Telus Uses AI to Alter Call-Agent Accents
letsdatascience.com
letsdatascience.com
Almost every time I get a call from TELUS about a new service or promotion, it’s someone from the Philippines or India. A lot of them speak English fluently, but the accent and phrasing can be pretty different from what I’m used to, and I don’t always catch everything they’re saying. Sometimes I feel like I’m guessing a big chunk of the conversation, which makes me not want to engage, especially on sales calls.
It matters more when I’m the one calling them for billing or technical support. In those cases, clarity really counts, and it can get frustrating when I have to keep asking for repeats or try to piece things together.
Honestly, I’d love something like this for my own speech too. I’m Japanese and have a fairly strong accent, and it would be nice if people could understand me more easily without having to guess.
OP likely just has more self-awareness than most in being able to be honest about it.
I don't actually understand why anyone would be. Please don't waste my time trying to sell to me. If I'm in the market for your service, I'll let you know
Whatever you interrupted is far more important to them than whatever you're selling; especially if you haven't introduced enough filters in your process to ensure you're calling the right people.
We should either ban cold calling completely or introduce enough friction to the process that cold callers are incentivized to more closely filter who they call. (IE, I get cold calls trying to sell solar panels. The caller knows my address, and can see the solar panels on my roof on satellite photos. They just shouldn't bother calling me.)
It's because there's an imbalance of cost: It's cheaper to just nag me than to actually research if I've already bought the product or are interested in the product.
When calling support in my own country it is much faster and easier, because they intuitively understand the type of issue I’m having and can better relate. I question if changing the voice would make it more frustrating, as I’d have similar issues without the obvious explanation as to why it’s happening.
This is a different kind of way of using AI to eliminate local jobs and allow them to more easily outsource it to countries with low labour costs and poor labour conditions.
While I would appreciate being able to understand them better, I would not at all support this. You could maybe make an argument that using this with local staff could have some merit. As at least then they are not exploiting cheap foreign labour. There are still people living within the country of the caller who may still have strong accents like in the example you gave about yourself.
Why is this a problem? Why are we so attached to the notion that a role must be completed from a specific jurisdiction (outside of regulatory). If you believe in remote work, then why should it matter from where that work is delivered?
Plenty of small companies offshore early support, to reduce costs. In many cases this provides jobs in economies that otherwise doesn't have them, and can lead to a tech industry that in turn hires globally. There are several economies that received a boost this way, and now benefit.
I don't see the problem. Yes, there may be uncomfortable shuffling of roles, layoffs,etc. But, as a believer in globalization, this will just happen. Yes, it will impact me as well.
Okay, well that's easy then.
In general I am highly concerned about the negative social and productivity costs of remote work, in industries ranging from tech support to software development to medicine.
Because it means that I will have to interact with foreigners instead of my own people. It means that a job that my people could have done gets sent off to the lowest bidder in an economy far away. It means that I get a lower quality service as I believe my people can do it better.
>Why are we so attached to the notion that a role must be completed from a specific jurisdiction (outside of regulatory).
Because in group preference along with wanting to win and be the best are human nature.
>If you believe in remote work, then why should it matter from where that work is delivered?
There is a difference between the location a job is done and who is doing the job. If I remote work from China, I am still American. Changing my location on planet earth didn't change who I am, nor does it change my values and work ethic.
>In many cases this provides jobs in economies that otherwise doesn't have them, and can lead to a tech industry that in turn hires globally.
Which I see as a bad thing as it means money and jobs that could have gone to my own country are leaving and being sent to another. I would rather have local companies invest in local AI than to hire foreigners.
>There are several economies that received a boost this way, and now benefit.
I would rather boost my own economy than someone else's.
However, it’s nearly the same global economy. At some point those issues in faraway places are the foreign policy issues in your localities. This is not a defense or argument in favor of hollowing out local economies.
Sadly, cost arbitrage will remain a thing. One underused avenue to make it a more even playing field, is to exports labour and safety standards from the developed world.
Arbitrage built from factories and sweat shops which have suicide nets should be anathema.
This type of enforcement is well within the realms of possibility. FDA inspectors travel to the source factories in other countries to ensure they are compliant.
I also don't think it would play out that well. If you are offshoring to country B but forced to use a factory following standards from country A you aren't going to be able to compete against a company from Country B using the best factories from country B. In my view you should either try and beat them at their own game by using equivalent factories or you should not outsource and use innovation to come up with a more efficient factory. Purposefully choosing an inefficient option leads to an inefficient economy.
They go off shore because they are less expensive.
Gotta love that switch to a passive voice whenever you're flagging your own guilt. You didn't see, things are seen.
You see them as less expensive, you want to pay less and less for every product and every service. If your provider charges you 25-50% extra per month because services are delivered locally, you just switch to the cheaper one. Most nationalists are more big mouth than standing by their stated values.
Why wouldn't I want those to exist locally and pay well?
Why the whole country?
Are all your countrymen equally deserving? Do all of them work as hard, care the same, and give back to their nation the same?
I too, want my nation to “win”, but I want that advantage to be something that we built and something that endures.
