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.
One could just as well argue the opposite position.
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.
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.
One of my cousins works for a call center from the Philippines - or used to, anyway. He would comment on how callers would ask to immediately be escalated to a manager upon hearing his accent despite speaking perfectly fluent - even native proficiency - English.
It's hard to describe how this affects your self-esteem and self concept, especially when it gets to the point where Filipinos will actively practice out any trace of their accent to sound as white as possible. You are now altering your identity in order to appease some racist shithead overseas and fit into their projection of what the world ought to look and sound like.
My mother was proud of the fact that she had "no accent" and laboured for years to make that the case. Contrariwise I consider this cultural genocide and the erasure of an entire people's way of speech.
Just goes to show how fucking full of shit Canadians are when they parade around their "commitment to diversity and inclusion." Orwellian lies and lip service, from both Telus for enacting these measures, and the callers who presumably spurred Telus to take this action.
Are they adjusting their tagalog accent too or so?
Either way. Consider how it feels elsewhere where the majority of such calls are not anywhere close to "native proficiency" English,...or Dutch or German or what have you and it's instead thick accents to the point you end up making your grandparents calls for them. It also doesn't help when they don't understand already suppressed and half erased local dialects/accents of the region they're servicing. Which indeed contributes to "erasure of an entire people's way of speech"
It also doesn't help that these people are often on the other side of the goddamn world and have usually a lot lot less tie-in to the company (if they even work directly for it) than when you get someone local on the line. I remember having to call one such company half a dozen times to get someone to understand that: no i was not the 1000th regular customer using one of their devices but wanted to make software that connects to it and had questions about their dev kit. It was the most infuriating experience figuring out again and again whether they couldn't understand the words i was using or just couldn't grasp that someone had a question that was unusual and didn't fit the scripts that they seemed to try to pull back to. In the end i had to weasel my way into the dm's of someone i once met working there who then immediately connected me to someone at the right department.
And everyone is abjectly aware that all this is just local companies outsourcing and suppressing wages.
What the fuck does this have to do with accents?
Are you Canadian or something? Your entire comment is just tantamount to a defence of racism.
White first world workers doing a job, often with lower intensity and workload, yet higher wages than overseas workers,is the definition of structural racism and white privilege. If Canadians are getting outpriced by hard working Filipinos overseas, that just means Canadians are not competitive in the labour market. Any attempt to correct this fact is a market distortion and artificial advantaging of your own nation over others - i.e. racism.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Obviously not enough of them. Most are used to under-bidding and being stretched to take the lowest possible price.
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.
—Some human that actually uses em-dashes
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)
OP likely just has more self-awareness than most in being able to be honest about it.
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
Anyone have the original source?
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.
"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)
Nearly all calls i get go to voicemail by default, it's been a great filter with its voice transcription!
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
Is this actually a thing? (Translating to American, it's the culinary equivalent of crepe-pizza-burger-clam chowder.)
That said, Sarvam, Gnani, and a number of other Indian AI companies are working on dialect aware TTS for localization usecases.
a sweet korma, or a vindaloo are my most favorite.
2) if that's not an option, have a pick-up-the-phone agent pick it up
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/educationascultu00carn
It feels like it bears some underpinning and contextual relevance.
Oldschool callcenters often had a human! Now I "interact" with AI ...
Modifying sensory inputs is going to become more of a thing for sure. The modification I want is smarter noise cancelling. The modification I'll probably get is something more dystopian and adversarial.
My current company is global and while everyone can speak English well sometimes accents make it almost impossible to communicate.
My current company is global
Scam calls sounding "more legitimate" because it passes the (unfortunately racist) filters most people have.
I realized quickly how it was changing my thinking process to devote so much to each word.