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.
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.
> 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.
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?
It's mostly the "voice smoothing" part of this technology that I have morality issues with.
This isn't any different from (usually white) teachers telling (usually black) kids to "speak better" simply because they consider the way they speak "wrong." Or, since TELUS is in Canada, like the Residential school system [^0] that their First People were forced to attend that did the same thing.
I believe that your voice makes you _you_. Taking that away because some people have trouble understanding dialects is literally taking away a foundational piece of one's humanity.
It's also a slippery slope: what's there to stop companies that do this from going straight to making everyone sound like a collection of voice profiles? Such a move would only make it easier to justify gutting customer service departments entirely.
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".
> It's already demeaning to expect them to "learn an accent"
The concept of an accent is broad, but at least part of it you need to learn together with the language, as speaking a non-native language with a thick accent is partly based on the fact that you have yet to learn.
Without being exhaustive, things that might fall into the "speaks with an accent" concept in this thread:
- Prosody. Prosody can vary per region but a distinctly alien prosody to a language is a barrier for the receptor of the message, that expects a given language and a range of prosodies. E.g. as I know french quite well, hearing english with a heavy french accent makes my brain try to understand what's being said as said in french, and interferes a lot.
- Sound shifts for particular phonemes. While some of it might be local to the language in certain registers (idea --> /ide"er"/, three --> /free/), others are clearly issues in the target language pronunciation (eg. japanese people having trouble with the l phoneme, spanish people adding an /e/ sound prior to an s-mobile, or v versus b for spanish people also).
- Connected speech. Where do you end words, how do you omit sounds, etc. Also massive hindrance to understanding.
- Grammar. Alien grammar is a hindrance to communication. You need to learn that.
> It's already demeaning to expect them to "learn an accent"
Uh, what? Excuse me?
The purpose of spoken language is communication. Accents can frustrate or enhance communication. In this case, conforming to the accent of the client enhances communication, because it is what the client is familiar with.
You do realize that the obligations of service are on the agent, right? It is the agent, as representative of the company providing a service, who is serving the client. If the aim of an agent is to assist a client, then using an accent that is more intelligible to the client is part of serving them.
You might as well claim that - given that language is part of culture - learning to speak another language at all is "pretending" that you're from a different culture. It's a ridiculous take.
> It is dehumanising to any person that their own human voice is no longer heard when performing a job involving human contact.
What does this even mean? What is your "own human voice" here? Accents are learned. They are conventional, even if they have objective properties that allow them to be compared. An agent's job isn't about him; it is about the client. It's not about "being heard" (whatever that means), but being understood by the client within the context of the purpose of the job.
Imagine if diplomats thought the way you do. Diplomats serve and represent their country, just as agents serve and represent their company. It is in the interest of the diplomat, his country, and the other party to communicate as effectively as possible with the other party.
> Not quite dehumanising, but it is certainly patronising that the company has an opinion as to what voice their customers can or cannot understand.
This, too, is nonsensical. Given that companies record calls, it is fair to assume that the company has statistical evidence concerning the accents of their agents and how well they're understood by their clients.
Now, if you want to criticize the use of AI in such cases on independent grounds, maybe you can make a case. I don't think it would be a very strong case, as this is such a trivial matter. But you cannot claim that learning accents is "dehumanizing". Accent is part of language. If you wish to communicate with a people, you need to speak a common language. That generally means learning their language. The better you speak that language, the better you can communicate with them. If you are serving, the burden is on you to speak in a way that can assist understanding. It's that simple.
But accent and pronunciation are different things, and the fact that you don't have a particular accent doesn't mean that you don't speak the language well, what matter most is pronunciation. Sometimes it can get ridiculous like when Trump had a interpreter for a guy that was native in English but had an accent or that other leader from africa that Trump asked where he learned English when it was it's native language.
Coming back to accent is different than pronunciation, in any English test like IELTS or Cambridge accent won't be qualified
> But accent and pronunciation are different things [...]
This isn't true in the way you are thinking of. An accent can pronounce words the same way that another accent distinguishes. An accent can pronounce word x that another accent pronounces word y. What comes to mind immediately: in Indian English accents, RP/GA fricative "th" is pronounced as the aspirate, while the RP/GA aspirated "t" is pronounced retroflex, so naively, "three" can be misheard as "tree".
The working-class accent that I use where I'm from (not India) is syllable-timed (stress does not lengthen the duration of a syllable), and uses pitch lexical stress, rather than intensity/loudness for it, and stress itself is frequently very differently located compared to RP or GA. For "th" as well, we collapse it into t/d.
All in all, for someone who has heard it for the first time or rarely, it can be extremely disorienting to listen to a very distant foreign accent.
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.
By that same argument, taken naively, film and video are dehumanizing, but not deplorably so: certainly the intensity of emotion and experience through film is far less present than say immersive theater, but we may be more comfortable with this modality, and also, benefit from the economies of scale.
Similarly, a call center worker may not care about having their accent being heard, but wants to get their numbers up, without struggling with a customer that isn't familiar with their accent, and enjoys the ease of speaking in their own accent than having to use one that distant customers are accustomed to. Likewise a customer probably just wants their problem fixed, without the effort of getting accustomed to an accent that they rarely encounter. This meets your definition of deplorable, but analogous to the former scenario, perhaps not deplorably so.
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)
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.
I am from a Canadian maritime province. I have had Americans (particularly from the south) who at least claimed they couldn't easily understand me, despite me understanding them just fine.
> 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.
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.
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?
> 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.