They need to win by just being that good, and creating an environment that allows for that to happen.
Since everyone cannot be the best and brightest, I would want a safety net that allows for a society that isn’t constantly in fight or flight.
> offshoring .. best factories from country B.
What typically happens is that factory B will offload work to factories that wont be inspected.
> use innovation to come up with a more efficient factory.
This is what is happening today. We’ve been losing more factory jobs to robotics than outsourcing for a while.
——
When manufacturing jobs are lost, the issue of underemployment and the loss of expertise is what hampers economies. Burger flipping pays far less than Foreman or specialist, and losing manufacturing hubs means no cross pollination and skill development in your populace.
This is all to say I am well aware of the issues, and sympathetic to your greater cause.
However, there is no victory for me in your ‘defeat’. The average citizen in any country has more to gain from the deepening of the middle class globally.
Healthy economies, with actual competition, create a deeper more informed citizenry. This means more people living up to their potential, more ideas, more culture, more resources to solve challenges, and a chance to live up the ideals we seem to be failing.
>The average citizen in any country has more to gain from the deepening of the middle class globally.
The deepening of the middleclass here to me has seemingly meant that more people do jobs that are seen as middle class. At the same time the "middle class" purchasing power when it comes to important thing isn't that far off from that of the lower class of the past. yes they can buy big flat screen tv's for cheap now but more important things have started to become an issue despite rapid technological advancement.
>Healthy economies, with actual competition, create a deeper more informed citizenry. This means more people living up to their potential,
You now compete with a foreign multinational which employs people at a fraction of your local wages. So you no longer compete and there's less real actual competition.
You are drawing a causal line between correlated events.
The middle class globally has been weakened since the 80s.
One of the current issues we are contending with is the fact that wealth has concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.
America recently had a year where the top 10% of earners drove nearly 50% of consumer spending.
We could spend the entirety of the conversation discussing wealth concentration, and it would still be a worthwhile digression.
You can’t have a consumer driven market if the consumers don’t have anything to purchase with.
However, when you dismiss flat screen TVs offhandedly also does your own argument a disservice. By deciding what is important and what is not, you are taking on the role of arbiter of subjective merit.
This is fine, but then you have to also make arguments for how the economic incentives must be aligned to achieve your subjective goals.
——
From what I have said, you should know that I am sympathetic to the motivations behind your argument. I am not sympathetic to bad arguments.
Protectionism is fatal to economies, and simply tanks your drive. The ability of MNCs to just offshore work should be benign, but appears malignant. If work is offshored, it should also result in more productivity or higher productivity in the nation it is offshored from.
You should see higher tax revenues as a result, which should be plowed back into your local economy.
Weirdly, our economies seem to all be becoming more productive, but not much richer.
This is one of the reasons I sincerely recommend exporting labour standards more aggressively. At least you are not at a disadvantage because you have actual labour protections, and it reduces the value of labour arbitrage.
The other issue is retraining doesn’t work at the speed and scales changes happen. Our brains are not flexible enough to retrain miners into programmers and have them find jobs which are equally well paying.
If we had a number for how much retraining we can actually achieve, or how much time it would take, we could figure out how much we can outsource before it becomes impossible to retrain our citizens.
And I'm suggesting wage bargaining power has affected that. Not on it's own. But it has had notable effect.
>By deciding what is important and what is not, you are taking on the role of arbiter of subjective merit.
I am as are you but I think I am far from alone. After all the big societal issues that spark these discussions aren't sparked by a few cents of lipstick and somewhat cheaper screens.
>Protectionism is fatal to economies, and simply tanks your drive.
Various protectionist self-serving policies are part of what made japan a threathening rapidly growing economic power untill the US and Europe strongarmed it with....protectionist policy. It's also what made China the power it is today. Etc
And I don't think anyone can argue it stopped japan, china, etc from innovating.
Show me the ultraliberal free for all that did well and isn't super financialized.
"drive" on the other hand is an ephemeral thing that starts falling apart when it is more clearly defined. I can just as easily argue that my drive is hampered because there's no reason for me to attempt to enter plenty of conceivable fields (and even begin to innovate) where i would compete with a multinational utilizing sweatshop workers in Mali. I can also point at the various industries that got internationally more and more consolidated into fewer and fewer players leading to less innovation and "drive".
>This is one of the reasons I sincerely recommend exporting labour standards more aggressively. At least you are not at a disadvantage because you have actual labour protections, and it reduces the value of labour arbitrage.
I don't get to dictate the labour policies of kuala lumpur, etc and any attempt to would be radically more involved costly and far beyond my small countries scope than simply affecting what companies do locally. It is defending a situation with hypotheticals that rarely happen and when they happen they have often happened badly or shift the problem further.
>The other issue is retraining doesn’t work at the speed and scales changes happen. Our brains are not flexible enough to retrain miners into programmers and have them find jobs which are equally well paying.
