In an era where having customer support at all is not a given, paying real human beings to offer customer support through ASL is pretty next level.
The more such a service gets attention from regular media (instead of the niche, targeted audience it aims to serve), I fear it'll be another case of "why we can't have good things".
Here if I understand you don’t get access to support but to an interpreter who will call the support for you. It’s of no interest if you don’t know ASL
I might receive some slack here, but I gave it a try (I don't know ASL). Within 5 seconds of clicking the button, I was connected to a live human, with both my video and sound, as well as the other person's, turned on (although I did have the ability to switch them off). There was no intermediate step to filter out spam calls. I did cut the call quickly though to avoid wasting their time!
They were able to confirm the issue was on AT&T’s end, give me the exact language to use when talking to AT&T, and were nice and easy to work with. At one point they needed a picture of something and I braced myself for what that process would look like, it was stupid simple, they sent me an email with a link to upload the picture. It literally couldn’t have been easier but I don’t think most support places could have accomplished that task.
I have been an Apple customer for well over a decade and that ABM experience blew me away and made me happy I had gone with iPads for my business over cheaper Android tablets (one of _many_ reasons).
They’re obsessive about quality, they treat design and customer experience as first class parts of the process, they invest heavily in long-term R&D, they have world leading support - they’ve basically done the opposite of what every financial analyst and business consultant in the world thinks is the right move, and as a result they’re worth more than Saudi-Aramco, and yet somehow every company out there is still sprinting in the exact opposite direction of how Apple operates.
Because Apple's way works does not mean other ways do not. Those other ways are way easier and cheaper, and businesses are fine chasing lower hanging fruits.
I think Tesla is the closest to trying to follow their model, in a much scrappier way of course.
- ship 90% solutions to learn very early what doesn’t work - iterate and make changes very rapidly to the product
This can be seen in the model 3, which has had significant variations even within a year. Both improvements (better fit and finish) and likely mistakes (deleting lidar).
The same is seen on the SpaceX side. The starship launches were wildly successful despite the catastrophic endings. This can be seen in the live streams of the employees cheering wildly at the end (which completely baffled armchair critics).
I’m on the fence if this is a good way to run companies long term, but the general point is that it’s about as far from Apple’s culture as you can get.
The only difference is that Jobs and later his deciples were able to blow smoke up your ass, and sell the obvious incomplete product as focusing on some other distraction, or something. Clearly the reality distortion field worked.
Panel gaps or whatever at Tesla are obviously something they know about, it's not like nobody at Tesla is aware that their fit and finish doesn't match a Mercedes S-Class.
Whereas Antennagate is something that shouldn't have escaped the lab, I can't really a similar incident with Tesla.
The recent Starship explosion was a success, if you want to see the cost of avoiding rapid iteration when it comes to rockets look no further than the SLS.
ASL is a more common language for deaf people in Francophone communities than LSQ.
c.f. ASL at 4965, 8175, 37620.
I perhaps overstated the case, but...
Surely a good part of the 990-1500 are also functional in ASL. Those who aren't are a vanishingly small subpopulation to have a team of interpreters on staff scheduled to shifts, ready to videoconference.
Do you, once again, have sources for that? I'm only trying to highlight the weird edge cases Apple constantly makes to operate in Canada, and you're carrying their water for them. They're adults, they could have explained themselves why they don't serve that language community.
> you're carrying their water for them
[You made a statement, and anyone who chooses to disagree with you is "carrying [Apple's] water for them". So I guess we should just STFU?]
> they could have explained themselves why they don't serve that language community
I think this is ridiculous. Are you aware of any company making a statement about why they don't serve a specific language community?
In any case, sure, I will take the bait and further strengthen my point:
Within Quebec, 1310 in the last census indicated that they are conversant in ASL.
The number of people in Quebec who would prefer to speak Quebec Sign Language are dwarfed by the number of people in Quebec who would prefer to speak any one of Moriysen, Telugu, Bosnian, the Swiss dialect of German, Nepali, etc. I have not heard any statements by any firms about why they do not cater to these language communities in Quebec.
There's also hundreds of people in Quebec who are native speakers of other sign languages other than LSQ or ASL. Apple does not cater to these people, either.
in practice that's all difficult, if at all possible -- but just sayin; we have decently good speech interpretation at this point, perhaps we aren't far from self-training ASL against something similar.
One of the more common examples from teachers is the sign for SLOW. On the west coast, we sign it as the flat palm being pulled slowly back along the extended non-dominant arm. But in the south and parts of the east, it is signed as the Y sign, thumb against the cheek, being tilted forward.
The way you fix this casually is to ask the other person to finger spell or mime what they meant. I can't see AI being able to do that well for a while but maybe..?
Not trying to be trite, but I imagine you don't know ASL. It is an extremely loose and context dependent language really. I am sure it can be done eventually, but I still think it's very far off in terms of recognition. Would love to find out more about the state of the art for ASL or BSL recognition though.