Q: What do I get for this purchase?
A: The ability to have a private email discussion about a specific number of support questions or over a specific timeframe starting at the date of payment, regarding OpenEars or its plugins. These questions are analogous to the public support questions that can be asked in the forums, in that there is a scope of support which has some practical limits, but unlike the public forum questions, these questions are discussed via private email.
Q: Do I get a guaranteed answer for all my questions?
A: Sorry, there’s no way of knowing in advance whether there is an answer, or a good answer, or if Politepix would be the source of the most ideal answer. The charge is for the time involved in discussing it, brief or involved.
Q: Will Politepix alter the code of OpenEars or its plugins in order to help me with my support issue?
A: No, but it is possible that Politepix will suggest changes you can make to OpenEars if they are minor changes.
Q: What kinds of questions can I ask?
A: Questions about using the APIs available in OpenEars and its plugins to implement speech recognition or speech synthesis in native Objective-C apps in ways that are currently possible with their use (or questions about whether an application is currently possible and if so, how to do it with OpenEars and its plugins), in order to get the best results with OpenEars and its plugins as they currently function. Sorry, it isn’t possible to help with the development of novel software or hardware techniques in the course of tech support for the OpenEars SDK – this would more come under the heading of software consultation, which isn’t possible to offer at tech support prices and isn’t a service provided by Politepix. Relatedly, just like with the compiled software products of other firms, tech support doesn’t supply information about how the binary products were implemented and/or their internal implementation details.
Q: Can I get a refund if I don’t like the answer?
A: Sorry, the payment is for the email access and time. If your purchase is for a single email support question and for some reason we’d prefer not to answer your question, we’ll refund your order when we first receive the question, but other than this scenario there are no refunds.
Q: Will you keep my request private? Will you sign an NDA to discuss it? Will you sign a non-compete to discuss it? A consultant agreement?
A: Politepix will keep your request and our discussion private. We will not tell anyone outside of Politepix what you are working on and when the incident is closed we will destroy any code and/or documents of yours that we have. We would greatly prefer not to be added to private repositories or shown any proprietary code, especially because it is the least effective way of troubleshooting a technical issue when contrasted with looking at a small self-contained code sample. It isn’t really that helpful to give Politepix an entire app or repo share because it isn’t possible for Politepix to give you support by downloading and running an entire app – if the issue isn’t apparent when simply viewing the code, it will be necessary for you to create a simple replicable example of the issue to share with Politepix that is independent of your app.
With that said, we can’t sign NDAs or noncompetes or consultant agreements because the odds are too great that your project has elements in common with other customers’ projects and current or planned internal Politepix projects, and that your question touches on things that we need to be able to answer for other developers who are using the forums, or produce ourselves. Most NDAs and noncompetes are too broad to allow us to continue to offer support to developers other than the party the contract is with, and negotiating them would be too costly to consider. You can be confident that we will not be telling your competitors what you are doing or using your code. By purchasing this support product you assert that you understand that the presence of elements in the products of other organizations, including Politepix UG (haftungsbeschränkt), that were discussed in the course of a support incident does not mean that those concepts were first discovered or learned of by Politepix UG in the course of a support incident, and/or shared with others, but are a reflection of the fact that most speech, speech recognition, and TTS projects have most of their fundamental elements in common with each other and require solving recurring problems of software and linguistics.
Q: What is the end of a support incident?
A: When an answer has been provided. We will always make best effort to give you a useful answer, but the payment is for the time involved and the privacy. It is possible that after researching your request the only answer available is “you can’t do that with OpenEars” and that would constitute an ended support incident if we believe that is the bottom line. In the absence of an ideal answer, Politepix UG reserves the right to conclude a support incident, or identify a new support incident, at its sole discretion.
Q: Is this the only way to get support for OpenEars?
A: Absolutely not, you can ask any question you like at the OpenEars forums. This is just being provided as an alternative for projects that don’t want to discuss their goals in public or want to be able to show more complete code examples than they’d be comfortable posting in public.