Startup is selling tech to make call center workers sound like white Americans
vice.com
vice.com
1) It's sad that we need this. However, I've talked to many, many customers that are not at all shy about being openly racist, and as long as we continue to entertain that "The customer is always right" mentality, it won't go away. I had customers who would get very hostile with my coworker adjacent to my desk who was from Pakistan but lived in the US, and often the customer would not believe that he was in the US until I audibly walked over to his desk and said in my loudest white-guy mid-Atlantic accent, "Hey, Mohammad! What seems to be the problem?"
2) I don't think this approach will work, if for no other reason than that Indian-British English has a distinctive style to it that extends beyond the accent. I once took a Udemy course (might've been on Elasticsearch?) and it was very clearly written by someone in India who then paid a white guy to read all of the slides in his American English accent. The results were hilarious, because the guy was clearly trying to do his best to make "do the needful" sound like something a Bay Area dude would naturally say, but, it simply wasn't.
3) For what it's worth, while I can immediately tell when I've called into a tech call-center based in India, I've been genuinely surprised at the relative lack of "foreign accent" when I've called into a call-center based out of Singapore or the Philippines. To my ears it sounded like non-distinct English (e.g. not quite American but not quite British either, and certainly not Indian).
That said, people today often use "mid Atlantic accent" to mean the standard "region-less" accent used by, for example, TV announcers. It is more and more the standard accent of America's educated elite in urban centers, regardless of location.
Mr. Burns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=othBTFk_W1Y
Sometimes it means "trans-Atlantic", an accent which Buckley, Burns, and many pre-1950 movie stars spoke with (while on-screen anyway). It falls somewhere between the accents found in the USA and accents found in the UK.
In the context of this thread, I think it means the mid-Atlantic states in the US. It's close to the American "television news accent".
EDITED TO ADD: It's worth noting that the two accents called "mid-Atlantic" sound very different.
1) sometimes people are hard to understand, especially with accents. It’s not “racist” if I prefer speaking to someone I can understand. I don’t care if they’re in the states or not, I just want to be able to communicate.
2) some accents are more difficult to understand than others. Usually, accents are easier to understand if I’ve encountered them in the past with some depth (e.g had a coworker with the same accent)
3) Corollary of (2): people who live further away from diverse areas often have less experience with this and are probably going to be more irritated hearing accents they have not heard before
4) people like to feign ignorance of (3) and pretend it’s all racism. Double points for assuming this because of the coincidence that flyover states are less diverse already, causing more irritation with accents, but we can pretend it’s racism because why assume anything neutral or positive if someone from a flyover state?
The inverse of the first point is also true. It’s often harder for the person on the other end to understand you if they’re not an English speaker leading to continually repeating yourself and spelling stuff out.
Of course this isn't always true. There are definitely some US call centers that are awful and some stellar offshore ones, but as a general rule of thumb this seems to be true.
If they can do that for internal support, it should be possible for external as well?
> Of course this isn't always true. There are definitely some US call centers that are awful and some stellar offshore ones, but as a general rule of thumb this seems to be true.
1) As I already mentioned, we had foreign-born workers living in the US, with accents. They were highly-skilled, highly-qualified, and getting the same wage as all of our other US colleagues.
2) We had coworkers in India at all levels of support, L1-L3. I'm sure payband was the motivating factor in their hire, but timezone availability was a large consideration as well. And they were eminently qualified: some of them could run circles around me from a knowledge perspective.
3) The kernel of truth which you may have touched upon and which some of our customers may have inferred is that for historical reasons, most of our L1's were in India and most of the L2's or L3's were American. So yes, if you got a guy with an American on the phone, he was probably going to be better-equipped to solve your problem--because he was an L2/L3. But the reason that guy didn't answer the phone had little to do with how much the company cares about support; it was because the L2's had more important shit to do, like filing bug reports, or code diving, or debugging. And if I'm interrupting a GDB session to take a call, I expect that an L1 has done the bare minimum of triaging first to ensure that I'm not answering a question that could have been resolved by RTFM.