I think this idea that everyone in the world can be part of the professional-managerial class (PMC) and this striving towards it is also self defeating. You argue about this from a global perspective but also as if it would be good locally in a more developed place if only those with "less desired jobs" could properly retrain and such as if these same reasonings wouldn't apply there. Those jobs that are leaving are desired to me even if I don't do them all. Those wage setting mechanics for jobs in mining, at a call center, assembling components on an assembly line also indirectly affect those wage setting pressures/purchasing power of the software dev, marketing person, etc
See when its an oversimplification of the case history, we will have divergent conclusions.
India's License Raj resulted in decades of slow growth, till the markets were opened in 1990 and incumbents were forced to shape up. Argentina is another case.
Protectionism here is far too broad a term. There are many things which were needed, such as investment in training, labour, export controls, infrastructure investment, industrial policy and more.
The Japanese market was also open to firms, and they most definitely entered and integrated into that market, so its not a one way street.
China is more egregious in that sense, since it has corporate espionage, state protection, and a market which is not really open to foreign compeition (unless you are a luxury brand).
> Show me the ultra-liberal free-for-all that did well
I am not going to ever make that case, since I don't believe that ever existed or succeeded if it did.
> I can just as easily argue that my dr
Sure, feel free to argue. However there are others who just want to make stuff, and don't spend the time arguing.
> I don't get to dictate the labour policies of kuala lumpur,
Says who? Have you ever seen an outsourcing contract? They include terms on how people should be fired, number of working days, and more. Rules vary according to jurisdiction, however the contract can include whatever terms you like.
> I think this idea that everyone in the world can be part of the professional-managerial class
Where did you get this? I am talking about retraining. You could retrain into naval captains for all I care.
> less desired jobs" could properly retrain
Not what I am saying. I am saying the argument for outsourcing used to be supported by the idea that those who lost employment could be retrained into other domains.
However, there are limits to what retraining can actually achieve, which removes the support this argument provided.
And for an outsourcing contract to be that way there's a certain intent that needs to exist.
Factory conditions in kuala lumpur scarcely reach my ears and we don't live under a single world government. It sounds exactly like in defense or argument in favor of hollowing out local economies.
> One underused avenue to make it a more even playing field, is to exports labour and safety standards from the developed world.
Because that has never been and never will be the point of the outsourcing. The point is to undercut higher wages and bargaining power.
It's hard to argue nationalistic beliefs.
Maybe "your people can do it better" but they won't because they do it for the lowest possible salary. The only difference is what's the lowest possible salary the company can get away with, because the lowest possible service quality they can get away with is the same no matter where they deliver from. Some nationalists will even tolerate a worse quality of service as long as it comes from "their own".
You wanted a cheaper and cheaper service so the companies offer it to you. When a company advertises "services delivered locally" none of the big mouth nationalists reach in their pocket to pay for it. Part of their values no doubt.
> If I remote work from China, I am still American. Changing my location on planet earth didn't change who I am, nor does it change my values and work ethic.
You think you and "your people" must deliver a better service and have better values because you are "American" (US citizen or literally anyone in the Americas?), or any country for that matter. Is that a part of that work ethic and values? To everyone else in the world that just sounds like very unfounded exceptionalism.
And that lowest possible salary is so low because we allow for wage suppression tactics such as this. My grandma tells with pride of the work they used to do and they did quite well for themselves.
It was things like rolling cigars and soldering on an assembly line. Stuff that now would be described as sweatshop work that nobody would expect to happen locally.
I now do far "higher status" work in the eyes of the classists that think all of this is fine but still don't get close to their wealth.
When you're talking about better paid jobs you're right to point that out.
But for the bottom of the barrel jobs this doesn't hold and you can check by looking at the salaries for these jobs in the countries that can't offshore further. They're still dismal.
The real reason is that the people looking at these jobs have no negotiating power whatsoever. They have no essential irreplaceable skills or experience, nothing that's hard to find on the market. All they have usually is the desperation to do any job to make a living. They need that salary now while the company can beat around the bush with the service, throw AI chatbots at it, allow longer call queues, and so on.
If anything, a the offshore employees have more leverage with their employer because they need to speak some foreign languages to interact with customers. They can differentiate themselves from the sea of other people in their own country. A US employee in a US call center serving US customers doesn't even have that. Not that much different in Canada despite the bilingualism situation.
No. It absolutely holds and the lowest common denominator is not some argument that it can't be better. Supressing wages in higher income countries does not mean that the lowest income countries somehow get pulled up proportionally.
>The real reason is that the people looking at these jobs have no negotiating power whatsoever. They have no essential irreplaceable skills or experience, nothing that's hard to find on the market. All they have usually is the desperation to do any job to make a living.
My grandparents on one side of the family had jobs that required no (At least not after a good amount of training) essential irreplaceable skills or experience and had plenty of purchasing power. Glass cutting at a glass factory, rolling cigars, soldering on an assembly line. Their negotiating power existed based on the fact that they were good workers and would fuck off to a different factory or pressure trough a union. They did very well for themselves.
Now that negotiating power is gone. They wouldn't go to philips or so because philips doesn't manufacture here anymore. The equivalent jobs that can't be outsourced run from my experience mostly on imported workers from poorer countries who will be replaced the moment they demand better conditions. The effects of that supression on "bottom of the barrel" job leeches upwards into jobs that people perceive as higher status without many people noticing. After all those people that would have done them still go for a different job.
