Call Centers Using AI To 'Whiten' Indian Accents 136
The world's biggest call center company is using artificial intelligence to "neutralise" Indian accents for Western customers. From a report: Teleperformance said it was applying real-time AI software on phone calls in order to increase "human empathy" between two people on the phone. The French company's customers in the UK include parts of the Government, the NHS, Vodafone and eBay.
Teleperformance has 90,000 employees in India and tens of thousands more in other countries. It is using software from Sanas, an American company that says the system helps "build a more understanding world" and reduces miscommunication. The company's website says it makes call center workers more productive and means customer service calls are resolved more quickly. The company also says it means call center workers are less likely to be abused and customers are less likely to demand to speak to a supervisor. It is already used by companies including Walmart and UPS.
Teleperformance has 90,000 employees in India and tens of thousands more in other countries. It is using software from Sanas, an American company that says the system helps "build a more understanding world" and reduces miscommunication. The company's website says it makes call center workers more productive and means customer service calls are resolved more quickly. The company also says it means call center workers are less likely to be abused and customers are less likely to demand to speak to a supervisor. It is already used by companies including Walmart and UPS.
If you say 'kindly' or 'do the needful' (Score:2, Insightful)
I am hanging up on you.
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Isn't rephrasing those part of the honkification algorithm? If not, someday will be.
I'm waiting for the sexy accent help-desk voice, like in the original Trek episode where the time refugee heard the glitched tone and said, "You people have interesting problems in the future" (paraphrased).
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Thank you for the word "honkification." It gave me a momentary giggle, which is better than most Slashdot comments.
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"Actually"
"Do the needful"
"Please intimate on the same"
"Triple tree" (supposed to be "triple three")
"kindly"
"kind sir / lady"
Those are off the top of my head. Plenty more that I just can't recall right now.
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what's your problem with actually?
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It's misused, a lot.
"Hello, I need to reset my password".
"Actually, what is your account ID?"
"The service is down. Could you please provide a timeline to restore it?"
"Actually, let me check that for you, sir".
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Hmmm... I often use "actually" in these contexts, or very similar ones.
I'm not from India, BTW.
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"revert" argh
Re: If you say 'kindly' or 'do the needful' (Score:2)
My native vocabulary is more like:
"Goddamn" (for example: Goddamn this flag on my truck is beautiful)
"Fucked" (universal diagnostic catchall - unfortunely nothing shows up in the knowledge base search)
"Literally" (for metaphorical emphasis)
"Actually" (when I explain something to a woman)
Please share your Americanisms. Of course, if you're American then I don't need to ask, since you will tell me anyway.
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I'm not. As a matter of fact, English isn't my native language.
On the other hand, I've been working with people from India since early 2000s. I know them very well.
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Y'all kindly do the needful, ya hear?
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Better than demanding to speak to a supervisor.
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Phrasing isn't the problem. The problems are 1) inability to pronounce English words properly, 2) barking dogs, and 3) screaming children in the background. The other problem is that they work for a company with 18 clients, and they sit too closely together and don't have sound-deadening furniture....if they're in an office at all.
Re: If you say 'kindly' or 'do the needful' (Score:5, Insightful)
You're missing the point -- making non-native speakers more intelligible to native speakers is racist. It's a form of white nationalism or fascism or something because English is apparently white, which means it's bad. You see, the more either party can understand what each other is saying, the more white and racist the world has become.
This has all been proven. Some physicists wrote a whi... -- ahem -- wrote a paper on it:
https://journals.aps.org/prper... [aps.org]
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You're missing the point -- making non-native speakers more intelligible to native speakers is racist. It's a form of white nationalism or fascism or something because English is apparently white, which means it's bad. You see, the more either party can understand what each other is saying, the more white and racist the world has become.
Oh gawd, that link. The writers do not understand physics, but they are at 500 level in internalized racism - they just forgot that if you judge by skin color, you are a true racist. And their paper drips with it. And racism lives rent free in their heads, so they see everything as race. Except themselves.
But for all the racists in here...
A person's voice has nothing to do with their skin color. It has everything to do with where they grew up.
A person of dark skin color born and raised in Great Britai
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Actually, it's a strictly business decision. Businesses which implement this don't care about either race relations or empathy. They just want to decrease headaches and increase productivity, and they can't be blamed for that.
Re: If you say 'kindly' or 'do the needful' (Score:2)
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Sure they can. They just chose not to.
