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August 23, 2022

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How To Not CX, Lenovo Style [Opinion] By Techagents

Sometimes the world of smart technology innovations collides with the planet of dumb customer service provisions. That confrontation usually doesn’t bode well for the customer.

In my case, that scenario is especially true. I bought Lenovo’s Chromebook Duet 5 from a leading national electronics store at an attractive price. In the end, it was a purchase I wish I could undo.

The Duet 5 is considered by many reliable reviews as the best overall ChromeOS tablet / detachable computer available this year. Its large screen and detachable full-size keyboard create a usable and fun tablet experience that isn’t available with pure Android devices.

To me, that honor does little more than reaching that point. In fact, if your primary need for a Chromebook is to run Linux apps, think again about not buying Lenovo’s Duet 5. You may find a unit like mine that works even if Linux doesn’t. That failure is not considered a valid claim under Lenovo’s warranty.

I have become very fond of Chromebooks. ChromeOS devices complement my home office cadre of Linux computers. They link to my Android phone and its apps. I can run the same productivity apps and access their data directly on the Chromebook.

What fueled my fascination with the Duet 5 is it’s logical follow-up to the very popular 10.1″ original Duet that I bought a few years back. The Duet line has a detachable keyboard and is a stand-alone ChromeOS tablet.

Putting need versus need aside, I debated the potential for greater productivity and convenience with a bigger screen at 400 nits, a bigger keyboard, and 8GB of RAM. I knew the manufacturer and the retail store as well as the product line. Or so I thought.

What could have gone wrong? Three things: a failed product, no support, and a warranty that didn’t work!

maybe a lot

The last thing I needed to buy was another Chromebook. Over the years, I’ve used four or five models from HP, Lenovo and Asus.

The Duet 5 seemed to check all the boxes. As it turned out, the check mark for reliable technical support and customer service went out of the box.

No, I could not return the computer. By the time I realized its faulty nature, the undo window was closed.

I think this incident would prompt me to buy expensive add-on store warranties for less expensive electronic components. Adding insult to injury, Lenovo tech support said the malfunction was “out of the scope of the manufacturer’s one-year warranty.”

A final correspondence from Lenovo’s tech support told me that if I sent the device to its repair facility, all technicians would do is reset the unit to its original OS state and remove Linux.

Heck, I’ve already done the same thing twice.

Lenovo buyer beware

This account is not intended for product reviews. Rather, it explains what happens when corporate arrogance destroys the customer experience.

I usually write about business technology issues and open-source development affecting the Linux OS. My reporting beat overlaps with e-commerce and customer relationship management (CRM) issues.

As a technical writer and product reviewer, I’m used to having manufacturers send me their own products in hopes of showing off their best wares. Marketing wonders often offer high-end configurations to capture the attention of consumers. They go out of their way to make sure the reviewer is completely satisfied.

It’s too bad that mindset isn’t always present when inferior consumers are on the receiving end. But I wasn’t using a lending unit, I’d send back anyway, satisfied or not. I have purchased this model and have no plans to review it. I just wanted to use it.

My personal experience further hardened my resolve not to buy Lenovo products. Not because of a bad product encounter. Lenovo lost my customer loyalty due to shoddy customer service and no dedication to solving my problem with a bad computer I made.

white detail

According to Lenovo’s ill-conceived logic, the warranty on Chromebooks doesn’t cover user modifications. Since I ran into a problem with activating the Linux partition, deleting the partition, and not reinstalling Linux apps when I bought it, I was guilty of modifying the device.

To clarify, all Chromebooks require the user to have a Linux partition on and install Linux apps. The same process goes for using Android apps on a Chromebook.

Chromebooks are built to run ChromeOS and optionally run in separate built-in containers of Android and Linux software. Google certifies the hardware to make sure the software works.

ChromeOS likewise enables users to access websites in a browser environment. An additional option lets users access those web destinations to run application services within a tabbed browser window or as Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) in their own separate window.

That’s what Chromebooks are designed to do on any manufacturer’s hardware. Turning on/off these built-in features should not be considered as “modifying” the device.

tech support helm

A few weeks after getting the Duet 5, I only experienced one intermittent screen flicker problem. This cleared up after a system update. do not worry. No worries.

that time i turned on linux partition and installed the same linux app i use on my other less endowed Chromebook. Those devices worked fine with the same apps.