The world changed. The skill pool was expanded significantly and skills are distributed differently. It used to be that no formal education was needed for some things, now everyone expects a PhD.
> would fuck off to a different factory or pressure trough a union. They did very well for themselves.
You still don't get it do you? You wanted stuff so cheap that every "factory" now pays the same shitty salary, and there are no unions because they drive wages and by extension prices up.
You want more proof? Amazon drivers are safe from offshoring, you can't deliver a package in the US while being physically in India. So why are they still paid a pittance and have to pee in bottles while driving? Because they have no leverage and you wanted everything dirt cheap. Offshoring had little to do with it in real life, only in the heads of nationalists.
No, I don't decide shit. Shareholders wanted profit margins so wide.
Funny how good you are at understanding bargaining power in labor markets and how dogshit you are at understanding it in consumer goods.
Shareholders can't force you to make them money. Blame is probably shared but it's your pressure to have super fast deliveries for anything because you can't wait or walk to a store that shareholders are exploiting for profit. It's your demands and expectations that make those Amazon drivers pee in bottles.
You can always boycott Amazon and the shareholders can't do anything to force you back. But you don't, you keep buying from them with fast delivery.
Same applies to everything else. Do you ever factor in the people’s pay when you select a service? Do you pick the companies that pay the best salaries even if the price is higher? If someone offers you a service from a guy who's paid more, you balk and go to another provider who gives the same service from a guy who's paid less.
The cop-out is always "but what can I do, I'm just one person?" so you keep perpetrating this.
For a lot of the jobs described that really isn't the big factor.
>It used to be that no formal education was needed for some things, now everyone expects a PhD.
Again more of a consequence of the "elite overproduction" and policy than anything else. I'm sure that earlier mentioned callcenter job could happen without a social sciences degree as can myriads of jobs i supported in factories.
>You still don't get it do you? You wanted stuff so cheap >Because they have no leverage and you wanted everything dirt cheap.
a) Stop projecting
b) I'm not arguing against what individuals want when spending. Americans such as you wanted cheaper and better cars and electronics and..... Japan provided those but not because japan was a libertarian paradise. America strongarmed them out of that position not because it is some kind of libertarian paradise. Same with the new competition in some fields from China.
> So why are they still paid a pittance and have to pee in bottles while driving? Because they have no leverage and you wanted everything dirt cheap.
PS They have better conditions and pay in my country. It still isn't great. Again due to lack of leverage since a lot of them are migrants. I'm sure you're supportive of that eroded lack of leverage but don't project it onto me. At some point you'll just end up arguing for the relative competitive advantage of places with slavery.
Took a while to guide to horse to water. We circled back to what I said from the first comment [0]: the lowest end jobs have very low salaries because these people have no leverage (multitude of factors, some of which I listed), not because of offshoring. This situation holds true even from jobs that are safe from offshoring.
> a) Stop projecting
> I'm sure you're supportive of that eroded lack of leverage but don't project it onto me.
The old "You don't project onto me! I project onto you!". But somehow you managed to screw up even your diss at me. Supporting the "eroded lack of leverage" means supporting the leverage. Maybe you wanted to say I "support the lack of leverage". I'm a strong supporter of everyone being able to have a good life, whether they do a job locally or from offshore. I won't get into that discussion because I don't think you care that much for anything more complex than grandparent stories.
So I'm sorry Mario but your reasoning skills are in another castle.
And workers that don't get what you're on about because they only have the script for a regular customers with regular issues become often incredibly frustrating when you have a more complicated issue that would be immediately resolved by someone at a helpdesk locally that immediately knows what internal niche department and person you should be redirected to.
Obviously not enough of them. Most are used to under-bidding and being stretched to take the lowest possible price.
And yes, cultural difference matters. Americans often have more agency to take initiative, on average. Knowing there's an American on the other side puts me at ease, mentally.
If I’m trying to convey an issue about a flight, per your example, it may very well be to someone who’s never flown or has very different expectations for what it looks like to fly. At one of the airports I was at in India, I was trying to find my gate and was pointed to a guy at a card table with a 3-ring binder, where he flipped through to find the flight. This was maybe 10 years ago; I had never experienced anything like that in the US, even going back several decades. This is a cultural and experiential difference. If someone from that airport in India called me for help (prior to that experience), I would have had an really hard time parsing their problem, as I wouldn’t have any context for seeing a man with a binder about finding gate information. Someone saying that wouldn’t have made any sense to me. Other airports there were more akin to what I’m used to in the US, but still had their local quirks.
This same type of issue could play out regardless of the country. India was the example brought up, but I’ve run into confusion due to cultural differences everywhere I’ve been to some degree. How impactful this is to support will vary based on how common the issue is, but I’m usually not calling support for common issues now that most of those can be handled via a website.
Half the inbound clients were Colombian families navigating US immigration. The agent had to know which apostilled documents the Cancillería typically processes in 3 days vs 3 weeks, that "documento de identidad" in Colombia is the cédula not the DNI, that the consulate in Bogotá closes early on Fridays. None of that is in any LLM's pretraining; we hand-built and update the knowledge files monthly.
