[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.

[close04]

> And that lowest possible salary is so low because we allow for wage suppression tactics such as this.

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.

[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.

[intended]

> I don't want an even playing field. I want my country to have the advantage.

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.

[close04]

> they are seen as equally expensive

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.

[clapthewind]

Putting it politely, I think you may have xenophobic tendency. And for all your buster, I suggest you work on having a more sane world view.

[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.