Humanising VIKI

General Discussion
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I’m going to start off by mentioning that I love the VIKI Community. I love all of you. It’s super nice to have discussions with people from across the world who enjoy the same things that I do. It’s OK to disagree as well. After all, it’s our differences that give it a bit of spice. :grin:

Weirdly enough, VIKI itself is the complete opposite. It’s this sterile place that could have benefitted greatly from our love of Asian dramas, especially after the fall of DF. VIKI, however, doesn’t care about the human element.
It’s content to hire a bunch of IT engineers who are endlessly changing things up without explaining anything to us, the people who actually use it. And then come the bugs… Oh, the bugs! There are so many problems with VIKI that it would take a whole day just to list them all.
Sure, we’re in the digital age. This is a common occurrence. You know, growing pains and all that. But then hire someone to interface with us humans too! It takes 2 weeks, two weeks just to receive a generic answer that solves absolutely nothing. Sheesh… :weary:

To end off this super long post, VIKI can have all the pretty buttons and sliders and toggles that it wants. But it’s the Community, the people who ultimately give it life. :heartpulse:

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@angelight313_168 @sonmachinima @frustratedwriter @piranna

So what do you think? Will VIKI ever change? I doubt my post will have any effect…

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You actually got a reply? I never get a reply if I’m not picked as CM. I just notice at some point that someone else has become the CM.

Btw, the last time I saw staff members being CM it was for shows with limited or no translation rights. That would not have been much fun for a regular CM anyway.

Maybe that is actually a sign that the staff members ARE human and can’t do everything at the same time. :thinking:

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Okay. I think there’s a distinction I’ll have to make before saying anything: it seems like there’s VIKI (as a streaming service) and then there’s the VIKI Volunteer Community as the community, the regulars, the volunteers.

As ONLY a streaming service, I think VIKI is one of the best. It’s got a good collection of free stuff to watch, which really helped a lot of people get into Asian dramas. Even in the ‘human element’ thing, I think VIKI is doing quite well. I like the idea of TCs. Yes, people, human people, sometimes misuse it, but on a whole, when used well, I really love watching stuff with the TCs on, commenting and seeing other people have the same reaction I did. I also liked the Learn Mode and Watch Party features, I’m glad they have them here. Not to mention this Discussion Forum, something I haven’t seen on any other service. VIKI does feel quite people-oriented.

As volunteers, we’re up close with the system. We see most of the rough corners of Viki because we spend so much time in different places throughout the website. Most of my friends who use VIKI as a mere streaming service love it. The bugs (when they do find them, it isn’t a common occurrence) they dismiss most of the time because they usually get solved pretty quickly…the max you’d have to wait is a week for most (on-site bug) problems to be solved.
I haven’t had to contact the Help Center much, whenever I had a problem I’d put it up here on Discussions and I’m usually surprised at how quickly I get an answer.

Agreeing with mirjam, when staff members are CMs the show is usually “special”…not open to translation, only English subs…take 18 Again for example. There is no team, it’s a special case (I heard that even NF doesn’t have it available in the US) so I’m just glad I get to watch it.
Also, those same staff members usually reply to us within 24 hours when we ask them something on Discussions.

It’s the volunteer community that is having problems. The Project Finder, the Inbox, things that only volunteers use…those don’t get as much attention so it’s sad, and I hope VIKI pays more attention to the volunteers and their needs.

I want to give VIKI some more time for improvement. They’ve just experienced a huge influx of users and the site is still under construction. Let’s not compare it to the giant Netflix, I don’t think that’s fair at all.

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Have you ever been in touch with their support? My cat would do a better job. Actually, that would be insulting to my cat, who happens to be a billion times more helpful and knowledgeable. And I was being quite generous when I said 2 weeks. The last time I asked for assistance, I had to wait more than a month for a generic response that a toddler would give. VIKI is a for-profit business. You can’t get away with such poor customer service, especially now when everything is online.

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I think that VIKI in regard of handling those who create the content that brings them $$$ is quite bad in different aspects that were already mentioned by different volunteers in different posts.

One aspect is that while VIKI now locks most of its content behind paywalls, earning more because more people use VIKI due to pandemic, some volunteers lost their real job and VIKI doesn’t even pay us at all which was okay when most of the content was available for free with adds and premium version was mainly add-free plus few Kdramas.