Your binder-table-at-the-airport story is the deeper one. AI can fake the voice. It can't fake the lived experience. Cheaper to invest in the knowledge files than in the accent layer.
Its not for the person on the other end.
I used to do phone tech support, and:
1. Lots of my female coworkers would end their shifts in tears because men would yell at them for no reason. A male voice would absolutely make the job more bearable for them.
2. Singaporeans hate Australian accents more than anyone over here hates indian accents. I had a nearly 100% strike rate with singaporeans demanding local tech support, calling me names and hanging up.
No way, I've never heard of this before.
Does anyone know why this is? Do they have a bad experience with Australian colleagues? Do we harrass them in public the way that the British backpackers do here?
edit: And if people are able to detect this and suspect they're not even talking to a human at all, it might even make verbal abuse more common.
On the other, too many customers are complete racist dicks to people who they perceive as not "belonging to their country". I... don't think this is the solution to that problem (people will just start applying their racist views elsewhere), but it could be argued by some that it might help.
I'm still against this, don't get me wrong - we absolutely should not be doing this to anybody. I can understand the appeal, though.
nunez alluded to the reason why people will do that. And no, it's not racist in the way you're trying to frame it.
The callers are angry that they're being forced to talk with people which don't even speak their language well enough for it to be a non-issue. Despite being paying customers.
Because the company had a genius MBA which wanted a bigger bonus, so they outsourced/offshored it.
These workers may not deserve this treatment, but it's completely understandable - and the foreign workers ARE the representative of the company doing this shit. And thus... Framing this behavior as racism will not help your message whatsoever.
1. The price would not be double. It'd be at most a marginal change. No company I've ever seen has more the a single digit percentage of their revenue in customer service
2. The customer was never given the decision wherever theyd be willing to pay ~1-5% more for better service, hence entirely useless to discuss
3. How the hell do you think that makes the people calling customer service racist? Or was my comment too challenging for you to read and comprehend?
Would the executives, especially the C-suite, be willing to make $8M instead of only $10M in salary and bonuses?
Neither do I though? I said it's understandable. Abusing people - even just verbally - is pretty much never justifiable.
But that still doesn't make the people doing so racist.
They're just angry (justifiable) and venting it at the representative of the company they're angry about (less so). Framing this issue as racist will just alienate all discourse, that was my point.
The Newfie barber they introduced me to I had to smile and nod because I couldn’t understand a word he said. And neither could they.
There are accents and then there’s accints.
I play destiny in a clan, most of them are from UK. I don't understand a single word from some of them...
One could just as well argue the opposite position.
Not just accented. India has regional English accents. Some of my Indian colleagues have very different accents from others.
- Is it dehumanizing to Filipinos that Filipinos probably now do their job more efficiently without having to learn an accent that they are not exposed to?
- Is it dehumanizing to Filipinos that they no longer enjoy having their accent heard as a externality of a counterfactual arrangement?
- Is it dehumanizing to the customers that the company does not expect their customers to be cosmopolitan enough to understand a foreign accent with ease?
- Is it dehumanizing to the customers that the customers are now more sensorily shielded from a current-day reality regarding globalized providers of service?
- Is it dehumanizing, not due to this decision itself; but the globalized arrangement, to Canadians that they cannot expect to hold such a job and get by in Canada? Or perhaps to Filipinos, that such a job might be low-paying in their own country (or in respect to non-domestic goods that need to be purchased from outside their polity)?
- Is it dehumanizing, regarding not this decision, but the offshoring decision, that such decisions can be made without consent by employees and contractors?
> Is it dehumanizing to Filipinos that Filipinos probably now do their job more efficiently without having to learn an accent that they are not exposed to?
It's already demeaning to expect them to "learn an accent", unless their job description is to literally pretend they are from a different culture (e.g. if they were actors). Introducing an "AI" middleman to change their voice is demeaning and dehumanising.
> Is it dehumanizing to Filipinos that they no longer enjoy having their accent heard as a externality of a counterfactual arrangement?
It is dehumanising to any person that their own human voice is no longer heard when performing a job involving human contact.
> Is it dehumanizing to the customers that the company does not expect their customers to be cosmopolitan enough to understand a foreign accent with ease?
Not quite dehumanising, but it is certainly patronising that the company has an opinion as to what voice their customers can or cannot understand. And if the company is hiring customer service agents whose accents are a serious hinderance to understanding, I would argue that their hires are not likely to accurately understand the very customers they are supposed to assist.
>Is it dehumanizing to the customers that the customers are now more sensorily shielded from a current-day reality regarding globalized providers of service?
Not dehumanising, but again patronising, and also disrespectful and borderline dishonest.
I won't get into the final two points, as those are prior to the accent-middleman "AI".
The concept of an accent is broad, but at least part of it you need to learn together with the language, as speaking a non-native language with a thick accent is partly based on the fact that you have yet to learn.
