<story><title>Say goodbye to hold music</title><url>https://blog.google/products/pixel/hold-for-me/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kmeisthax</author><text>The whole point of not allowing you to cancel the account is twofold:&lt;p&gt;1. To make it difficult and frustrating to cancel by wasting the user&amp;#x27;s time.
2. To allow the company the opportunity to haggle the price of the subscription down, convince you not to cancel, or worse, upsell you on other services.&lt;p&gt;I can totally foresee some kind of Google Duplex detection in the future intended specifically to ensure that they&amp;#x27;re wasting the time of a human, not a pile of linear algebra in a Google datacenter. Or perhaps they play legal games with two-party consent states to try and find a way to sue Google into not offering the service.</text></item><item><author>cactus2093</author><text>Does anyone else find this to be a pretty hilarious example of a tech arms race? It solves a real problem, assuming it works, but what a strange, rube-goldberg-esque use of technology.&lt;p&gt;Service Provider buys voice recognition software and sets up complex maze of phone tree options to drive users away from the human support agents (even though the users can&amp;#x27;t solve their problem without human intervention - if you don&amp;#x27;t want to pay for enough support agents for your call volume, wouldn&amp;#x27;t it just be simpler to let me cancel my damn account online??).&lt;p&gt;Now user can deploy their own speech synthesis bot to wait on hold, with what is presumably a complex system of AI decisionmaking to be able to navigate the maze and find a human support agent to connect you with.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pjmlp</author><text>While back in most European countries if I get pissed off with such attitudes, I just need to report the company to the consumer&amp;#x27;s protection agency and they will take it from there.&lt;p&gt;It might not be as fast as one would like, but it usually does the trick.</text></comment>
<story><title>Say goodbye to hold music</title><url>https://blog.google/products/pixel/hold-for-me/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kmeisthax</author><text>The whole point of not allowing you to cancel the account is twofold:&lt;p&gt;1. To make it difficult and frustrating to cancel by wasting the user&amp;#x27;s time.
2. To allow the company the opportunity to haggle the price of the subscription down, convince you not to cancel, or worse, upsell you on other services.&lt;p&gt;I can totally foresee some kind of Google Duplex detection in the future intended specifically to ensure that they&amp;#x27;re wasting the time of a human, not a pile of linear algebra in a Google datacenter. Or perhaps they play legal games with two-party consent states to try and find a way to sue Google into not offering the service.</text></item><item><author>cactus2093</author><text>Does anyone else find this to be a pretty hilarious example of a tech arms race? It solves a real problem, assuming it works, but what a strange, rube-goldberg-esque use of technology.&lt;p&gt;Service Provider buys voice recognition software and sets up complex maze of phone tree options to drive users away from the human support agents (even though the users can&amp;#x27;t solve their problem without human intervention - if you don&amp;#x27;t want to pay for enough support agents for your call volume, wouldn&amp;#x27;t it just be simpler to let me cancel my damn account online??).&lt;p&gt;Now user can deploy their own speech synthesis bot to wait on hold, with what is presumably a complex system of AI decisionmaking to be able to navigate the maze and find a human support agent to connect you with.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>matheusmoreira</author><text>So why can&amp;#x27;t we simply refuse to pay? We should be able to just cancel the payment and that should be the end of it. They&amp;#x27;ll cancel the service for us when they see we didn&amp;#x27;t pay for it. No user interaction necessary.</text></comment>