I'm not completely certain who you were replying to, but a person's voice is not an indication of their "race". Of course, race, being the ultimate social construct, using negligible genetic variations to declare normal homo sapiens sapiens as "the other" makes for a lot of racists - ironically many of whom declare themselves "inclusive"
What people who use call centers are looking for is to understand what they are being told. And if say, you are talking to a man of Indian heritage that grew up in the US
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Phrasing isn't the problem. The problems are 1) inability to pronounce English words properly, 2) barking dogs, and 3) screaming children in the background. The other problem is that they work for a company with 18 clients, and they sit too closely together and don't have sound-deadening furniture....if they're in an office at all.
+5 Insightful
I'm pretty good with accents. I get the patterns where certain phonemes are pronounced differently than I'm used to. That just doesn't work so well when the other person has a defective headset, is (apparently) attending a bull-fighting match, and is coming to me on a VoIP link that's compressed onto a 1200bps link. There's just too much distortion for me to make out the sounds they're making to transform them into the sounds I'm expecting.
When your job is phone support, work-from-home m
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Cajuns are by far the worst.
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I have more problems understanding an Irish brogue. Cajuns are by far the worst.
Many years ago when I worked as a field tech for cable TV, I was paired with a lineman from Alabama with a very heavy southern accent. And I'm a yinzer. It was a comedy with us trying to understand each other. After a few weeks, we worked it out, and turns out that we started aggregating our own accents.
Thank you. Come again. (Score:3)
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I'm looking forward to hearing "please do the needful" in an American accent.
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The phrase is actually pretty great. I mean, you imagine you are just done dealing with someone and just tell them, "Okay now, just do the needful."
If only we could capture the look on callers face when told this. Be a great reality tv show.
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So, just what the fuck does "do the needful" even mean?
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I tried to make a campground reservation in West Virginia in 1995 and got the response, "OK, but it's not needful." It was new to me at the time but so apt that I adopted it thenceforth. The clerk was an all-American young woman, not someone who had brought a foreign phrase in from abroad.
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The clerk was an all-American young woman
How did you know that? Was she obese or perhaps you asked her?
Re: Thank you. Come again. (Score:2)
All signs point to meth.
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I have a doubt, as I got to know about this today only. But do one thing, say it with a southern drawl. Rest is fine.
I feel ashamed to say this, and it seems racist. (Score:3)
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The headline is racist, the actual content is not.
It's not about "whiteness" at all, just about reducing the friction caused by people in one country, not understanding the accent of people in another country. The improvement in understanding goes both ways, and has nothing to do with skin tone.
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Less to do with his race and more to do with him being a script monkey who will get fired if he goes off track. The chatty nature of it is some corporate idea of a "friendly" service.
In other words (Score:2)
Another layer of abstraction to assist in jerking the customer around.
It's not about skin color (Score:4, Interesting)
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I came to the conclusion that T-Mobile customer support in India does not have the ability to do anything, even if they genuinely want to. It's not their fault and I feel sorry for them.
After dozens of failed calls, I filed a complaint with the FCC. Then a white guy from T-Mobile corporate called me and the problem was fixed.
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I came to the conclusion that T-Mobile customer support in India does not have the ability to do anything, even if they genuinely want to. It's not their fault and I feel sorry for them.
After dozens of failed calls, I filed a complaint with the FCC. Then a white guy from T-Mobile corporate called me and the problem was fixed.
In point of fact, he could also have been Hispanic, black, or Asian and you might not have known. Race is the one thing that's not at play here, contrary to the racist headline.
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How do you know he was white?
Re: It's not about skin color (Score:2)
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Sophistry, aka strawman. Don't feed them, brother.
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The problem is that Indian call centers are, 99% of them, guaranteed to consist entirely of people who have no power to do anything but read a script and take you through a predictable flow chart.
That and:
- Extreme lack of accountability. Chances are they're using a fake name and the call center is a subcontractor. Good luck being able to report the failure of customer service, and any request to escalate will just get you the runaround (likely while they say some insulting things in their local languag
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The problem is that Indian call centers are, 99% of them, guaranteed to consist entirely of people who have no power to do anything but read a script and take you through a predictable flow chart. Cheaping out like this and then calling me racist for not liking it is the worst kind of sophestry.
The problem with your statement is that 99% of call centers everywhere in the world are like that. Therefore calling Indian call centers out for it and acting like you've made a useful argument against them is nationalism at best, and quite possibly racism. I don't know which applies to you and don't care frankly, because both are fallacious and the difference is uninteresting once that's established.
