Not Good
For such a company that is selling a mobile at an expensive price, running their very own software, this is the complete opposite of acceptable. It's a complete absence of customer service.
Google has escalated the priority and severity rating of a bug that has been silencing microphones on its Pixel smartphones running Android 8.1, aka Oreo. The Chocolate Factory on Wednesday raised the priority level and the severity level from 3 to 1, the highest possible level, signaling that it intends to expedite its …
It's a complete absence of customer service.
But when did anybody, ever associate the terms "Google" and "customer service", unless there was an expletive between them?
What would you expect in a word cloud for Google? I'd not expect to see "great customer service", but I would expect to see terms like monopolistic, self-absorbed, shonky, impersonal, intrusive, creepy, greed, tax dodging, lobbying.
Well... I've contacted them for everything from Google Earth to Google Apps for Education. On their standard support lines (no fancy queue-jumping, just the same one you'd contact for your GMail going skew-whiff, etc.).
They were fabulous. Despite the fact that I have 600+ users on their services and don't pay a penny for them (educational users).
Unlike... Apple, Microsoft,... just about all the big companies with whom I spend an awful lot of money.
And, more amazing, not only were they "good" at handling the calls, they immediately resolved all my problems. You can't say fairer than that.
Pretty much, Google and Amazon - great customer service. Apple and Microsoft, zero customer service unless you pay through the nose, have a very simple problem and remembered to bring all your receipts.
And I'm a volume/business user of all four.
El Reg, "The Register asked Google to weigh in on the matter. A spokesperson was not available to comment."
Actually the spokesperson *did* answer your call. It's just that they were using a company-issued Pixel phone.
El Reg, "Hello? Hello? Hello?"
Google, " "
El Reg, "Hello? Hello? Hello?"
Google, " "
El Reg, "Hello? Hello? Hello?"
Google, " "
El Reg, "Hello? Hello? Hello?"
Google, " "
~CLICK~
Their lack of support does not surprise me at all. Issues have and probably always will get ignored or liked projects dropped because they can't be bothered. Even their own tools that keep them in milk and honey (api' s for adwords) did a serious disservice by forcing everyone to use a library (whether your coding language was supported or not) and remove all documentation that might have helped figure out how to work directly with the api.
If Google can do that with one of their main revenue sources then why would they care about getting something that's more of a window dressing right?
It's an old Microsoft/Apple level move of just ignore the problem until the next versions out.
This post has been deleted by its author
I disabled voice in the assistant voice and everything works as is it should. It seems the assistant listen function gets stuck in a listen loop and doesn't return the mic to the system when the ui requires it. I even made a youtube video for the fix (mikesunboxing no sound in calls)