The AI startup erasing call center worker
accents: is it fighting bias – or perpetuating it?
Guardian [U.K.],
by
Wilfred Chan
Original Article
Posted By: Ribicon,
8/24/2022 1:14:09 PM
Hi, good morning. I’m calling in from Bangalore, India.” I’m talking on speakerphone to a man with an obvious Indian accent. He pauses. “Now I have enabled the accent translation,” he says. It’s the same person, but he sounds completely different: loud and slightly nasal, impossible to distinguish from the accents of my friends in Brooklyn. Only after he had spoken a few more sentences did I notice a hint of the software changing his voice: it rendered the word “technology” with an unnatural cadence and stress on the wrong syllable. Still, it was hard not to be impressed–and disturbed.
The man calling me was a product manager from Sanas,
Reply 1 - Posted by:
red1066 8/24/2022 1:29:44 PM (No. 1257936)
I wonder if Disney had a hand in the development of this software? They've been in the forefront of replacing American workers with foreigners for decades.
7 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
Christopher L 8/24/2022 1:34:37 PM (No. 1257943)
What wonderful piece of technology. Now, when they call offering to extend my auto warranty or lower the interest rate on my credit card, I won't be able to instantly know they are scammers. /not
5 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
Gina 8/24/2022 1:41:45 PM (No. 1257953)
I called the number for corporate Kroger's grocery store because they charged my card for something I didn't purchase. I could not understand the woman -- her voice was muffled. I told the woman I could not understand her and asked if she was talking into the phone. Then I heard a child in the background. Anyway, it was frustrating. I don't know what was going on. Was she calling from a foreign country? We only have Kroger stores (since Marsh groceries went out of business) and Kroger is terrible.
7 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
MOBeef4u 8/24/2022 2:08:25 PM (No. 1257975)
Renewing XM subscription every year requires a foray into unintelligible accent land. And then there was the time a rooster was crowing in the background…work from home?
8 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
Vesicant 8/24/2022 2:32:28 PM (No. 1257998)
An accent means two things -- first, you can't understand what they're saying, and second, you know they won't understand what you're trying to tell them. Customer disservice is bad enough without dealing with calls being routed via Pluto to a third-world country just to hear somebody doing a garbled reading from a script. Accent correcting software might fix the first problem, but not all the others.
4 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
kono 8/24/2022 2:32:34 PM (No. 1257999)
Why do we seem increasingly to be penalized for brilliant innovations? I'm not sure whom to blame, though - the authoritarian Socialists (whose morality is defined by their own will), the greedy Capitalists (whose morality is defined by profit margin and growth), or the arrogant techies who care about only whether something can be done, not whether it should be done.
4 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
PCMM 8/24/2022 2:56:41 PM (No. 1258027)
Having spent 25 years in healthcare, I absolutely despise the Indians encountered in both admin and patient care. They are the most arrogant and hateful people towards Americans in the US healthcare community and no other group even comes close.
7 people like this.
Conversely, I called Sunrun yesterday and was connected to someone who sounded like the girl next door but turned out to be in Manila, and while many Filipinos (Filipina, in this case) speak fluent English she had absolutely no trace of an accent. Very courteous, too. I was sure to compliment her.
2 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
DVC 8/24/2022 6:45:57 PM (No. 1258258)
It's NOT "AI", it's just programming. "AI" is the latest fraudulent tech buzzword, so everyone has to claim it. ALL are lies.
1 person likes this.
I not biased against Asian call centers, but I have a hard time understanding their accents and oftentimes they use idiomatic catch phrases which are irrelevant and distracting. They also have the habit of repeating what has just been said by me but with their strange accent... which is REALLY annoying. Finally, half the time they can't help you and they know it before they begin the conversation. The call centers just want to take calls and get paid for answering them, not necessarily being helpful at all.
1 person likes this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
kono 8/25/2022 5:46:54 PM (No. 1259231)
#9 makes a relevant point about AI, which is a general term given to evoke thoughts of living machines, smarter than people, and serving our needs. The closest thing to AI in use today are still just "expert systems" that use sets of rules that are populated by "experts" in particular areas of expertise, linked together in a manner that tries to mimic the decisions made by such "experts".
There are a few discrete projects that have tried to build systems that simulate learning, aiming to reach a critical mass of sorts to ignite some kind of self awareness, to varying degrees of success. But most of them have barely sniffed their goal, and none of them is likely to achieve it.
0 people like this.
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What could be more gloriously American than enabling the replacement of American workers with foreigners who work for a fraction of the price? It falls just short of slave labor, but it's a cost-cutting measure necessary to maintain those stratospheric top executive salaries and perks while the rest of us tighten our belts.