Without being exhaustive, things that might fall into the "speaks with an accent" concept in this thread:
- Prosody. Prosody can vary per region but a distinctly alien prosody to a language is a barrier for the receptor of the message, that expects a given language and a range of prosodies. E.g. as I know french quite well, hearing english with a heavy french accent makes my brain try to understand what's being said as said in french, and interferes a lot.
- Sound shifts for particular phonemes. While some of it might be local to the language in certain registers (idea --> /ide"er"/, three --> /free/), others are clearly issues in the target language pronunciation (eg. japanese people having trouble with the l phoneme, spanish people adding an /e/ sound prior to an s-mobile, or v versus b for spanish people also).
- Connected speech. Where do you end words, how do you omit sounds, etc. Also massive hindrance to understanding.
- Grammar. Alien grammar is a hindrance to communication. You need to learn that.Uh, what? Excuse me?
The purpose of spoken language is communication. Accents can frustrate or enhance communication. In this case, conforming to the accent of the client enhances communication, because it is what the client is familiar with.
You do realize that the obligations of service are on the agent, right? It is the agent, as representative of the company providing a service, who is serving the client. If the aim of an agent is to assist a client, then using an accent that is more intelligible to the client is part of serving them.
You might as well claim that - given that language is part of culture - learning to speak another language at all is "pretending" that you're from a different culture. It's a ridiculous take.
> It is dehumanising to any person that their own human voice is no longer heard when performing a job involving human contact.
What does this even mean? What is your "own human voice" here? Accents are learned. They are conventional, even if they have objective properties that allow them to be compared. An agent's job isn't about him; it is about the client. It's not about "being heard" (whatever that means), but being understood by the client within the context of the purpose of the job.
Imagine if diplomats thought the way you do. Diplomats serve and represent their country, just as agents serve and represent their company. It is in the interest of the diplomat, his country, and the other party to communicate as effectively as possible with the other party.
> Not quite dehumanising, but it is certainly patronising that the company has an opinion as to what voice their customers can or cannot understand.
This, too, is nonsensical. Given that companies record calls, it is fair to assume that the company has statistical evidence concerning the accents of their agents and how well they're understood by their clients.
Now, if you want to criticize the use of AI in such cases on independent grounds, maybe you can make a case. I don't think it would be a very strong case, as this is such a trivial matter. But you cannot claim that learning accents is "dehumanizing". Accent is part of language. If you wish to communicate with a people, you need to speak a common language. That generally means learning their language. The better you speak that language, the better you can communicate with them. If you are serving, the burden is on you to speak in a way that can assist understanding. It's that simple.
This isn't true in the way you are thinking of. An accent can pronounce words the same way that another accent distinguishes. An accent can pronounce word x that another accent pronounces word y. What comes to mind immediately: in Indian English accents, RP/GA fricative "th" is pronounced as the aspirate, while the RP/GA aspirated "t" is pronounced retroflex, so naively, "three" can be misheard as "tree".
The working-class accent that I use where I'm from (not India) is syllable-timed (stress does not lengthen the duration of a syllable), and uses pitch lexical stress, rather than intensity/loudness for it, and stress itself is frequently very differently located compared to RP or GA. For "th" as well, we collapse it into t/d.
All in all, for someone who has heard it for the first time or rarely, it can be extremely disorienting to listen to a very distant foreign accent.
Similarly, a call center worker may not care about having their accent being heard, but wants to get their numbers up, without struggling with a customer that isn't familiar with their accent, and enjoys the ease of speaking in their own accent than having to use one that distant customers are accustomed to. Likewise a customer probably just wants their problem fixed, without the effort of getting accustomed to an accent that they rarely encounter. This meets your definition of deplorable, but analogous to the former scenario, perhaps not deplorably so.
This isn't any different from (usually white) teachers telling (usually black) kids to "speak better" simply because they consider the way they speak "wrong." Or, since TELUS is in Canada, like the Residential school system [^0] that their First People were forced to attend that did the same thing.
I believe that your voice makes you _you_. Taking that away because some people have trouble understanding dialects is literally taking away a foundational piece of one's humanity.
It's also a slippery slope: what's there to stop companies that do this from going straight to making everyone sound like a collection of voice profiles? Such a move would only make it easier to justify gutting customer service departments entirely.
[^0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...
Technology is supposed to make life easier and better
I've tried to keep the habit of talking about things in the third-person when I'm on the phone with someone: instead of saying "you messed up the billing" I say "BigCo messed up the billing".
It's a small mental reminder that it's not the fault of the person I just happen to be talking to.
I worked in a call center. You quickly develop an emotional rhino hide or you won’t make it.
If I have a hard time with accents and someone has a thick accent, the technology is not too different from the sci-fi babblefish concept, automatic translation for the recipient. It is always presented as an enabling technology.
I have no expectation that sci-fi analysis of a potential technology is correct or complete. But I do think we can think about why this feels so different.
In this case I think neither recipient nor speaker has opted in, and I think deceptively at that. It would feel different if the recipient is turning on an assistive technology because they are having a hard time understanding, or if the speaker is turning on an assistive technology because they are having a hard time doing their job.
Are you going to also fight the good fight for Chinese and Japanese depictions of and reactions to black people, for example? Because those caricatures are certainly worse.
