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guessmyname
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".
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.
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.
cassianoleal
> heavily accented, not unlike other English native speakers
One could just as well argue the opposite position.
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.
torginus
Dunno, a ton of UK born and raised people have accents so thick that I struggle to make out what they're saying.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
undefined
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.
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.
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?
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.
faangguyindia
[flagged]
al_borland
I did not use AI for the comment. AI usually does that at the start of a paragraph, not the end. I tacked it on the end to better clarify my actual point, as it required reading between the lines too much, which can be problematic on a forum.
yonatan8070
> It's not X, it's Y = AI pattern.
Yeah, a human has never used this pattern before! Good thing AI always leaves this digital signature which is never wrong, so you always know if the person on the other end has used AI.
Terr_
FFS enough with these goddamn witch-hunt anti-shibboleths. It is neither reliable nor clever nor funny.
—Some human that actually uses em-dashes
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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=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
gomoboo
Refreshed gift link: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/ac7e9825b17af566d8cdb52...
altairprime
Email the mods and they can change the link
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.
Marsymars
Not Telus, but I was getting an insurance quote last week and actually gave up after five minutes and told the agent they were just too difficult to understand with their poor microphone and background noise.
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?
cormorant
Source publications cited in first sentence but not linked. https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/2026/05/05/telus-uses-ai-to-ch... , https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-telus-ai-ac...
duskdozer
It also has a lot of annoying vibecoded UX smells.
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.
patall
Spammers are probably not targeting you. Like the obvious comma and spelling mistakes in spam emails that are there to weed out the smart people that are much harder to scam, this also serves as a filter to get only the most vulnerable people.
walrus01
Don't tell the call spammers this or they'll train all their "agents" to start phone calls with "what's up, bro" or something they think is the stereotypical opposite of formal.
tehlike
"Good morning, am i speaking with Mr. xxx" is how most formal stuff happens with me in the US.
serf
it's a huge red flag for me if I hear that without an origin.
"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)
Mistletoe
I’d actually be entertained by this.
sjtgraham
I would rather speak an actual AI rather than an offshore operator using AI to disguise their accent.
mrweasel
The problem with almost all call centers is that their "agents" aren't given any agency. They can attempt to convince you that your bill is actually correct, or escalade our issue to technical support, which may or may not get back to you. I don't see how any amount of AI will fix the complete lack of trust that many companies seems to have in their agents, regardless of them being software or humans.
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.
allthetime
I prefer neither
throw0101c
Accent training for call centres is a thing as well:
* https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20160317-inside-the-sec...
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.
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.
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?
ing33k
https://www.sanas.ai/#playground check the Accent Translation section
maxrmk
I ran into this (or a similar service) when cancelling comcast a few weeks ago. It worked _really_ well. It was slightly uncanny, but I think most people wouldn’t notice anything. It was only some awkward phrasing that made it obvious to me.
DANmode
Curious: How could you differentiate it from a foreign-educated English-speaking human?
jorisw
I wonder about latency especially. Does the AI wait for sentences to finish?
14
Found a video from a couple years back using this tech. Wasn't Telus in the video but they demonstrated it and the change was subtle but definitely noticable. See how it was 2 years old I am certain the technology has greatly improved since that time.
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.
skinfaxi
Who said it wasn't dehumanizing? I didn't get that takeaway from the limited article.
LurkandComment
In the comments.
b0ner_t0ner
Startup is selling tech to make call center workers sound like white Americans (2022):
stingraycharles
That’s a significantly more rage-bait-y title. As a foreigner myself that deals with customers all over the world, it’s sometimes genuinely difficult to understand people with thick accents. You get better at it when you’re exposed to the same accents frequently, but you still have awkward moments where the other person has to repeat themselves several times (or worse, a colleague taking over), which just makes everyone feel bad. This happens often in video calls as well.
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.
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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.