We can argue all day about whether to call these assumptions "racism" or not, but I would argue that whatever their origin, they feed into that sense of customer entitlement that leads to customers screaming at my colleagues over the phone as soon as they hear an Indian accent. And that's horseshit.
I'll leave you with a final example: we had a very irate CEO customer once in a conference call for a longstanding issue, and the call on our end included several product support leads, managers, and developers. At some point we decided to bring the company's Director of Software Engineering onto the call to try to calm the customer down. The director had an Indian name and was physically in our office but was introduced by name rather than title. The CEO responded by saying, "I don't wanna talk to some freaking guy in Bangalore!"
2) There are lots of qualified people in India. Agreed
3) Screaming at anyone on the other side of the phone is horseshit Agreed
Companies either see support as a cost center or a differentiator. Those that see it as a cost center are less likely to invest in providing top tier support and more likely to offshore their support.
Now I'm sure there are companies that offshored not to save costs but to increase quality but they are rarer. And they are hamstrung by the existing experience of customers that expect offshore support to be worse.
If for historical reasons all L2-L3 support was offshore and L1 support was onshore, then people would breath a sigh of relief when they heard the accent.
Take, for instance, a company like Crutchfield. Their entire call center is based out of New Jersey or something like that. The important part is that it's in-house. They are all extremely knowledgeable and powerful to help you out.
If it's out-sourced to another company or country, the result is the same. They mostly can't do anything.
I grew up in the Midwest and hadn't encountered this phrase until I moved out to Seattle and started working in tech. Indian folks definitely use it the most, but I also hear it regularly from the American-born guys who did a stint at Microsoft in the Aughts. Given more time, it might end up being one of those West Coast-isms.
It’s just corp-speak propagation where a heavy proportion is alternative grammars.
I live in an area with a lot of Philippine immigrants. Even kids that just immigrated here speak English as well as the locals.
Call centers are more like heat pumps for frustration.
There is so much terrible design in both automated and human customer support. For instance, you ask a question in chat and there is no response for a few minutes. After a few minutes, you'll see the 'typing ..' indicator, but it'll be some generic bullshit platitude about how they value you or something. This is frustrating to no end. Even in voice systems, there is so much drivel. "It'll be just a moment while a look this up ", and then some keys clacking in the background. Who falls for this ?
I mean, yes there is maybe a racist angle to this story, but also, I wish I could use this box back then. The call centre people were very nice, very helpful, and used to repeating stuff n times over, but that's still suboptimal.
Point being, this Indian call center accent, while unmistakable, IMO is also extremely easy to understand. I find call center workers speak more slowly and with more "rounded" vowels to try to mimic an American accent. So lack of intelligibility isn't the reason to try to hide this.
But I think trying to hide even this accent isn't so much about racism, it's about trying to fool customers into thinking their support request hasn't been outsourced to the lowest bidder. I'll admit, when I know a call is being handled from India, I immediately think that if my problem isn't a common one that can be handled by a script, that I'll be disappointed.
It's a simple fact that there is no such thing as "sounding white" as others have pointed out, non-white people of any nationality can have American accents, or any accent.
I feel it's racist to define people as "sounding white" - people do not sound like their race, they sound like their nationality. Who is the author to make the judgement that American accent == white person on the phone? Racist and quite frankly, stupid. Though I guess I shouldn't expect much more from Vice.
Myself I have a very vanilla non-regional American accent (think Walter Cronkite) and they often point out just how “white” I sound.
I also have family with more regional American accents (Upper Midwest, Southern) and as a child they’d often make fun of my “accent”. My response was always “turn on your TV, they sound like I do everywhere”:
https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/196999/why-do-newsca...
This can be seen in a somewhat-humorous old YouTube clip:
And yet, despite not existing, we all know exactly what it means. Kind of odd that we can all easily identify something that isn't real.
Meanwhile, most of us white folk have to work to "sound white", too, when we want/need to, because our usual accent doesn't "sound white" in the way that's meant. In plenty of cases this is quite far from our ordinary, or at least childhood (some of us all but obliterate it by adulthood, on purpose) accent. It's a poor term in this kind of context, and better ones exist.
