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Agreed - I've almost never called [Insert Service Provider Here] and had one of their automated responses be helpful in any meaningful way. I'm calling because I have what seems like an exception to deal with.

I learned pretty quickly as a young man that the fastest way to get my problems solved was to hit 0 on my phone as many times as it took to get that sweet, sweet "Okay, I'll transfer you to a live representative" response.



When I contact Google Fiber's chatbot about an outage, it will let me know they are aware and give me a rough ETA.

First time I've experienced a useful chatbot.


Same here, but now it seems no-one implements 0 in automated phone systems anymore!


I just say “representative” for every spoken request they make and that’s never let me down.


Hitting a combination of #, * and 0 seems to still do the trick for most places. That and excessive swearing at the robot.


I usually do: 0, then *, then #, then I say Human a bunch, then I go into a swearing fit.

Usually by the human stage I've gotten through, but sometimes the swearing is inevitable


> … was to hit 0 on my phone as many times as it took …

You just qualified for one of those rare and hot Prompt Engineer positions, and I've got an OpenAI to sell to you.


I normally don’t press anything to get that result.




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