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Whiten? Seriously? The problems I have with Indian technical support go far beyond their accent, and I don't give a flip where they live. The problem is that Indian call centers are, 99% of them, guaranteed to consist entirely of people who have no power to do anything but read a script and take you through a predictable flow chart. Cheaping out like this and then calling me racist for not liking it is the worst kind of sophestry.
I abhor racism (and most forms of bigotry)... You've a point and it's got fuck all to do with race. The decision to run a call centre like this was likely made by white American (or European) businessmen anyway and it wouldn't matter if they were staffed exclusively people people with a mid-atlantic accent or received pronunciation.
Trying to alter the accent won't help one bit as there are plenty of places that can produce a cleaner accent like the Philippines (where English is widely spoken). The proble
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I once had to deal with one of those call centers. The Indian dude had a near perfect Texan accent. Blew my mind. Was just as unhelpful as someone with an Indian accent, but it was at least novel.
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This. And it's not new and not specific to India, just more visible on a larger scale.
Many, many years back I had issues with my DSL connection, back when DSL was brand-new and the only reason I had one at home was that the company ordered and paid for it so I could wake up at night and babysit the servers if something went south.
Anyways, after a while I knew their script, and I could answer all their questions before they even asked them.
One night, when I was particularly unhappy about being up, I called t
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I second that and also have another issue. I've called several times about how a company violated their own terms of service and only get lip service from call-center people who have zero authority to do anything.
I'm in IT and work with lots if Indian people and we communicate fine. Sometimes when I have to call some 800# for support, I get an Indian person with such a thick accent that I really can't understand half of what they say. I'm not trying to be difficult and just want my problem addressed, but it
Ask to speak to supervisor (Score:3)
This typically happens after I tell the call center I've already reset the router multiple times, along with checking drivers and ensuring the internet connection to the router is good, and then the call center starts at the beginning of the list with resetting power to the router. When your call center person knows less about the device I'm trying to debug than I do, and I'm calling you to make sure it is time to return the device that is still under warranty, though honestly I gave up on even calling the 1-800 number for most devices a long time ago.
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So the future will consist primarily of AI vs. Karen?
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So the future will consist primarily of AI vs. Karen?
If expecting the call centers to know more than what is written on the instruction booklet is being Karen, I will Karen it up in here!
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I so hate jerk mode, but there is only so many times you can tell them it is dead and does not work.
A defense (Score:3)
Like any accent the Indian accent can be difficult if you are not routinely communicating with people who have a strong Indian accent. In that respect such a tool could be good idea. If I call for tech support I don't care where they are from, I only care if they can solve my problem. If I can't understand what they are saying they can't help me, regardless of how skilled they are.
Interesting it can be English speakers that have the most trouble with English speakers of other countries, whereas people who have English as a second language can often handle different types of English accent better. In my case my New Zealand accent has been a problem ordering fast food in America. If I ask for a cheese burger can't you guess what I want? How many things on the menu do you have that sound similar to what you hear me saying? So I end up putting on this horrible false American accent to be understood. That helps but is feels like I am mocking the way they speak. On the other hand in countries like Ukraine and China they have been able to guess what I wanted fine. I think instead of expecting an exact match they try and guess the closet sounding thing on the menu.
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If I ask for a cheese burger can't you guess what I want? How many things on the menu do you have that sound similar to what you hear me saying?
To be fair, over those garbled remote speakers, "cheese burger" can easily be heard as "please finger". Depending on your preferences, the results can be catastrophic...
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True story: At one burger place that was not busy the staff member called over the other staff to hear my accent. Apparently they liked it, but it was a weird experience.
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I'm a programmer. At this point I can understand an Indian accent better than an American one.
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I think part is the problem with Americans struggling to understand Indian accents is that Indians generally think they speak English perfectly and as a result don't bother to speak clearly or slow down. In contrast, many other non-Americans know that their English is not that good, so they over-enunciate and slow down, which can help to mitigate their accents.
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Accents can really be a problem. I once went to the UK and France with my boss. I had to "interpret" English for him while in the UK, but he understood French people's English with no issues. He wasn't trying to be a jerk or anything, he really just couldn't understand what they were asking him when we did things like checking into the hotel, airport interactions, and ordering food.
I called my health plan help line... (Score:3)
Is AI going to take that out too?
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Great. Now I have Alice in Chains playing in my head.
I certainly hope AI's coming to snuff the rooster.
This is the solution? (Score:3)
I know I've had some issues understanding folks who are obviously in India when on the phone. Not only do you have to deal with the accent, often extremely thick, but there's also the fact that the line between us introduces enough noise that it sounds like they're in a submarine, speaking through the old kid's string and can telephone over a distance of seventy meters with a hurricane force wind in between us. If we could clean that up, it would also be helpful to at least *start* the communication on the right foot.