"General American is thus sometimes associated with the speech of North American radio and television announcers, promoted as prestigious in their industry,[45][46] where it is sometimes called "Broadcast English"[47] "Network English",[4][48][49][50] or "Network Standard".[2][49][51] Instructional classes in the United States that promise "accent reduction", "accent modification", or "accent neutralization" usually attempt to teach General American patterns.[citation needed] Television journalist Linda Ellerbee states that "in television you are not supposed to sound like you're from anywhere",[52] and political comedian Stephen Colbert says he consciously avoided developing a Southern American accent in response to media portrayals of Southerners as stupid and uneducated.[45][46]"
(Wikipedia, "General American English")
That's what's intended. Not "white". They surely aren't trying to make them sound like most of the American white people I know who haven't deliberately trained away their natural accent & dialect—and I don't even live in the South!
Sounds like you need to watch Sorry to Bother You (2018)
There's hundreds of millions, if not billions of white people who are not native english speakers, and also there's millions of americans who are not white. There are different accents in America, but that doesn't depend so much of the race as it depends on geographical areas or communities. Some of those communities happen to have certain racial origin, like African Vernacular English / Ebonics, or Latino/Hispanic communities, for different reasons.
There's for example American people of Indian heritage who were born in USA and are native english speakers, who would according to the article "sound white", which is ridiculous.
And it's also common in the US to call someone from South America or Spain non-white, which is hilarious because there's a lot of people from South America who is white, and most people in Spain are white. They even called Antonio Banderas non-white!
I suppose that comes from the notion of WASP (White Anglo-saxon Protestant), and so they call non-white anyone who is not WASP?
I'm Spanish, white (and with blue eyes) and atheist, so I'm not WASP. I speak english well but i do have an accent. I suppose I would be called non-white in the USA?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_th... - many groups that used to be called non-white, are now called white.
You are not putting enough focus on the "American" in the title. The software makes them "sound American", and sound like a specific group of Americans. It doesn't make them "sound white" and sound like a specific group of whites. The concept of whites has no meaning outside of a particular society's definition of it (in this case the US).
And yes, if you're born in the US and grew up there your accent will be closer to your school/general society than your parents, in my experience. If the school isn't high percentage Indian, then you will "sound white [American]".
Like which ones?
https://www.theroot.com/when-the-irish-weren-t-white-1793358...
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/where-the-irish-are-not-quit...
Eastern Europeans, Poles, Slavs, Hungarians:
https://andscape.com/features/white-immigrants-werent-always...
“The History of White People” by Nell Irvin Painter covers this idea in depth.
Well calling "mexican" to everyone with a darker skin who speaks spanish it's plainly as racist as calling any asian person "chinese", etc.
AFAIK the term Latino in USA refers to anyone from South America (including Brazil), which would exclude Spain, Italy, France... while Hispanic technically includes people from Spain as much as from any other spanish speaking countries from South America (so it would exclude Brazil).
Also, you say that with a non-american accent he would be perceived as non-white... so what if he went with Raphael which is actually also a German name, and he had a German accent? or a French accent? Or an italian accent? Would he also be non-white?
Whiteness and blackness have more to do with social status and class. Hence, in the South, you get people saying of certain types of blacks, “that’s a good one”. In Russia “blacks” would be Chechens and Dagestanis.
This article lacks so much perspective, Europe is filled with white people having trouble understanding each others English.
It's not that weird that once you start jumping continents this effect simply gets stronger.
What Americans consider "white" is not fixed. Jews are white or not depending on the time and context. Cubans would be considered Latino or something today, and yet the most popular TV show of the 50's (I Love Lucy) featured an American woman married to a Cuban man at a time when interracial marriage would never have been shown on TV.
"White" != "WASP": Catholics of Irish descent are definitely not "WASP": not Protestant; many would also say Celtic or Anglo-Celtic not Anglo-Saxon; yet they are considered "white".
