss and account hacking/lockout, I'll be happy.

One tap does't mean much if I have to wait on hold for 45 minutes and get transferred seven times.

Why the excitement? If you're paying for a service, you're entitled to customer service.

Try telling that to Microsoft.

Why? They have world-class service with real people, real responses and more often than not, real solutions. On the phone, in minutes.

At least for partners. I haven’t had much experience with regular end-user support, so I won’t make any bold claims about that.

Kidding? I've had MS reps call me for even free products. My paid Gmail got shut down and I couldn't even get a human to answer me.

1800MICROSOFT (which interestingly works, despite being 13 digits) is just a call center in india, however they seem to be at least somewhat knowledgeable. I haven't called them in probably around 9-10 years but I remember they would remotely control my PC and run commands in the command prompt (which doesn't mean much if they're just following a script but they seemed to be able to at least somewhat interpret the results). If the L1 tech can't solve your problem you get escalated to someone who is smarter (And these people definitely knew what they were talking about).

I believe you get three free calls for every licence you buy (home/basic licences only get one or get none, depending on the product).

*This is all based off of my experience from many years ago so it might not be true any more.

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