But I think so long as people are given the choice it's not dehumanising at all. Just like how I choose to speak a little slower if speaking to someone who doesn't speak English very well when it becomes clear they're struggling to follow what I'm saying.
So in a way it's actually more human than completely ignoring the reality of a situation like that. Same as that first human binding the leg of another.
My reason for mentioning this, is that there are going to be weird bugs in any such system. Systems hallucinate. Misunderstand words. I can see accent removal meaning that different words are the result, and context can mean those different words could be a disaster. This immediately opens up liability, because it doesn't matter if it was a computer, a human, or who, a company is on the hook.
It also doesn't matter if another company is providing this service, your contact is with Telus. Telus may sue their company, but you're going to go after Telus. A company could agree to all sorts of things without meaning to, make fraudulent statements, and yes they are liable and always have been. That also includes hate-crime related legislation, harmful insults, snide comments, and here's the fun part...
The person on the other end doesn't even know what they're saying to the person. Not accurately. This is supposed to be seamless, so they'll think that what they're saying is coming through correctly. And continue talking.
Yes, humans can do all of these things. But often there's a manager walking around the room, listening, and would hear someone raising their voice, yelling at the end-user, swearing, making inappropriate statements. This would stand out.
Yet here we have a system altering what's being heard, and no one is directly in the loop on that. No manager. No person on the floor.
Frankly, I hope this explodes in their face. Hard. I want to see them sued so hard, that no other company tries to ever interfere with human conversation again. Go full AI? OK. Full human? OK. But this nonsense???
Absolutely not.
From GP
> Almost every time I get a call from TELUS about a new service or promotion
I’d hate to see accents removed in movies and e.g. YouTube review videos. But sales and customer service have lost their humanity long ago. At least the call center workers will receive less bigoted hate and hard-of-hearing customers will be less confused.
However, thanks to this AI 'assistance' its becoming what was actually intended to be said by the people and what was made up the LLM, with some people creating wordy pages long LLM babble.
This also prevents non-native speakers from actively getting better, which is a core issue with AI general.
Also I think people who are not native speakers are often overly concerned with how much other people are bothered by broken English and accents (as long as accents are clear enough that the point can be understood)
A) this will be used to hire non Canadian with minimal language skills and will be bad for the local labour market without objection from customers
B) accents are troublesome but the biggest issues were people that don’t have the same cultural standards for things like, not lying, not dumping calls that were hard, or doing a good job with complicated systems and accurately logging cases truthfully.
So many problems are created by poor workers (opps we deleted the customers account, oops I transferred them too you).
These were problems that were so bad they had to have specific cultural training for specific nations to get people to the Canadian standard, and many failed. But hey, cheaper labour!
Now I clean houses, and there is so much competition from people from abroad who are flooding the market and undercutting prices and I don’t get government subsidies to live in a hotel…
Canadians get a lot of scam calls from Indian call centres. Whether it's furnace cleaners or somebody calling about a fraudulent amazon package you supposedly ordered, it's usually somebody with an Indian accent. It's reached the point where many people simply hang up if they hear an Indian accent on the line. If you're trying to do telemarketing, possibly using the very same call centres that run these scams, that's a huge barrier.
Telus, for its part, is absolutely shameless in its use of aggressive telemarketing. I'm not surprised that they're one of the first companies to employ this sort of innovation. Unfortunately, this tech will likely spread to the scammers almost immediately, assuming it didn't originate with them.
As an aside, here's one of my favourite games to play with telescammers: Pick one word to say over and over again, but attempt to give it a variety of natural inflections, ambiguities, etc. so that it sounds like you're not just saying one word. Then see how long you can keep the scammer on the line. Start your stopwatch the moment you start talking to a human. I once managed over three minutes with the word, "Fuzzy-cuffs". Every minute of their time you waste could be a minute somebody's Grandma isn't being scammed.
e.g. This was in the news yesterday, but there's basically always a scam of the week/month going around: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/scammers-rogers-custo...
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
You must be very lucky to always get "a lot" of fluent English speakers.
Just this week I was speaking to Microsoft (well, their Indian outsourcer, of course).
As is the case 99% of the time, the guy was not at all fluent.
I'm not being rude here. I live in a large city in a Western country, I have friends and colleagues who are Indian and I encounter Indians in day-to-day life. These people all speak English in a truly fluent manner. Yes they still have the strong accent, but guess what the accent has never caused me a problem.
Telus thinking they can magically fix the lack of fluency through AI because the "problem" is the accent ? Now that IS being rude and disrespectful.
The solution is to hire people who can be understood, and empower them with the authority to be effective. Elaborate and misleading schemes to mask the problem are disrespectful and insulting to your customers. If the job involves speaking with customers, candidates for it should have the communication skills required. I've dealt on a regular basis with foreigners / ESL'ers who are perfectly capable of speaking English, French, etc. even with an accent.
If the job involved regular heavy lifting, would you hire someone incapable of doing so?
Related last year:
AI Accent Conversion for call centers (48 points, 70 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43514141
Call centres using AI to 'whiten' Indian accents (8+6 points, 0+6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43246376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43292311
Anyone have the original source?