Now even the Cdramas are mostly locked behind VIKI pass AND/OR QC what makes it even harder to find volunteers or to give new volunteers the option to join the team of an ongoing drama…

So thanks a lot @adrianmorales for your post! :rose:

PS:

The last message to help center was closed without any reply at all or better saying an autogenerated-mail to rate the great customer support :rofl:

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I’m really happy that you feel that way. I really wish I could agree. But VIKI as a streaming platform is a total mess. That’s a fact. It’s not a free service, either. You either pay for it, work as a volunteer or put up with annoying ads in order to view anything. It’s a for-profit business, so as a customer, I have every right to complain about their terrible business practices, cutting corners whenever and wherever possible being the most egregious.

VIKI as a Community is my favourite, however, and the only reason why I still haven’t deactivated my account. I wanted to… But then I started missing all of you like crazy. :smile:

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Thank you. I write these things because I care.

I think they discovered you’re a robot :robot: :sweat_smile:

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Several times and they usually answered relatively quickly.
I’m sorry you have different experiences though. :frowning:

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We don’t have enough volunteers in all areas and even the ones that are there are not always available. There’s only a handful of Japanese-English subbers, for example.

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I would say, if we are getting some help from the Staff in subtitling then why reject it? As for segmenting, I never saw a staff member making segments like any other volunteer, so I won’t comment on that. But if a staff member knows the source language of a drama and we don’t have much subtitlers from that language to translate to English, I would gladly accept the help.
I work as a GE on a Taiwanese show, most of the subtitlers read and write Simplified Chinese, so Traditional Chinese becomes a barrier in fast and effective subtitling. We have a Staff member who helps us with the show, then why reject the help and work slowly if we are getting some extra help?
Same goes with Japanese shows, I sometimes volunteer for Jap-Eng translations, but my fluency is a barrier for me to work on several Japanese shows at the same time. There are hardly 3-4 people who work as Jap-Eng translator and we have just one Japanese TE, so why not take help from a Staff member who is a native Japanese speaker?

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What happened exactly? You had a problem watching dramas on Viki?

It’s been a long time I haven’t contacted the Help Center or watched TV, so I don’t really know the bugs that could have happened.

In comparison, the experience I got with contacting other customer services were… It depends.

  • The customer service for Rakuten was okay. I got refunded quickly, but the problems a customer can have are quite standardized for Amazon or Rakuten.
  • The customer service for an app I bought to learn Chinese was quite weird. Many translations were wrong compared to what I learnt with my teacher and their staff told me the app was currently being builded for other languages and they recruited a pro translator to correct them. Still, he asked me to correct them by email, which I didn’t do, because I’m learning Chinese. It lasted for 2-3 weeks.
  • The customer service for trains was… the most complicated. I got to go to their office x2 and couldn’t get refunded for the full price. The chatbot on their website to get refunded was impossible to deal with, it only understood limited answers and patterns. I showed it to the woman from the office (she didn’t even know that there was a chatbot…) and finally told me to send a letter to another office for refunds. I finally got refunded really soon and they gave extra money for the inconvenience.

The conclusion is: I think the last one was the worst customer experience because I was dealing with a bot that couldn’t understand anything.

P.S.: Another recent exp I got was with an author on Amazon, the soundtrack was broken, so I asked by mail if she could put another one. She didn’t answer me, but around 2-3 weeks later, I found by pure coincidence that she replaced the soundtrack to a working one so I could download it. I also sent another request if she could make another Chinese book for my level because her stories were pretty good. She never answered me, but she released another book for my level which I bought. After all this, I changed my review on Amazon for her book from 4/5 to 5/5 stars. Even if I got 0 answer from her, she took my requests into account and everything was solved by her actions.

Btw, does Netflix have a customer service? Never got to contact them, I did through their video bug a very long time ago because the sound was totally off, big chunks from translations were missing. But I don’t know if they send something after clicking on this video bug, do they contact customers again? I didn’t check.

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I got other examples for customers services from last year too!

  • For Rakuten, you can only return an audiobook once in your lifetime from my understanding. Later, they send you an email with a link. You click on the link and there’s a chat window (like Skype or any chat app) and you begin to write in live with a staff from the customer service who also writes you back at the same time about your matter. I don’t remember correctly but it was around 2-3 days after my request that I went on this chat.
    If you leave the chat window, you will receive by mail that the staff wrote something else in the chat for example.
    It’s my first experience in this type of customer service.

  • For Amazon, I think their customer service is the best I have known so far. You just click to return and it will be done.
    There is a limit for ebooks you can return each month, so if you want to return more ebooks, you will have to contact their customer service. Later, they call you on your mobile phone about this matter during the week.
    It was super easy and the guy was pretty nice.

