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Comments (194)

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  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.
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  SkyeCA
  Telus is completely out of touch. The issue hasn't been the accents of most agents, at least not for years at this point, it's the horrendous quality microphones the agents are given and the noisy conditions they're forced to work in.It's hard to decipher anyone when you can hear 30 other people in the background and the audio is choppy.
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  gnabgib
  Original source (please submit): https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-telus-ai-ac...Related last year:AI Accent Conversion for call centers (48 points, 70 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43514141Call 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
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  dlenski
  While this is interesting and newsworthy, especially for those of us who live in Canada and have to deal with Canada’s Telco/Internet monopolies… this "article" itself appears to be a crappy LLM summary of some other piece of information.Anyone have the original source?
• Marsymars
  I had a particularly frustrating experience recently with a heavily accented customer service rep.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.
• throw0101c
  Accent training for call centres is a thing as well:* https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20160317-inside-the-sec...
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  wewewedxfgdf
  Doesn't matter.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.
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  sjtgraham
  I would rather speak an actual AI rather than an offshore operator using AI to disguise their accent.
• cyanf
  I had a strange call with a support rep recently.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.
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  LurkandComment
  Here's how its dehumanizing: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.
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  kelseydh
  Does anybody have a demo of this technology in use? I'm very curious to see how it sounds in practice. Uncanny or hyperrealistic?
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  b0ner_t0ner
  Startup is selling tech to make call center workers sound like white Americans (2022):https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32591709
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  Brajeshwar
  Oh! Dear Lord. I still want to hear my Indian friends speak Indian to me during Support Calls. These days, I’m hearing American accents trying to calm me down over my complaints on that excess masala in the idli-dosa-pav-bhaji butteerr-chicken combo in the El Camino Eatery in the outskirts of Jhalandar.
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  superkuh
  Comcast (Xfinity) is doing this too. I was absolutely convinced I was talking to an artificial voice but the human-like capabilities of that voice to respond were far beyond what I'd expect out of LLMs. I think it must have just been done to hide the accent.
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  worthless-trash
  I had 'accent neutralization' training as part of my hire for a US company in 2004. Americans could not understand my Australian accent. It still affected my accent to this day.
• caonidaye
  Usually the title goes: XXX uses AI to replace Call-Agents
• baq
  1) stop picking up the phone2) if that's not an option, have a pick-up-the-phone agent pick it up
• diego_moita
  Doesn't matter. Whenever Telus calls my standard answer is the call blocker.
• j45
  This will also let the telco further train agents to handle calls without the humans once enough scenarios are in place.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/educationascultu00carnIt feels like it bears some underpinning and contextual relevance.
• NickC25
  Sad. I think companies that have a near or quasi monopoly over regulated utilities should be banned from hiring cheap labor from developing countries.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.
• shevy-java
  Dagnabbit - I was so used to imagining Apu from Simpsons in callcenters. Now I have to deal with unknown language dialects of fake-AI-agents wasting my time ...Oldschool callcenters often had a human! Now I "interact" with AI ...
• anon
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• Ozzie-D
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• isaisabella
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• redsocksfan45
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• chris_explicare
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• anon
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  parpfish
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  ares623
  Like all things AI, this one's tricky.Scam calls sounding "more legitimate" because it passes the (unfortunately racist) filters most people have.
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  penguin_booze
  This is positive news, although my use-case is different. I've been looking for a tool that'll mask off the diarrhea of 'like', 'I mean', and 'you know' from some americans' speak. MEGA: Make English Great Again!