But Lenovo Duet 5 froze after loading Linux apps and running for few minutes. Messy installations happen. So I did what is standard troubleshooting. I have reset ChromeOS to its original state. Then I set up the Linux partition and resized it beyond the Google-recommended minimum size.

not a solution to the problem. So I wiped the Linux partition again. This time around, I installed a single Linux app at a time, looking for the culprit that stunned others. Every Linux app froze in isolation.

Lenovo technical support declined to examine or test the hardware. Agents suggest finding an affiliated tech center to pursue a solution.

stuck with no option

I would have happily done so. But the nearest such Lenovo repair center was about 150 miles across state lines.

I contacted the Google Chromebook support community for an alternative solution. A support person there had me run the “df command” in a Linux terminal to determine the physical health of the partition.

A readout of that diagnostic confirmed that the device contained a valid and working Linux container. This partially settled the question about the hardware. However, it did not identify what other hardware issues could be involved.

The Google support forum tech then suggested that I find one or more dude packages by following the procedure outlined above. But, of course, I have already done this many times.

poor lesson learned

If you’re planning on buying a Chromebook just to get easy access to selected Linux apps, seriously consider my experience. Maybe look elsewhere instead of Duet 5. Several Chromebook alternatives exist.

Who knows? Maybe the Linux apps on your Duet 5 work just fine for you. As I said, I haven’t had this situation on any other Chromebook product I’ve used.

No doubt my experience was a gross anomaly. The worrying part of all this is that I will never know the reason for it.

But if you buy the Duet 5 from a retail outlet directly from the manufacturer, be sure to confirm how that store honors the warranty. Now you know how Lenovo honors its warranty.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ECT News Network.

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Internet

Accent altering voice tech aims to replace frustration with communication By Techagents

Having trouble understanding the person at the end of the support line you’ve called to get some customer service? A Silicon Valley company wants to make problems like this a thing of the past.

The company, Sunus, makes software that uses artificial intelligence to remove accents in the speech of non-native, or even native, English speakers and output a more standard version of the language. “The program performs phonetic-based speech synthesis in real time,” Sharath Keshav Narayan, one of the firm’s founders, told TechNewsWorld.

Furthermore, the voice characteristics remain the same even after the accent is removed. The sound output by the software sounds the same as the voice input, only the pronunciation has been removed, for example, the gender of the speaker is preserved.

“What we’re doing is allowing agents to keep their identity, keep their tone, it doesn’t need to change,” said Sunus CEO Maxim Serebryakov.

“The call center market is huge. It’s 4% of India’s GDP, 14% of the Philippine GDP,” he told TechNewsWorld. “We’re not talking about a few thousand people whose Along with their cultural identity they are being discriminated against on a daily basis. We are talking about hundreds of millions of people who behave differently because of their voices.”

“The concept is sound. If they can make it work, that’s a great deal,” said Jack E. Gould, founder and principal analyst at J.Gold Associates, an IT consulting firm in Northborough, Mass.

“It can make companies more efficient and more effective and more responsive to consumers,” he told TechNewsWorld.

talking local

Gould explained that local people understand the local dialects better and engage better with them. “Even talking to someone with a heavy Southern accent gives me pause sometimes,” said the Massachusetts resident. “If you can be too much like me it affects the effectiveness of the call center.”

“Many call center employees are located overseas and customers may have trouble understanding what they are saying in terms of strong accents,” said John Harmon, a senior analyst at CoreSight Research, specializing in retail and technology. told TechNewsWorld, a global advisory and research firm.

“But the same could be true for the regional American accent,” he said.

However, Taylor Goucher, COO of Connext Global Solutions, an outsourcing company in Honolulu, cited discounts as a source of customer frustration.

“It is well known that companies outsource call center support to different countries and rural parts of the United States,” he told TechNewsWorld. “The bigger issue is the positioning of employees and the right selection for the training and processes to make them successful.”

customer perception

Harmon notes that consumers may have a negative reaction when they encounter a support person with a foreign accent at the other end of a support line. “A caller may feel that a company is not taking customer support seriously because it is looking for a cheaper solution by outsourcing service to a foreign call center,” he said.

“In addition,” he said, “some customers may feel that someone overseas may be less able to help them.”

Goucher cited a study conducted by Zendesk in 2011 that showed customer satisfaction dropped from 79% to 58% when a call center was relocated outside the United States. “Everyone I know is likely to have a bad customer experience at some point in their life with an agent they didn’t understand,” he observed.

He said the biggest problem with poor customer experience is the lack of support systems, training and management oversight in the call center.