Some people have this idea that "the Irish didn't use to be white", but that is historically very dubious: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
Really what much of this comes from, I think, is some people in the US today are so focused on race, they will reinterpret other forms of cultural/ethnic discrimination as being racial – even though that doesn't make a lot of sense. The "Irish didn't use to be white" claim is retconning religious hatreds – anti-Irish sentiment in the 19th century US was primarily driven by anti-Catholicism – into racial ones.
This reinterpretation also reveals a narrowly US-centric view of the world: Australia is another country which received significant Irish immigration (10-30% of Australians have at least partial Irish ancestry, depending on how you measure it), yet "Irish aren't white" or "Irish didn't used to be white" is a thought which would have never occurred in Australia: Australia's historical racially discriminatory immigration policy (the "White Australia Policy") always counted Irish as "white"
> Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionally very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased.
tl;dr: Saxons and the English are White People. Other Europeans are "swarthy".
[0]: https://archive.org/details/increasemankind00franrich/page/1...
Did Franklin mean to include Irish people in that even if he didn't explicitly mention them? That seems unlikely, because when he wrote that in the 1750s, there was very little anti-Irish sentiment in America, and I'm aware of no evidence that Franklin personally harboured any. Most 18th century Irish Americans were Protestant, and whether or not they technically count as "WASP", they were rarely distinguished from them.
Benjamin Franklin visited Ireland in 1771; I'm aware of no evidence he thought he was visiting a "non-white" country. During his visit, he socialised with the wealthy Protestant establishment, although he saw the poverty of the Irish masses and was struck by it – however, rather than blame it on their race, he attributed their plight to British rule, even later suggesting that without independence, the British would reduce poor Americans to the same extreme poverty that poor Irish endured. Keep in mind that in 18th century Ireland, the Protestant establishment in Dublin viewed themselves as "Irish"; they did not see themselves as a different nationality from Irish Catholics, and would not have agreed that they were a different "race" from them.
For example: you say that it seems unlikely that Franklin considered Irish people inferior, because in 1755, Americans didn't have anti-Irish sentiment.
But the fact we're trying to determine is "was there anti-Irish sentiment in colonial era America", using Franklin's words as evidence. If you simply assume your conclusion and use it to invalidate evidence, then there isn't really a point to me providing evidence.
Something else worth noting is that Ben excludes Swedes from whiteness, despite their Protestantism.
Anyways, this isn't really a hill I care to die on, so I'll be bowing out of this discussion.
Franklin's words are irrelevant to the question of "was there anti-Irish sentiment in colonial era America" – because he never mentions the Irish at all.
He does express a belief in an intra-white racial hierarchy, of "more pure" and "less pure" white people. He never once tells us where he thinks the Irish sit in it. My assumption about where he would have put them is as good as yours.
Only because of the deep inroads that views such as those of Ignatiev have made into American popular psyche in the last 20–30 years.
> So you provide a citation please that Irish people weren’t treated in such a way
Arnesen, E. (2001). Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination. International Labor and Working-Class History, 60, 3–32. https://library.fes.de/libalt/journals/swetsfulltext/1489521...
> ...The historians of whiteness are on firm ground when, building on the substantial body of scholarship in American immigration and political history, they reiterate the well-chronicled point that many Irish workers responded enthusiastically to the calls for white supremacy, which in this case is defined as a support for slavery and other political measures designed to subordinate African Americans and participation in anti-black mobs in workplaces and communities. They are on thin ice, however, when they draw from this the conclusion that the Irish were not white but, in embracing white supremacy, eventually became so. The former point is hardly a controversial one in American historiography; the latter is the invention of whiteness scholars.
> Upon close inspection, whiteness scholars’ assertions of Irish non-whiteness rest largely upon their conflation of racialization and the category of whiteness. For Ignatiev and Roediger, the increased popularity of the “racialization of the Irish”—the tendency to see the Irish as a distinct and inferior race—is equated with their exclusion from “whiteness” itself. The two, however, are by no means equivalent. Matthew Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color becomes relevant here. One need hardly accept Jacobson’s assertion that the Famine Migration “announced a new era in the meaning of whiteness in the United States”—what he calls the “fracturing of monolithic whiteness” or “variegated whiteness”—to appreciate the grounding of his arguments in the contours of mid-nineteenth-century scientific racism. Jacobson insists that racial science produced, and American culture popularized, the notion of an “increasing fragmentation and hierarchical ordering of distinct white races.” The Irish become the Celtic race, but it is a white, if inferior white, race. Although Jacobson undercuts his own contribution by concentrating on what he sees as “vicissitudes” of whiteness and by repeatedly translating a rich and complex language of race into the narrow idiom of whiteness, his formulation, if taken at its face value, can effectively dispatch the “how the Irish became white” question, replacing it with “how immigrants became racialized.”