Or, and I know this is gonna sound absolutely batshit fucking insane to business decision makers, but I'll say it anyway, perhaps it would be a good idea to target phone oriented support agents to the area they will be providing service. Since I'm ostensibly speaking to business owners, let me simplify that down to something understandable by the "make it a pretty chart, please," crowd: Hire in-country support people for the phones. If someone is desperate enough to call phone support in this day and age, the last thing you want to do is piss them off by immediately shuffling it off to someone that isn't comfortable with the language they're speaking and is hard enough to understand even if they were standing face to face, then adding on that you cheaped the fuck out on comm lines and are making it sound like 1950s AM radio through the worst battery powered receiver you could imagine.
"Whiten"? (Score:2)
How about just "render the voice understandable to the target audience"?
I mean, I don't think that black Americans, say, are necessarily any better at understanding Maninder ... I mean Bob ... from India either.
Indians can't understand themselves either (Score:3, Interesting)
How about just "render the voice understandable to the target audience"?
I mean, I don't think that black Americans, say, are necessarily any better at understanding Maninder ... I mean Bob ... from India either.
If your accent is thick enough, no one can understand you. I work with a LOT of Indians and they don't understand our coworkers any better than we do when their accent is thick enough....not to mention that many Indians don't really think India should be 1 nation....it's a mashup of lots of languages and cultures and backgrounds with little in common beyond brown skin and being conquered by the English at some point.
So yeah, there's no guarantee someone from Sikkim or Uttar Pradesh can understand someon
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I am learning Spanish and my accent is atrocious...I don't make it about race when someone from Mexico says "you suck at this....let's just speak in English because your Spanish SUUUUUCKS and no one has any fucking clue what you're trying to say"...I just accept that there are correct ways of pronouncing words and I need to do better if I want it to not be struggle for someone to understand what I am saying.
No one would say they're "giving my accent a tan"...just correcting my horrible pronunciation and tendency to pronounce words with American English vowels and consonants instead of Spanish ones.
I've been learning Spanish for the last 10 years... I may even have got some of it.
The Spanish and Latinos tend to be very kind and forgiving when you're speaking Spanish, a lot of people are just glad you can and are generally quite kind when correcting it (especially compared to say, the English correcting English)
I was recently told in Alicante (Spain) that my Spanish was Basque (a different part of Spain I'd never been to). Most of the people I speak Spanish to are Paisa (from Antioqua, Colombia)
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How about just "render the voice understandable to the target audience"?
That will require additional AI to liberalize the language.
accent please (Score:2)
can we pick the accent? sexy french?
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The Merovingian: "I have sampled every language, French is my favourite - fantastic language, especially to curse with. Nom de Dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperies de connards d'enculé de ta mère. It's like wiping your arse with silk, I love it."
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This curse is incredibly boring, compared to some Serbian or Greek ones.
It could work both ways, too (Score:2)
AI could give all us Americans an Indian accent when we call in.
Honestly, that probably helps both sides of the call.
I work in tech, so I'm used to pretty much all the accents. But my 80+ year old mom with hearing aids - who for decades taught English as a second language at our local library - now has a *terrible* time understanding people with accents. It was rough even in person during COVID, because she lost all visual cues under masks.
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Precisely, I see this as a good use for AI.
Re: It could work both ways, too (Score:2)
If people who basically speak the same language are too lazy to adapt to each other then we probably should give up on language entirely, just have AI translate series of grunts and gestures.
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When you speak with a person from India, perhaps a coworker or someone you meet locally, do you change your accent to match theirs? Are you "too lazy" to adapt to their accent? What makes your accent better than theirs? This goes both ways, assuming that they should adapt their accent to match ours, is at least bigoted, if not racist.
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Why don't we just bring call centers for US help desk issues....BACK to the US using US citizens to handle the calls?
It wasn't that long ago this was the norm and no one complained.
The simple answer is the best.....maybe we someone put tariffs on offshore help desks?
“Whiten”? (Score:2)
So, this is just a phrase for “Making Indian accents sound North-American” right? Because everyone in North-America is “white”, and everyone in India is “brown” I guess?
“Neutralize” is also silly. Everyone perceives whatever accent he grew up with as the most neutral one.
Won't be long (Score:2)
Coming to a scammer near you! (Score:2)
This is going to be great. Now it will be even harder to tell if the person asking for my bank login is a scammer.
Think of the possibilities! (Score:2)
Every caller can be matched with a voice that suits their racism best.