“Too often we see companies take call centers offshore just to answer the phone.” They said. “In customer service, answering the phone isn’t the most important part, it’s what comes next.”

“Agents, Accent or No Accent, will be able to deliver a winning customer experience if they are the right person for the role, have the right training, and have the right tools to solve customer problems,” he said. “It’s easy to say the pronunciation is the problem.”

prejudice against accents

When a customer support person doesn’t have the tools to solve a problem, it can be a huge disappointment for the customer, Gold said. “If I call someone, I want my problem solved, and I don’t want to go through 88 steps to get there,” he said. “It’s frustrating for me because I spent a lot of money with your company.”

“Anything that can be done to get over that hump faster has many benefits,” he continued. “From a consumer standpoint, I have the advantage of not annoying. Plus, if I can move faster, it means the service person can spend less time with me and handle more calls. And If I can understand the problem better, I won’t have to call about it again.”

Even if a customer support person has the equipment they need to provide the highest level of service, accents can affect the caller’s response to the person on the other end of the phone line.

“A customer may be bothered by decoding a foreign accent,” Harmon said. “There’s also a stereotype that some American accents seem illiterate, and a customer may feel like the service provider is getting cheap support.”

“In some cases, I think the biggest pre-existing bias is that if the agent has an accent, they won’t be able to solve my problem,” Goucher said.

options for voice

Serebryakov noted that one of the goals of Sunus is to provide people with options for their voice. “When we post photos on Instagram, we can use filters to represent ourselves however we want,” he explained. “But you don’t have a uniform medium for voice. Our mission at Sunus is to provide that kind of choice.”

Although Sunus initially targeted call centers for its technology, there are other areas that have potential for it.

“One of the biggest uses we see for the technology is in enterprise communications,” Narayan said. “We got a call from Samsung that they have 70,000 engineers in Korea who interact with engineers in the US, and they don’t talk in team meetings because they’re afraid of how they’ll be interpreted. That’s the next use case That’s what we want to solve.”

He said the technology also has potential in gaming, healthcare, telemedicine and education.

Sunus announced a $32 million Series A on June 22, marking the largest Series A round in history for the speech technology company.

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Information Technology

Coding Vulnerabilities, Linux Growth, FOSS Friction Cap Summer Highlights By Techagents

As IT workers continue their arduous job of protecting network users from the bad guys, some new tools could help stem the tide of vulnerabilities that continue to add up to open source and proprietary software.

Canonical and Microsoft reached a new agreement to keep their two cloud platforms running well together. Meanwhile, Microsoft apologized to open-source software developers. But BitLocker made no apology for shutting down Linux users.

Let’s take a look at the latest open-source software industry news.

New open-source tool helps devs spot exploits

Vulnerability software platform firm Resilien announced on August 12 the availability of its new open-source tool MI-X from its GitHub repository. The CLI tool helps researchers and developers quickly know whether their containers and hosts are affected by a specific vulnerability to shorten the attack window and create an effective treatment plan.

Yotam Perkal, director of vulnerability research at Resilion, said, “Cyber ​​security vendors, software providers, and CISA are issuing daily vulnerability disclosures alerting the industry to the fact that all software is built with mistakes, which are often immediately detected. should be addressed.”

“With this flow of information, the launch of Mi-X provides users with a repository of information to validate the exploitability of specific vulnerabilities, creating greater focus and efficiency around patching efforts,” he added.

“As an active participant in the vulnerability research community, this is an impressive milestone for developers and researchers to collaborate and build together,” Perkle said.

Current tools fail to factor in exploitability as organizations grapple with critical and zero-day vulnerabilities, and scramble to understand whether they are affected by that vulnerability. It’s an on-going race to figure out the answer before the threatening actor.

To determine this, organizations need to identify a vulnerability in their environment and find out whether this vulnerability is indeed exploitable, for which there is a mitigation and treatment plan.

Current vulnerability scanners take too long to scan, don’t factor in exploit potential, and often miss it entirely. This is what happened with the Log4j vulnerability. According to Resilien, a lack of equipment gives threat actors plenty of time to exploit a flaw and do major damage.

The launch of Mi-X is the first in a series of initiatives to foster a community to detect, prioritize and address software vulnerabilities.

Linux thrives along with growing security crisis

Recent data monitoring of more than 63 million computing devices across 65,000 organizations shows that the Linux OS is alive and well within businesses.