There is no question that Irish Catholics were heavily discriminated against in the 19th century US. (I say that as a person of majority Irish Catholic descent myself.) But, almost nobody before the 1990s viewed them as "non-white". Discrimination against them was very often couched in non-racial terms–especially with reference to their religion. Even at times when it became "racialised" in the US, that was in terms of the idea of multiple "white races", and a hierarchical ranking of them – Irish people were never put in the "non-white" category.
They will discriminate on multiple axes. You can be white and not check off enough boxes to be just like them and you will then be discriminated against.
The ridiculousness of what it means to "sound white" is the subject of lots of humor. I think Dave Chappelle did a pretty good mockery of it with his news reporter character. There's also a pretty funny scene in Sorry to Bother You where Danny Glover is explaining his call center success to LaKeith Stanfield.
You might think the world translates to your language and you could participate. You might have trouble understanding or be shocked by the reasoning and think asking will help you get it. You might even think you should have an opinion as you have the mistaken idea that your culture is close to the American one. You would be wrong.
The way these subjects are entwined with the American psyche and identity defies entendement and reasoning. In my experience it’s best to treat it like you would a foreign religion.
There are still members of this enslaved race that, when they were born, were deprived the right to vote because of their race.
In this historical context, America's relationship with race does not defy reasoning. It's the only reasonable outcome of a nation that began with humans of one skin color being 3/5 of humans of another skin color.
Aristotle believed that the majority of human beings were "slaves by nature"–by their in-born constitution fit only for slavery. Many Romans wholeheartedly embraced Aristotle's thesis. No doubt they would have thought the vast majority of Germanic people fit that category.
Just quietly listen with a soft smile and then change the subject when your coworker goes off on a diatribe they’re sure everyone around them agrees with.
Come to think of it, that might be why I get along with Western Europeans so well.
reminds me of this time I joined up with a german fellow and we were walking around talking to girls in ukraine. They were enamored with him and asked him to teach him english. He meanwhile was growing more and more disturbed at how they would completely ignore me. At one point he points to me and goes, "I'm german, I have a very obvious german accent. He on the other hand is American!!"
Please don't base your perceptions of America on a Vice article. Clearly non-white people are capable of speaking in an "American" accent too, but Vice is the sort of news outlet that must make things divisive on racial lines as often as possible.
————-
Are you able to share what text-to-speech or voice acting service you used to produce your videos? I'm working on producing some internal training videos for my workplace that may be released externally and since 'generic North American male voices' seem to poll best with viewers I was thinking I'd "re-dub" my content either using a voice actor or text-to-speech is real-sounding enough I'd use that to read my course content.
I've always wondered what's going on from a technical side. Is it some sort of "signal delay adjustment protocol" that instead of speeding up and distorting the speech of the speaker like happens on video calls, these call center tech companies have chosen to just drop an entire second from the conversation? Or is it some other glitch?
I guess "due to COVID", companies "just can't control" the quality of the microphone their support staff are using. Surely this has nothing to do with the side effects: it's impossible to make a usable recording of the call (to hold them accountable), I'm frustrated with the experience (and less likely to consume their support resources in the future), and maybe I'll even give up now (saving them money on a product exchange, credit, or whatever I'm calling about).
See also: long holds with noisy corpaganda instead of music, keeping you on the phone while we "fill some things in", "oops the system is loading", and so on.
Its not like these are unsolvable problems. But, money. And regulatory capture.
