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Comment by BobbyTables2 | Hacker News Reader

Some people are just very robotic.

Today I spent 20 minutes in a call to customer support. The representative spoke so robotic-ally (both cadence and word choice), I was extremely confident they were an AI for the first 15 minutes. Was quite certain the automated AI had transferred me to a more advanced one…

Turns out they were just likely in a low cost Latin American country and trying really hard. I felt bad one could be reduced to such…

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Probably more like "some jobs are just very robotic". CSRs aren't paid to think for themselves, but rather to follow a script. I suspect that human would behave a lot more like a human outside of work.

Oh it gets worse. Apparently Comcast is now using a voice-changing AI - it's a real (probably Latin or Asian) person getting their voice replaced on-the-fly to sound "American."

I know it's more trendy to bash them for this... but I honestly struggle a lot to understand call center people with thick accents from other countries, and I often find myself wondering "am I racist for wanting to speak to a native right now" just because I cannot make out what they are saying.

It might have been that!

The cadence was extremely robotic and consistent. Only thing that makes me think it wasn’t AI was the very end when they repeated a confirmation code and didn’t use the NATO names for the letters the second time around.

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