In this specific case, it seems like your concerns are a hypothetical, no?

Not really, no. A lot of us only really have to deal with English-adjacent input (i.e. European languages that share the majority of character forms with English, or cultures that explicitly Anglicise their names when dealing with English folks).

As soon as you have to deal with users with a radically different alphabet/input-method, the wheels tend to come off. Can your CSR reps pronounce names written in Chinese logographs? In Arabic script? In the Hebrew alphabet?

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cowsandmilk 8 months ago | parent | next [-]

You can analyze the name and direct a case to a CSR who can handle it. May be unrealistic for a 1-2 person company, but every 20+ person company I’ve worked at has intentionally hired CSRs with different language abilities.

	▲	Muromec 8 months ago \| parent \| next [-]
		First of, no you can't infer language preference from a name. The reasonable and well meaning assumption about my name on a good day makes me only sad and irritated. And even if you could, I don't know if you actually do it by looking at what you signup form asks me to input.
	▲	michaelt 8 months ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		A requirement to do that is an extremely broad definition of "treat strings as opaque blobs most of the time" IMHO :)

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int_19h 8 months ago | parent | prev [-]

For one thing, this concern applies equally to names written entirely in Latin script. Can your CSR reps correctly pronounce a French name? How about Polish? Hungarian?

In any case, the proper way to handle this is to store the name as originally written, and have the app that CSRs use provide a phonetic transcription. Coincidentally, this kind of stuff is something that LLMs are very good at already (but I bet you could make it much more efficient by training a dedicated model for the task).

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account42 8 months ago | parent [-]

This situation is not the same at all. The CSR might mangle a name in latin script but can at least attempt to pronounce it and will end up doing so in a way that the user can understand.

Add to that that natives of non-latin languages are already used to this.

For better or worse, English and therefore the basic latin script is the lingua franca of the computing age. Having something universal for internation communication is very useful.

	▲	GoblinSlayer 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		FWIW, proquint encoding allows you to pronounce any sequence of bits, though the need for pronunciation eludes me, just copypaste it.