When I worked in call centers, a lot of us would toggle that mute very frequently while conversing with co-workers. Sometimes to help each other out, but mostly to complain about or make fun of callers. Quite a bit of jaded cynicism in that scene.
Feels like phone latency is getting longer and longer as we move to VoIP for everything and I hate it.
But yeah, a better one is probably 'don't trust anyone who calls you', which people will need to adapt eventually.
Or emails or sends you a text message. This has become my policy. Recently had a medical procedure scheduled. Hospital called me from a random number but wanted me to verify my SSN and address to them. I told them no, but I would be glad to call in to the main hospital line to be transferred back to them so I could be sure that I was providing that information.
There are just too many scammers today.
I have an Indian name but I am born and raised in Midwest America. Whenever a random call center would call me - I could easily detect whether this was originating from South Asia or not merely by their opening salutation and choice of invoking the "correct/traditional" pronunciation of my name. This data leakage alone, betrayed all of their further attempts at sounding like a "white American" with a fake flattened accent. The illusion was broken.
> Say 'Hi' to Raul > > A friend and fellow Stanford engineering student, we started Sanas for him. > > During school, he was forced to take a leave of absence and return home to Nicaragua. He started looking for jobs with high English proficiency. But, as he hadn't matriculated yet, he only had his high school diploma. With those credentials, the highest paying job he could find was in a call center. > > Working there he was faced with daily bias associated with his accent. He was verbally abused and discriminated against over the phone. And found himself underperforming at a job for which he was vastly overqualified. Unsurprisingly, he decided to leave the job after a few months. > > Knowing he wasn't alone, we started Sanas to ensure people around the world could take back the power of their own voice.
I don't know if this is real or just something they made up but I get where they're coming from. Call centres have to deal with tons of abuse and accents are easy pickings for the racists and other horrible people.
This solution doesn't try to do anything racist; it's a simple, practical solution to avoid a very specific type of hate and toxicity some people encounter during their day job. It's not saying "start speaking anglo-saxon, white, protestant, male English", it's "let's try not to give racists any fuel".
Honestly, I think the solution doesn't solve anything. The end result sounds computerized and fake. Even if it didn't, it's just a step back. People who abuse call centre workers shouldn't be treated with satin gloves to avoid triggering their sensibilities, they should be dealt with professionally. With products like these, companies can avoid having to fire customers or employees by preventing incidents.
Frankly 95+% of my complaints have been resolved by these front line workers (I want to cancel an X, my Y hasn't arrived),so it clearly works.
If you want good service you'd have to pay for it, but you don't want to
"English" is just too broad a term. Indian English is different from American English in pronunciation, preferred synonyms and even grammar. In fact, the way small grammatical features can tell the difference between "white" American English and African American Vernacular English causes some Americans to code switch to "white". Even "American English" isn't a single kind of English. Of course, you won't hear anyone but the most racist people openly complain about someone speaking AAVE but the unintentional bias towards preferring people speaking in their own accents is real and in some cases very problematic.
I think most Americans want the person on the phone to speak American English (or their preferred flavour of North American Spanish, depending on their native tongue), preferably in an accent close to theirs. That's the language, culture, and subset of dialects that they understand. It's not just Americans, of course, it's people in general; we humans like it when things are easy for us, and the less we need to pay attention to decipher what the others are saying, the better.
I don't think its purely about accent though. Like I can't picture someone from texas saying they'll do the needful
My favorite is prepone. As in, I'm going to prepone the meeting to tomorrow (the meeting was originally next week)
Client: Sold. Can you do accounting? HR? IT? Actually, I just want everything you sell. I know there's a language barrier but we can sort out the details later, let's roll this out now.
Now when dealing with call centers, many of them are sales focused and losing sales because your customer base can't understand your salesmen is a very real problem. Editing their accents to encourage more sales is not a race thing, because again, what does 'White' sound like? Its just smart business. Same with customer service, if an American calls in to get help from your company and they cant understand the person speaking with them they are going to get frustrated and the business is going to lose clients.
tldr: I wish everyone would stop making everything a race thing.
