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Re:Natural language is the lazy user interface by Dudeman112 on Friday January 27, 2023 @01:42PM (#34549949)
Whenever this is discussed, it always makes me wonder... Why? Just why?

SURELY just adding an option to use the damn textual "pick 1 for Blah, 2 for bleh..." would take no effort at all?

Re:Natural language is the lazy user interface by monkpit on Friday January 27, 2023 @02:48PM (#34550825)
You also have to consider - does the company you are calling BENEFIT from you hanging up in anger/frustration? Many times the answer is yes.
Re:Natural language is the lazy user interface by Dudeman112 on Friday January 27, 2023 @03:04PM (#34551076)
Most of the time the answer long term is "no" because as long as it's not a monopoly people will go to their competitors that aren't utter shite at what they do
Re:Natural language is the lazy user interface by monkpit on Friday January 27, 2023 @03:56PM (#34551738)
I think the number of people who would actually do this is smaller than you think.
Re:Natural language is the lazy user interface by allgreed on Friday January 27, 2023 @09:00PM (#34554325)
But there are cases where the interacting with company which engages in said practices is due to a transitive relationship.

Example: My preferred clothing vendor uses a certain of delivery company.

If I, personally, am sending a package then switching the delivery company is usually trivial. Switching clothing vendor because UPS has crappy international package management and you need to say the package id instead of typing it would hurt me more than it would hurt them.

And the other shipping companies aren’t much better anyway. And afaik there isn’t much incentive for trading off something in exchange for pissing parcels receivers less, because see above.

On the other hand, there are great shipping companies, end user experiance-wise. One I can think of is a polish automated pickup station company. Somehow the experience (including customer support in case of a stuck door, etc.) only gets better with time so far. But they were the first and afaik remain the only company in the automated pickup station space that counts in Poland.

Re:Natural language is the lazy user interface by pintxo on Sunday January 29, 2023 @12:15PM (#34570216)
Depends, if your only option to cancel is via phone or chat-bot.
Re:Natural language is the lazy user interface by tiagod on Thursday February 02, 2023 @04:32PM (#34633397)
I had to cancel a service via fax... in 2023...