[guessmyname]

I think this is a good idea.

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.

[nunez]

I think it's dehumanizing. Yes, they have accents. English isn't their first language. TELUS decided to move jobs they could have given to Canadians offshore to save a buck or two. We're already conditioned to treat service reps like punching bags; now we're literally taking away their voices and further devaluing them. Not okay.

[throw0101c]

> We're already conditioned to treat service reps like punching bags; now we're literally taking away their voices and further devaluing them.

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.

[shermantanktop]

I just tell them “I know this not your fault.”

I worked in a call center. You quickly develop an emotional rhino hide or you won’t make it.

[jhanschoo]

I don't understand the locus of the arrangement/decision that you find dehumanizing. There are several distinct ways I perceive how someone might find aspects of such an arrangement and change of arrangement dehumanizing, and I shall list them out, though I may or may not subscribe to them (for the purpose of this comment, I am assuming Filipino call center contractors, though one may substitute in any other country where the population knows English and jobs are outsourced to):

- 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?

[Mordisquitos]

I am not impacted by this issue on either side, but I am in the "dehumanising" camp, so here are my opinions:

> 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".

[harperlee]

> It's already demeaning to expect them to "learn an accent"

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.

[lo_zamoyski]

> It's already demeaning to expect them to "learn an accent"

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.

[kelvinjps10]

But accent and pronunciation are different things, and the fact that you don't have a particular accent doesn't mean that you don't speak the language well, what matter most is pronunciation. Sometimes it can get ridiculous like when Trump had a interpreter for a guy that was native in English but had an accent or that other leader from africa that Trump asked where he learned English when it was it's native language. Coming back to accent is different than pronunciation, in any English test like IELTS or Cambridge accent won't be qualified

[jhanschoo]

> But accent and pronunciation are different things [...]

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.

[jakelazaroff]

I don't think you need to go that deep. This technology is literally dehumanizing: it's replacing individual human aspects of someone's voice with a computer-generated facsimile.

[jhanschoo]

By that same argument, taken naively, film and video are dehumanizing, but not deplorably so: certainly the intensity of emotion and experience through film is far less present than say immersive theater, but we may be more comfortable with this modality, and also, benefit from the economies of scale.

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.

[fennecbutt]

And photos steal a person's soul? Or something like that.

[nunez]

It's mostly the "voice smoothing" part of this technology that I have morality issues with.

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...

[Cthulhu_]

For India, English is an official (government) language; it may not be their first but they're really good at it. But, heavily accented, not unlike other English native speakers, and the less exposure one has to the accent the harder it is to understand. (Americans will have trouble with British accents that aren't london too)

[adriand]

I went to Newfoundland and I went to a bar one night and met a guy from a small town along the coast and I literally couldn’t understand a single thing he said. He was apparently speaking English but it may have been Ancient Greek for all I was able to make out. The only way we could communicate was via the bartender, who would interpret what he said and tell me. He had no trouble understanding me. It kinda blew my mind.

[LoganDark]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs-rgvkRfwc

[ChoGGi]

Newfoundland

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u9eTOIGZkOI

[cassianoleal]

> heavily accented, not unlike other English native speakers

One could just as well argue the opposite position.

[torginus]

Dunno, a ton of UK born and raised people have accents so thick that I struggle to make out what they're saying.

[SkyeCA]

I am from a Canadian maritime province. I have had Americans (particularly from the south) who at least claimed they couldn't easily understand me, despite me understanding them just fine.

[bonesss]

I had a Newfie friend from a Newfie family growing up, all good no problem.

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.

[Bombthecat]

Agree!

I play destiny in a clan, most of them are from UK. I don't understand a single word from some of them...

[alberto467]

And i honestly don't think they would get hired for a call center job.

[triceratops]

> For India, English is an official (government) language; it may not be their first but they're really good at it. But, heavily accented, not unlike other English native speakers,

Not just accented. India has regional English accents. Some of my Indian colleagues have very different accents from others.

[Sophira]

On the one hand, I agree with you, and your reasoning is self-evident IMO.

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.

[crote]

Or perhaps you treat the customer support workers as humans instead of worker drones and give them the agency to terminate the call when they are getting abused, with the contracts of repeat offenders getting terminated?

[ffsm8]

> On the other, too many customers are complete racist dicks to people who they perceive as not "belonging to their country"

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.

[thedevilslawyer]

Would the cuwotmers also be willing to pay 2x the price for the product or service? These decisions do not happen in a vacuum.

[ffsm8]

What a strawman

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?

[throw0101c]

> Would the cuwotmers also be willing to pay 2x the price for the product or service?

Would the executives, especially the C-suite, be willing to make $8M instead of only $10M in salary and bonuses?