From the article, "It’s not hard to imagine scenarios where the introduction of Sanas results in companies demanding more of their workers because they now have “accent matching" that is supposed to increase their performance with customers—-a typical outcome when workplaces with minimal autonomy implement performance-boosting software."
The Indian accent comes through bright and clear in a few places, especially in:
* "How are you today?"
* "Please give me a minute to check on that."
* "Let's see what I can do about correcting your order."
I don't totally like it, but it seems like it could be a successful idea.
If your target audience is a median American, having an American accent will help you, if that is the only parameter that you can improve on.
The Wolf of Wallstreet guy has an entire book on this about his method of phone salesmanship. It's a good read.
(The page has a somewhat broken layout for me - use the toggle switch.)
One of the more annoying ones for me is contacting tech support with extensive debugging information/logs and only being able to talk to people who can't understand what I'm talking about and insist on power cycling the device (which of course may momentarily resolve an intermittent issue, and is enough for them to "close" the case).
Over the phone, people cannot necessarily tell my race.
Yeah… this is dystopian, offensive, racist, utterly thoughtless, completely lacking in any sort of understanding of human cultures… this is wrong on so many levels.
Not only is the Indian to “White American” demo offensive in the obvious racism way but it also represents the removal of cross cultural exposure, the parallels to “news bubble” and the problems they can lead to are obvious and it’s extremely irritating as a potential customer to be lied to like this (its a great example of the sort of thing that leads to customers boycotting a company once its discovered)... and my ultimate example of why this is an bad company (not a bad technology, as technology is simply a tool, the ethics of which depend on the humans putting it to use) imagine it backwards, a “White American” using this to sound “Indian” … hopefully the offensive nature of selling this as a product was obvious before that example but yeah. This is toxic ethical swamp territory that I hope their investors end up watching their money slowly sink into before it eventually disappears.
This startup should not have happened.
I don't call a call center to be exposed to new cultures. I call them to fix a problem.
Waiting 20 minutes then ending with someone who has a terrible mic that seems like it's 10 feet from their face then throw on an accent of any type (heck, I've had agents with US Southern accents that I can't understand) and I end up hanging up to pull the lever on another agent.
Like yeah, is it racist? Probably. But would it fix a problem without hurting anyone? Yes.
If my options as a call center business owner are to 1) use foreign workers and lose customers due to the communication gap, 2) use foreign workers and leverage software to negate the communication gap or 3) use more expensive US based workers; how is it racist to acknowledge the facts on the ground and choose the second option? Your argument is that the call center operators should be forced to lose customers and business because not to do so is racist?
India is also a country, a guy of Indian descent from Britain sounds just like a white guy from Britain, same with people from Florida or NY. To conflate race and nationality is a flawed argument. What does 'White American' sound like? Do people from Alabama and NYC sound the same? If a black kid and a white kid are adopted as babies and raised in the same family they will sound the same. Accent is a regional thing, not a racial one.
Not everything is racist, stop trying to find things to be outraged about.
And let's not play dumb here, the end goal is too milk workers from third world countries
Races don't exist so I guess racism doesn't either right ?
This tool is made to continue employ people from third world country with low wage without making your company sound bad/cheap when you call their support.
The goal isn't the problem, the intent is
"This tool is made to continue employ people from third world country with low wage without making your company sound bad/cheap when you call their support."
of course that's the point of the tool, what is wrong with that? Your options are either that, or pull the jobs back from the third world. Which do you prefer and more importantly which do you think the people employed in the third world prefer? The central drivers of why are even employed is because they are cheaper, business is not charity.
I am willing to bet that the people this effects, the call center employees don't even care. Everyone is just white knighting for them.
I sure am not the only one concerned about megacorps exploiting third world country workers to maximize their profit. Who's winning here ? Your boss buying his new yacht or the army of semi slaves forced to use a SV designed software to roleplay as white americans because their accent is "too offensive" for the racists using your service ?
There is such a wide gap between the buzzwords on this startup "about" page and the reality of what they're enabling.
Pretty much your only options.
I think people just want to talk to people that are easy to understand. They don't care about their color on the other side of the phone.
My mind is not blown by that very obvious fact which has nothing to do with the discussion