New research from IT asset management software firm Lensweeper shows that even though Linux lacks the more widespread popularity of Windows and macOS, a lot of corporate devices still run the Linux operating system.

Scanning data from more than 300,000 Linux devices in approximately 26,000 organizations, Lensweeper also revealed the popularity of each Linux operating system based on the total amount of IT assets managed by each organization.

The company released its discovery on August 4, noting that around 32.8 million people worldwide use Linux, about 90% of all cloud infrastructure and nearly all of the world’s supercomputers are dedicated users.

Research by Lensweeper showed that CentOS is the most widely used (25.6%) followed by Ubuntu (20.8%) and Red Hat (15%). The company didn’t break down the percentages of users of many of the other Linux OS distributions in use today.

Chart showing Linux devices by company size

Lensweeper suggested that businesses exhibit a disconnect between using Linux for their enhanced security and proactively putting security processes in place.

Two recent Linux vulnerabilities this year — Dirty Pipe in March and Nimbuspun in April — plus new data from Lensweeper show that businesses are going blind when it comes to the security under their roof.

“It is our belief that the majority of devices running Linux are business-critical servers, which are desired targets for cybercriminals, and the logic suggests that the larger the company, the more Linux devices that need to be protected. ,” said Roel Decnett, chief strategy officer at Lensweeper.

“With so many versions and ways of installing Linux, IT teams are faced with the complexity of tracking and managing devices as well as trying to keep them safe from cyberattacks,” he explained.

Since its launch in 2004, Lensweeper has been developing a software platform that scans and inventory all types of IT equipment, installed software and active users on a network. It allows organizations to centrally manage their IT.

BitLocker, Linux Dual Booting Together Isn’t Perfect

Microsoft Windows users who want to install Linux distributions to dual boot on the same computer are now between a technical rock and a Microsoft hard place. They can thank the increased use of Windows BitLocker software for the worsening of the Linux dual-booting dilemma.

Developers of Linux distros are facing more challenges in supporting Microsoft’s full-disk encryption on Windows 10 and Windows 11 installations. The Fedora/Red Hat engineers noted that the problem is made worse by Microsoft sealing the full-disk encryption key, which is then sealed using Trusted Platform Module (TPM) hardware.

Fedora’s Anaconda installer cannot resize BitLocker volumes with other Linux distribution installers. The workaround is first resizing the BitLocker volume within Windows to create enough free space for the Linux volume on the hard drive. This useful detail is not covered in the often vulnerable installation instructions for dual-booting Linux.

A related problem complicates the process. The BitLocker encryption key imposes another deadly restriction.

To seal, the key must match the boot chain measurement in the TPM’s Platform Configuration Register (PCR). Using the default settings for GRUB in the boot chain for a dual boot setup produces incorrect measurement values.

According to the discussion of the problem in the Fedora mailing list, users trying to dual boot when attempting to boot Windows 10/11 are then left at the BitLocker recovery screen.

Microsoft, Canonical: A Case of Opposites Attract

Canonical and Microsoft have tightened the business knot connecting them with the common goal of better securing the software supply chain.

Both software companies announced on August 16 that native .NET is now available for Ubuntu 22.04 hosts and containers. This collaboration between .NET and Ubuntu provides enterprise-grade support.

Support lets .NET developers install the ASP.NET and .NET SDK runtimes from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with a single “apt install” command.

Check out the full details here and watch this short video for updates:

Microsoft reverses open-source app sales ban

In what could be the latest case of Microsoft opening its marketing mouth to stumbling blocks, the company recently rattled software developers by banning the sale of open-source software in its App Store. Microsoft has since reversed that decision.

Microsoft had announced new terms for its App Store, effective July 16. The new terms state that not all pricing may attempt to profit from open source or other software that is otherwise generally available at no cost. Many software developers and re-distributors of free- and open-source software (FOSS) sell installable versions of their products at the Microsoft Store.

Redmond said the new restrictions would address the problem of “misleading listings”. Microsoft claimed that FOSS licenses allow anyone to post a version of a FOSS program written by others.

However, the developers pushed back, noting that the problem is easily solved in the same way regular stores solve it – through trademarked names. Consumers may disclose the actual sources of the Software Products from third-party re-packers with pre-existing trademark rules.

Microsoft has since accepted and removed references to open-source pricing restrictions in its store policies. The company clarified that the previous policy was intended to “help protect customers from misleading product listings”.

More information is available in the Microsoft Store Policies document.

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