[aceofspades19]

You're making the assumption people with accents are necessarily foreign-based workers. You can be a US or Canadian citizen and have an accent. I worked in a call center in Canada servicing Americans, I was born in Canada and lived here my entire life and I can assure you I definitely sound canadian but customer still accused me of being located in India, a place I have never even visited. So I don't think customer opinions on the matter are 100% justified and fair.

[ffsm8]

> So I don't think customer opinions on the matter are 100% justified and fair.

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.

[ryandrake]

It's unlikely to be racism, since the customer likely has no idea what the representative's race / skin color is. OP's point was (I believe) that the customers he's talking about would not behave that way if the representative sounded sufficiently native to the customer's own nationality. "Xenophobic" might fit better.

[bearcobra]

I worked in call centres for Telus and Shaw. I’m a white guy from southern Ontario. I’ve had at least 100+ calls where a customer went on a racist tirade directed at me. I think you’re underestimating how much of a role racism plays

[frays]

Not sure why you're being downvoted but this is the truth if you live in a western country (probably other countries too but I have never lived outside of a non-Western country).

[mekoka]

I'm unclear as to where your outrage is directed. Is it that they give jobs offshore? Or rather that those who get them are now victim of their original accent not being heard by Canadians?

[fennecbutt]

But is it only dehumanising in the context of the western world and generally high migration numbers in that direction vs. the opposite direction?

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.

[furyofantares]

I think there can be a nuanced take here.

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.

[rexpop]

Literally the thesis of Sorry to Bother You (2018).

[hdndjsbbs]

Boots Riley is one of the most underrated American artists of our time. "I'm a Virgo" is also great if you haven't seen it.

[high_na_euv]

So, better if they have no jobs because of things that arent under their control?

Technology is supposed to make life easier and better

[al_borland]

Changing an accent doesn’t change the content the person on the other end receives it with. Most of my issues with overseas support is that they have no real context for my problem. It’s not just a language barrier, it’s a culture barrier.

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.

[Fogest]

The other issue is that this further incentivizes companies to off-shore their support. A lot of the reason companies don't use it comes back to the reputational style issue. Where people don't want to feel like they are getting crappy support and having to deal with not understanding people.

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.

[cik]

> The other issue is that this further incentivizes companies to off-shore their support

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.

[modo_mario]

It's wage suppression. Plain and simple.

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.

[charcircuit]

>Why is this a problem?

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.

[close04]

> It means that I get a lower quality service as I believe my people can do it better.

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.

[modo_mario]

>but they won't because they do it for the lowest possible salary

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.

[intended]

First off, I get the nationalist instinct. I don’t think it’s bad per se.

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.

[modo_mario]

> 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.

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.

[charcircuit]

I don't want an even playing field. I want my country to have the advantage. It shouldn't come down to a 50/50 coin toss whether to offshore or not because they are seen as equally expensive.

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.

[dlenski]

> If you believe in remote work, then why should it matter from where that work is delivered?

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.

[j45]

Some call centers do train on the cultural and society side of the places they serve.

Obviously not enough of them. Most are used to under-bidding and being stretched to take the lowest possible price.

[chistev]

Hey, J, I sent you an email.

[timcobb]

How unique are our problems? They have utilities, airlines, etc in India. Everything you'd talk to a support agent with is basically the same globally, and if not, can easily be explained to a person who hasn't been living in a yurt and burning yak dung for fuel; and tbh I think you could explain return processes to those folks as well.

[al_borland]

I’ve spent time in India, and while they have many of the same things, they sometimes operate very differently. I assume call centers don’t pay that much, so it’s very possible that while India has certain things, the people I’m talking to have limited access.

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.

[timcobb]

Right but it's not like they don't know about flying and can't be instructed and coached? I don't mean to me dismissive, maybe (quite possibly) things are more complicated than that, but ...? Like, okay when an Indian person is working for an Indian airline they're instructed "hey, here's the departures binder." But when they're hired by Lufthansa they get oriented using whatever system and processes are in place at that company. And "hey, don't be rude. To western people, here's what that means beyond what's intuitive to you." How does their previous experience with a binder mean they can't relate to you on a support call?

[balance006]

Spent the last year building a customer-facing AI agent for a Miami law firm with operations in Colombia. The accent question never came up in the build. The knowledge question came up constantly.

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.

[tehlike]

it all depends on their training. And with the churn i imagine they are getting, or the cost measures, it's usually not quite the same.

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.

[protocolture]

>Changing an accent doesn’t change the content the person on the other end receives it with. Most of my issues with overseas support is that they have no real context for my problem. It’s not just a language barrier, it’s a culture barrier.