It's hard to decipher anyone when you can hear 30 other people in the background and the audio is choppy.
As soon as I hear the "Mr Firstname and how are you today?" I hang up.
Call spammers have not worked out that a formal polite greeting is a big giveaway.
"Am I speaking with X? This is Y from Z Corp." is okay.
"Am I speaking with X?..." is a spammer, a complaint, or someone trying to serve me papers.
(in the US)
Nearly all calls i get go to voicemail by default, it's been a great filter with its voice transcription!
They want to make sure they called the right person. Except they know everyone hates getting called like this, so they take "who is this?" as affirmation and then proceed to tell you their company and the call.
Most modern call centers / support is completely pointless and almost nothing would be lost by not having them. This is assuming that you'd provide just a half decent self service and have actual information available, written in a clear, easy to read, language.
* https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20160317-inside-the-sec...
I couldn’t care less whether it’s American English, British English, or whatever.
But to expect everyone in the world to be comfortable with all possible English accents in the world is madness.
You expect everyone to be comfortable with all different accents that exist?
I think this whole discussion is framed from an extremely American perspective, which is extremely ironic as that’s a very racist attitude.
Standardization of pronunciation is not a bad thing.
"I dont think its racist".
It's not inherently racist, just very lazy, but it can quickly lead to racism.
Additionally I find even though I can understand an Indian accent for example quite well in person, I really struggle with it over the phone due to the compression causing quite poor sound quality and lack of facial expressions to be able to read (which I would be using in person to help me understand a strong unfamiliar accent), whereas when accent is more familiar to me, the poor audio quality and lack of body language isn't nearly as much of an issue, presumably as I just have way way more exposure to the accent so can fill in gaps better.
I'm sympathetic to audio quality issues. No one would object if they developed tech to improve call quality, but they didn't.
You expect everyone to learn every accent?
This seems to be written from the perspective of a native English speaker only, rather than taking the world population into account, which is in itself racist.
Can’t help poor education.
I had to give them various pieces of information that had to be accurately transcribed, e.g. a Hide My Email - generated email address.
Normally for this like this, I tell rep that I'm going to read the full email, then spell it out using the NATO phonetic alphabet, then read it out again, and this usually works great.
This particular rep was entirely unfamiliar with the NATO phonetic alphabet and couldn't reliably make out make bog-standard North American accent, so I spent probably five minutes on the phone to just read off my email address with various iterations of "T AS IN TANGO"... "did you say M as in mango?". By the end I still was not confident that they'd accurately taken down my email.
I don't think AI accent-altering would have fixed this exchange.
They sounded a tinge strange, like they’ve almost crossed the uncanny valley, only to succumb at the final 3% stretch.
I was suspicious, but their ability to understand my complex request and the relatively low latency make an LLM -> TTS or e2e voice model unlikely.
This post finally solved the mystery.
Still, they could just give the employees training to learn additional accents.
The English accents around the world were left behind with the subsets of English people were taught to be able to aspire to entry level administrative jobs.
Someone recommended this to read, not sure if anyone else has read it: https://archive.org/details/educationascultu00carn
It feels like it bears some underpinning and contextual relevance.
a sweet korma, or a vindaloo are my most favorite.
Is this actually a thing? (Translating to American, it's the culinary equivalent of crepe-pizza-burger-clam chowder.)
That said, Sarvam, Gnani, and a number of other Indian AI companies are working on dialect aware TTS for localization usecases.
You say they're not good enough, they smell, they don't fit in, but you take their culture, their clothing, their food and rebrand it as scandinavian, high fashion, chic fitness, pumpkin spice. They do the things you value but for their skin color.
You pay them colored people wages, with colored people working conditions with no social mobility outside of where they live, but you literally rob them of voice.
Your lack of ability to see "why this is dehumanizing is" why you're replacing yourselves with A.I. "AI is better" f*k. AI is controlled by a few platform owners. Once everyone is replaced with AI they're jacking up the cost and no one of any color is eating. Just a few rich.
So yeah, i can understand why you think it isn't dehumanizing. You don't see when you do it to others, or when we do it to ourselves.
I wonder if it doesn’t make more sense to do it on the client side. I would love to have an app installed on my machine that does this for me, because then I also have the option to turn it on and off.
Oldschool callcenters often had a human! Now I "interact" with AI ...
Canada, USA, doesn't matter - if our taxes subsidize a market or entrench a player within an important market (telecom, physical infrastructure, etc), they should be mandated to keep the money in local economies.
I'm American, and find it deeply offensive if a company wants to offshore despite getting tax breaks, government protections against new market entrants, etc.
I'm not paying tax money so a utility can raise prices, pay its executives more, spend more on lobbying, and outsource labor to 3rd world or developing countries. I don't give a fuck how well those folks in those countries speak English.
2) if that's not an option, have a pick-up-the-phone agent pick it up
Scam calls sounding "more legitimate" because it passes the (unfortunately racist) filters most people have.
I realized quickly how it was changing my thinking process to devote so much to each word.