Talking to India

I recently had trouble with my DSL connection, so called the SBC support line.

First, I got to have a conversation with a computer. It asked questions and then used speech recognition to process my answers. It worked well, although I still find talking to a computer a little uncomfortable. It's amazing how good the speech recognition software has become, at least for this type of application.

When a person came on the phone, he was from India. Actually I had to call twice, and so talked to two different people. They both were quite helpful although they were obviously working from a script, and so the outsourced tech support worked quite well, even though there were some problems with the phone line quality. What they walked me though helped me figure out what the problem was, and I was able to fix it.

This is my first personal experience with service outsourced overseas. But it is obviously a growing trend. M.D. Anderson, among others, is now outsourcing the reading of MRI and CT-Scan images to India due to a shortage of radiologists in the U.S. I'm more comfortable with the computer tech support than the imaging outsourcing, but it's just a manifestation of how well our world is connected.

I wonder what else is being phoned in?