The caller is a man with a black American accent? "Hey, my brother. How can I assist you today?"
Does that black American male not like other black Americans and treat them poorly? Make a profile of every caller, and then feed them different races until they're happy with what they get.
A southern white American? "Hey, massa. How can I be assisting yous today?"
When I call phone sex, I want a Vietnamese woman. When I call tech support,
can they remove the accents? (Score:2)
I have had Indian call center operators have such thick accents that I can't understand them over their garbage connection. If the accents can be removed so that I can understand them, that will remedy my complaint and I won't care what nationality they are just like I don't now. I only care whether I can understand what they are saying.
Why not just (Score:2)
... have the AI do the tech support?
It's not the accent. (Score:2)
The accent has nothing to do with it. It's the attitude. There's an attitude in some cultures where people pretend not to understand you when they don't want to do something for you. It's a form of gaslighting. Blame the language barrier on the customer so they will go away in frustration.
It's not the accent, it's the incompetence (Score:2)
Look, I don't give a shit where your call center is, and I can handle pretty much all but the borderline unintelligible accents.
Whether it's Ramesh in Chittagong or Melinda in Kansas or LaQueesha from Atlanta: if they can answer, competently respond, and help me, that's all that matters.
If had examples of people with no English accent be completely useless, and people I wasn't even sure they were always speaking English but who were clearly trying their best to help and occasionally are great.
I would say if
Neutralise (Score:2)
Like it was a disease... Well...
Incomprehensible (Score:2)
Whenever I get an expected call from a legitimate company and there's an Indian on the other side of the wire, I always ask to be transfered to someone with a native English accent. "Sorry 'John', but I've got a slight hearing impairment and I simply do not have the technical capacity to understand what you're saying well enough to get the job done.".
Is it real time or not? (Score:2)
Why bother? (Score:2)
This is fraud. (Score:2)
Just Use Real-Time Translation (Score:2)
"Whiten" ?! (Score:2)
Since when does the color of your skin affect your accent.
Sack the racist writer and replace with "Anglicize" or "Americanize"
Could this tech be adapted to... (Score:2)
...voice-controlled elevators in Scotland?
Soon to be adopted by phone scammers (Score:2)
I've already seen scam baiters using voice altering software so how long before scammers start doing it?
Anything but... (Score:2)
...hiring Americans, and paying decent wages.
lipstick (Score:2)
Lipstick on a pig. These guys are generally awful. They think they can replace competence with obsequiousness.
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From afar, I'd like to see the results of the world needing India.
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Literally nothing would be lost
I don't know about that... they might miss all the racists.
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You do know Indians in India tend to be extremely racist and have a dedicated word for how it's codified, right?
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A friend of mine once went to Chennai on a business trip and according to him the locals always treated him with politeness and respect. He is about ten shades lighter than these locals, according to my estimation.
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A friend of mine once went to Chennai on a business trip and according to him the locals always treated him with politeness and respect. He is about ten shades lighter than these locals, according to my estimation.
India is much like the rest of SE Asia, outwardly polite but inwardly very bigoted. It wouldn't just be Indians vs foreigners, it'll be a huge hierarchy of locals and people from other parts of India and then certain locals over other kinds of locals. The Caste system hasn't even been gone that long and it's remnants still hang around. You'd be a fool to think they've forgotten who was Brahma and who was Dalit.
Another thing is that the concept of face, appearing to be proper is more important than being
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One final thing, they're culturally incapable of saying no... so it's an exercise for the listener to determine if they mean "yes I can" or "yes I can't". "No" is the rudest thing you can say in India.
Interesting. This might be related to a similar phenomenon in much of the Islamic world, including Pakistan, where they say "Inshallah" (G-d willing) instead of "it won't happen [anytime soon]".
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People would notice cutting Linux off very quickly. Most of the internet runs on Linux and its derevatives.
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Melon 2028?
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How do you "whiten" this? (and I am aware this has nothing to do with India)
It's you, how are you gentleman
Good day, ladies and gentlemen.
All your base are belong to us
Per contractual clause C, sub-clause B, paragraph D, little letter A, I now own you.
You are on the way to destruction
Renegotiation is no longer possible due to the fact that you will no longer exist in short order.
All your base are belong to us
As previously stated, and reinforced by contractual obligation, I now own you.
You are on the way to destruction
Prepare for your business to be concluded post-haste, and the controlling entity to be wound-down as quickly as is feasible.
All your base are belong to us
Resistance is futile.
Speaking of which, Space 1999 used that line *DECADES* before Star Trek got a