  • From another author on Amazon, the description of the product was not correct. The audio was not a human voice, but a bot voice, so I couldn’t learn Chinese. I contacted the author and she told me that it was to help students, but with a human voice, the price would be higher. Truth to be told, there are many books cheaper than this one with human voice and her books are among the most expensive compared to others. As a result, I didn’t buy anything from her collection again.

  • For Lenovo, the guy over the phone was super nice, explained everything and told to contact him again if anything, sent me everything by mail again. But the repair after sales service was… A new computer, didn’t even use it and the keyboard already had something. 1 month later, got it back and the note from the repairman was no more problem, but I don’t see the difference with the keyboard. I don’t know if they repaired something.

  • For the train national service, at first the woman from the office said it was impossible to get a refund. I told: “So my train was cancelled because of Covid and I have to pay €60 of extra fees for buying other tickets for a cancellation that is external to me?” Then, she started to say to go on the website for a refund. I showed her the chatbot when I go to the website that only gave us 4 choices that were not my situation and each time, the chatbot was reboot when it was not a situation it knew. I tried all the choices… After seeing that, she gave me the address to send my letter to.

  • For another app that is like a list of words app that I bought, the tutorial to import a list of words was really minimalist. There was no FAQ, so I got to contact the customer service by email. The staff didn’t read carefully, so I repeated many times until he told me to send him the file I wanted to import… This file in question, I didn’t have it anymore :joy: The discussion lasted for 2-3 weeks just for that end.

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I think @piranna said that the train service had a dysfunctional chatbot, not Viki :sweat_smile:

What windows popup? Never seen that before :thinking: do you mean the instructions for the inbox? Those don’t pop up if you’re logged in already on your one device. If you change devices and newly login, those pop-ups appear

Yes, I have never had a problem that didn’t get resolved. I’d always get a pretty satisfactory answer from the staff here.

This was a known issue, are you still facing it?? It disappeared a long time ago for me, I wonder what’s wrong? :open_mouth:

hehe I guess our opinions differ because I’m still a broke student and it’s either Viki ads every fifteen minutes or inappropriate weirdo ads and popups on rival free sites :slight_smile: and so Viki wins out every time

  • I spent about an hour figuring how to communicate with Samsung one time :joy: their chatbot was still pretty stupid but I’m glad they connected me to a real person quickly. My problem was also weird so I may have confused the chatbot :sweat_smile: whatever, the issue was solved quickly

  • Adobe’s service was lightning fast, you get but I’m oh so mad at them they are just meanies to students. their free trials didn’t even work for me so I decided to pay and WOW they act like they’re being so generous with the student discount but it’s a yearly SUBSCRIPTION paid monthly. How on earth do they expect students to dish out Rs. 1600 per month for a whole year for the service?! The price is very good for full-time professionals, but we’re students studying other stuff, for crying out loud! I can’t believe how absolutely stupid I was, I can’t even cancel my plan, that was what the lightning-fast customer service told me :roll_eyes:

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There are some versions of Photoshop, Illustrator and others… (not official) that people use in scantrad.

I can send you the link if you want, but it doesn’t work as smoothly as the official one.

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it’s alright, I work on Premiere Pro and found another app called Da Vinci Resolve which works the same way so I’ll definitely switch once my bond is over :tired_face:

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Same, they have a version (not official) for Premiere Pro if you want.
But if you’re a student working in that field, your school normally offers it to students during your school years.
The best is to know students working in that field and they can install it for you.

Da vinci resolve is the other free option competitor. Final cut pro for mac too (€300 1 payment, not a subscription).

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that’s just it, I’m not working in tat field…it’s a hobby i’ve had for a few years now :sweat_smile: anyways, sorry this is off-topic…won’t talk about it here again

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DF happened actually. When that platform had closed down, a lot of its users migrated over to VIKI. But then VIKI failed time and time again to upgrade its services in order to accommodate this large number of people. Instead of focusing on its customer support, for instance, VIKI was simply content to change up the site’s interface and layout. It didn’t even do a good job with that since it’s plagued by numerous bugs. The worst part is that these are paying customers: They’re used to paying for a well-rounded service. And let’s face it: VIKI is mostly reliant on its volunteers.
That subtitles are delayed because they are provided by volunteers, not actual paid translators is part of the game.
Ultimately, a lot of people are expecting VIKI to be just like DF. And it’s not.

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It’s a nice hobby :slight_smile: Do you intend to have a Youtube channel?
(Have you just bought it less than 14 days ago? In Europe, if you shop online, you can return your product (software or subscription or anything) within 14 days at least. And sellers can’t say no or try to ignore it if you talk about that. On Amazon, you have even more days to return the product. What about the regulation in your country?)

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