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.

[idle_zealot]

Something seems very wrong with observing that people are shitty and terrible to each other and proposing interposing a machine between them to make communication bearable.

[DANmode]

It’s either that, or letting more people meet their demise for rudeness.

[duskdozer]

I suspect the main culprit here is company policy/choice resulting in angry callers. Not to say there aren't other factors, but people generally don't call companies because they're having a good time. If Telus is anything like American TV/phone/internet companies, then I'm even more convinced of this.

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.

[protocolture]

It would often happen to me mid escalation. The local SEA attendant escalating for the purposes of higher level technical support. Most calls like this the caller was relieved to be away from the level 1 support person.

[AussieWog93]

>Singaporeans hate Australian accents more than anyone over here hates indian accents.

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?

[protocolture]

I think its partially the australian reputation for being assholes overseas, and partly a sort of unionistic culture that tries to demand locals do everything to maximise employment. I got a similar vibe from people in the phillipines, just not to the same extent.

[pyuser583]

That may be true, but I find Australian accents the most beautiful.

[fragmede]

The stereotype is of Australians going over to Singapore for a holiday and being drunk and rude. It's a stereotype, but that's where that hate comes from.

[c7b]

I don't like it. It's inevitable, but no reason to cheer it on. I find it similar to Google Mail or YouTube autotranslating content without opt-in (and sometimes opt-out). It's continuing a trend of you can't really trust the content you see is the content someone else sees or what they sent. It says it only changes accents, soon it'll filter swear words and what else? The end game for the legal use of such tech is always injecting ads. And with this particular tech, we know that the legal uses will be a negligible fraction of the real uses.

[armchairhacker]

> The end game for the legal use of such tech is always injecting ads

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.

[QuantumGood]

Things I can do to help someone understand me are, generally, a net plus. Same for someone trying to help me understand them. But this has complicated effects, some surely unforseen.

[b112]

It's also going to be a landmine. First you can't force ToS on support calls, although I've seen companies try. If a company has charged you erroneously, for example, by no means do you have to adhere to their terms to resolve such an issue. The very notion is absurd, both ethically and legally, and no recorded message telling you so holds water.

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.

[torginus]

I don't love this - in a forum I frequent, there has been a surge of posts theat have a distinct LLM flavor to them. Some people have argued this is a good thing as it allows non-english speakers to participate in the discussion.

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)

[lukev]

You get calls about a new service or promotion, and it's the diction of the caller that makes you not wish to engage...?!

[philangist]

I believe this applies to a large segment of the population. Diction, tonality, and "vibe" have a big effect on how open recipients are to cold calls, at least according to my SDR friends.

OP likely just has more self-awareness than most in being able to be honest about it.

[bluefirebrand]

Personally I'm just not open to cold calls, period, ever. Not ever

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

[gwbas1c]

The problem with cold calls is that you expect random people to stop what they are doing and listen to an advertisement; often for something they don't want or need.

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.

[traceroute66]

> A lot of them speak English fluently

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.

[renegade-otter]

The first person that mentions anything about "the needful" with no accent is getting hung up on.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

[totetsu]

Japanese politicians and CEOs like talk about how AI and robotics will offset labor shortages. The xenophobe party goes so far as to say that this means there is no need to dilute the pure blood of japan, by offering any path to stable residency for foreign workers. But I think just as easily AI could serve to solve the real problems of integration and understanding from just accepting foreign workers. Of course this doesn't solve the imaginary race purity problems of the xenophobes.. But now I can see a path, where maybe they could just opt into some filter, where all foreign humanity and culture is just altered by AI to look like Japanese things, so they dont ever have to feel uncomfortable.

[henry2023]

Regardless of tech you can always improve your speech. I had a Japanese girlfriend who went through the process and 80% of the results where accomplished by learning the ~20 vowel sounds found in American english (vs her native 5 vowel sounds).

[newsclues]

I used to work in call centres for telcos in Canada.

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…

[beloch]

This is more likely about sales than customer service.

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.

[Marsymars]

I get a ton of calls from "Telus" and "Rogers" and just hang up on all of them - I have no idea how I'd be supposed to tell which are and which aren't scams.

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...

[Teever]

I hate to break it to you but like 60%+ of the time when someone is calling you claiming that they're from Telus/Rogers/Bell they actually aren't.

[mrweasel]

Personally I'm very suspicious of any company calling. These are businesses that have actively avoided any form of human to human contact in the past two decades, why would they suddenly want to call me?

[rkagerer]

This is a terrible idea, and I'm far from convinced it will improve clarity.

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?

[whh]

I'm Australian, I need this.

[kennywinker]

God forbid they hire canadians