

There are good reasons for saying hello. - indiejade
http://www.esmerel.com/circle/wordlore/hello.html

======
leftnode
Wait, people would just call somewhere and say the extension? That sounds
awfully rude to me. Wouldn't you normally say, "Hi, can I have extension 432,
please?"

It does the same thing the article says, but you sound like a decent human
being.

~~~
indiejade
What it reminded me of is when, after waiting on hold forever, the CSR says
something like: "Thanks for calling ABC Company. What's your account number?"
or "What is your phone number?" Having the first "words" a customer utters be
numbers is probably not the best idea. I wonder how many hours of waiting on
hold could be eliminated if more companies understood this phenomena.

I also wonder if the full word "hello," would be necessary, since the word
"hi," makes the similar cavity-sound as the spoken number "five"?

~~~
patio11
With something like Twilio I don't think you have any excuse for this part of
the interaction: play a recorded greeting saying "Hiya, for fastest service,
type in your account number . If you don't know your account number, hit 0 and
one of our operators can help you look it up." If you get their account
number, pick the appropriate CSR, bring up the details directly on their
screen, forward the call and drop them straight into "Thanks for calling
FooCorp. This is Melinda. To whom am I speaking please?" _Hears customer name,
a necessary formality because many accounts have multiple people in charge of
them -- the most common situation in B2C is husband and wife._ "Thanks for
calling Mr. Smith. What can I help you with?" If Mr. Smith says his last order
didn't ship yet, Melinda is a single keystroke away from pulling it up.

Ooh, the possibilities with Twilio make me giddy. If I can only productize one
of them... (Crikey, the possibilities for per-company customization are
_endless_. Do customers ever call you? You should be using Twilio.)

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repiret
I fully support being polite, but there's a lot more to vowels than relative
pitch. When speaking a vowel, the geometry of your mouth creates multiple
resonant frequencies. The ratio among those frequencies is far more important
than the ratio of the dominant frequency of one vowel to the dominant
frequency of the next.

Consider a couple of examples:

1\. A trombone can't say "I Owe You", despite the fact that it can produce any
dominant frequency, and that phrase contains only vowels.

2\. Voice "Ahhhhhhhhhhhh", going from a high to a low pitch (I imagine the
doppler effect of a cartoon screaming as he rides by on a cart), and then
voice "Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh" in the same fashion. At every point, they sound
different. You can't take a clip from an arbitrary pitch range of an Ah and
convince someone its an Oh.

3\. Shape your lips like you would for oo as in Moon, Noon, or Spoon, and try
make the ea vowel as in Squeak just by changing your pitch. It won't happen.
You'll get the German ö, but not the English ea.

~~~
jimbokun
"It won't happen. You'll get the German ö, but not the English ea."

Cool! Now I know how to pronounce a German ö!

~~~
eru
And also the Turkish ö. But not `coöperate' from the New Yorker.

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kbutler
Are you sure this isn't a troll? It's so easily disprovable.

Here's a sound clip of an adult male speaking, followed by a young boy.

Do you honestly have trouble understanding the number the boy says?

<http://soi.kd6.us/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/sound.mp3>

~~~
lunchbox
Bingo. I'm surprised nobody else has questioned whether the purported fact in
the article is even true. I can't relate at all to not understanding the first
few words someone says.

(Although I doubt it's an intentional troll.)

------
novum
On a related note, the Oatmeal just posted 10 reasons to avoid talking on the
phone:

<http://theoatmeal.com/comics/phone>

~~~
robryan
I always noticed the awkward goodbye, in other people, not so much myself
because of lack of phone conversations really. But it seems people have to
make an excuse for every time there hanging up rather than just saying im
going to go now bye or something.

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andrewcooke
this is particularly true (in my limited experience) if you're not a native
speaker - saying something like "hello i'd like to talk to extension 123"
gives people a chance to figure out your accent. also, like smiling, saying
something friendly encourages people to make an effort to understand you.

~~~
lqdshadow
I wonder if attention plays a part. I have noticed that people can interpret
what I say if I start with a grunt or other vocal sound, but if I start off
with the thing I want to say immediately, I have to start over. I realize that
it can be explained by this "human brain interprets your two syllables" idea,
but if a mere grunt also does the trick, this suggests to me that attention
plays at least as much an important part.

~~~
sundarurfriend
To me too, it seems attention is of more importance here. It seems the author
has a degree in linguistics (<http://www.esmerel.com/wagons/ann/>), so I won't
dismiss this theory easily, but the lack of any citations or references in the
submitted page looks suspicious.

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rriepe
Very interesting. I think phone skills are something a lot of people overlook.

I don't have the resources to do a study on this, but another tip is to smile
when you talk on the phone. It might just be because my voice is deeper
(making something like a smiling face lets you hit higher notes when singing
too), but it seems like people understand me faster on the phone when I do
this.

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grinich
Does any speech recognition software use vowel normalization?

~~~
ezy
Yes. See: "VTLN". Also, the audio feature transformations are adapted during
recognition in most cases. For instance, speaker independent recognizers
generally do runtime adaptation on a per conversation basis. Speaker dependent
ones generally continually adapt to the user using the same techniques.

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mhb
Are more or fewer syllables needed in various languages? Does it matter
whether they are tonal languages?

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marze
The word "the" serves a similar purpose, to reset the vocal tract so the next
word can be resolved more easily than if it was following an arbitrary word.

~~~
mhansen
[citation needed]

~~~
Pistos2
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilation_(linguistics)>

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mmagin
Sounds like a good practical explanation why in some cultures (French, for
example), it's practically mandatory to say the equivalent of "Hello" and
other pleasantries before getting to the actual content of the conversation.

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nearestneighbor
I'd like to see this theory put to the test. Get a number of differently-sized
individuals record "see" or "saw" and test the ability of native speakers to
identify which they heard.

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Pistos2
I upvoted this because I would love to see more linguistics-related posts come
through HN.

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fexl
I like this little esmerel.com site ... it's quaint and interesting. Thanks.

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pnelly
nevermind the fact that saying 'hello' is considered polite... But I still
like this article :)

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dsplittgerber
I honestly can't believe people write posts about this.

~~~
barrkel
I find it interesting that human voice communication seems to have a kind of
built-in handshake to synchronize expectations of vowel sounds etc. It makes
sense, but it hadn't occurred to me before now, and is probably part of the
reason speech to text is so difficult.

~~~
thwarted
I've known a few people who don't get the "conversation is ending" inflection
and can't/don't express it. It leads to some awkward pauses on the phone and
me having to ask continuously if there is anything else. May be the other
person doesn't want to hang up first, but _I_ have no trouble hanging up first
if there's an indication that the conversation is over and the other person
isn't just stalling because they have more to say.

~~~
NathanKP
In my experience I know a couple people who don't understand how the
conversation starting and ending works. Usually a person's tone and speaking
pace has a distinct pattern at the beginning of the conversation, and also a
distinct pattern at the end that shows that the conversation is ending.

These people just start off talking like it is the middle of the conversation.
When they are done they just walk right off abruptly. It is interesting the
way we come to expect certain speaking patterns based on how most people
communicate.

~~~
eru
> It is interesting the way we come to expect certain speaking patterns based
> on how most people communicate.

Isn't this what language (and other practical conventions) are all about?