1. The price would not be double. It'd be at most a marginal change.
No company I've ever seen has more the a single digit percentage of their revenue in customer service
2. The customer was never given the decision wherever theyd be willing to pay ~1-5% more for better service, hence entirely useless to discuss
3. How the hell do you think that makes the people calling customer service racist? Or was my comment too challenging for you to read and comprehend?
You're making the assumption people with accents are necessarily foreign-based workers. You can be a US or Canadian citizen and have an accent.
I worked in a call center in Canada servicing Americans, I was born in Canada and lived here my entire life and I can assure you I definitely sound canadian but customer still accused me of being located in India, a place I have never even visited. So I don't think customer opinions on the matter are 100% justified and fair.
> So I don't think customer opinions on the matter are 100% justified and fair.
Neither do I though? I said it's understandable. Abusing people - even just verbally - is pretty much never justifiable.
But that still doesn't make the people doing so racist.
They're just angry (justifiable) and venting it at the representative of the company they're angry about (less so). Framing this issue as racist will just alienate all discourse, that was my point.
It's unlikely to be racism, since the customer likely has no idea what the representative's race / skin color is. OP's point was (I believe) that the customers he's talking about would not behave that way if the representative sounded sufficiently native to the customer's own nationality. "Xenophobic" might fit better.
I worked in call centres for Telus and Shaw. I’m a white guy from southern Ontario. I’ve had at least 100+ calls where a customer went on a racist tirade directed at me. I think you’re underestimating how much of a role racism plays
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).
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?
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.
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.
I fucking hate this. This is a literally racist technology. What's next? Painting everyone's face white on Zoom? Why don't you just fucking ask for clarification?
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-image, 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.
What if I genuinely don’t understand what they’re saying, and neither does anyone in my team? This happened many times. Is this racism or a practical inconvenience?
I find the sensitivity on this topic regarding racism kind of overshadowing the practical aspect of not being able to understand what the other person is saying.
We offer people in our company English language training, because we’re a world wide remote company and everyone should be able to understand each other. Is this racism as well?
So everyone in the world should just be capable of speaking all different accents of English there are, just because of.. what? Fabricated outrage?
Do you even realize just how special it is that English is the defacto standard language and that this happens to work? And now you’re saying it’s realistic for everyone to also learn all different accents of every country?
You do realize that Filipinos have difficulty understanding Indians and vice versa? Should they both be completely comfortable with each others’ accents, rather than a single standard way to pronounce things?
I don't think the ability to understand the accents of the people you may interact with at work is an unreasonable baseline job requirement, at least not these days of very diverse teams. Many people have to learn an entire foreign language (English) as a job requirement! If I went to work at a German company, I might be both expected to learn German fluently and be able to understand regional accents, too.
I actually happen to be in The Philippines right now, so funny you mention that.
No of course we don’t, and neither do we offer one with a more Spanish, French, Russian, Polish, Thai or German accent. This is because we decided upon American-English as the language, which is also reflected in the grammar choices on our website (despite being a French company).
The courses are entirely optional. Some colleagues don’t take them, and they have problems communicating with customers, which is very frustrating. I’ve had an Indian manager of a customer complain that one of our Thai support engineers was incomprehensible, and my boss complain that this Indian manager was incomprehensible. It’s just a mess all around.
I’m Dutch myself and these languages courses have benefited me a lot to remove some of my Dutch accent, which helps during business conversations. I’ve traveled the world pretty much constantly over the past 12 years, so I’m quite tolerant of many types of accents, but even just arriving in the Philippines for the first time last week required some recalibration, because they have their own way of pronouncing things.
If you are in the Phillipines, you might notice that English is an official language of the Phillipines - unlike Spain, France, Russia, Poland, Thailand, or Germany (or the Netherlands). This means that the Filipino English accent is just as much a native accent as the Scottish, Canadian, or American, Indian, Australian, etc. accents. And yet, no one is requiring people from London to change the way they speak their language, even if it's sometimes hard to understand for people from NYC.
I've had significant accent friction when I started watching British television after a long time of learning English from simply watching only American television. But I don't expect people in Britain to "fix" their accent.
You know that people studying a second language often study native pronunciation, right? Thats just standard curricula for language acquisition. Youre fishing for racism where theres none.
English is one of the two official languages of the Philippines, so their English accent is native, just as much as the English accent, Scottish accent, American accent, NYC accent, etc.
Sure, there's no such thing as a native accent. In the end these are all concepts and if you dig down the semantic value of the label is blurry at the edges. Language is a malleable construct of agreement which corresponds to an ever flowing ever changing loosely defined idea, and you cannot point to a proper category that transcends cultural and social norms and stratification. We can play the post-structuralist game, but you're not engaging in good faith.
Language is useful insofar as it lets you communicate, and if you lack the phonemes the meaning of your words will be misinterpreted and misunderstood. Learning a more common accent is a reality that has incredible utility and is not in itself racist. At any rate, there's enough variation between the English commonly spoken by Philippinos that it's considered a dialect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_English.
I understand the words you are saying, but struggling to make sense of what you are trying to say. We're talking in this thread about learning a native accent in a second language. I do the same when I am learning Hungarian, as the phonemes are different than what I am used to in my native tongues.
I had a Southern accent and had to train it out because my northern colleagues kept making fun of it. I noticed that I was perceived as "smarter" without it. My story is not exactly uncommon and there are a bunch of famous people (e.g. Stephen Colbert) who did the same thing.
It has less to do with reinforcing stereotypes and more with fooling customers into thinking the company they're trying to get support from isn't so fucking cheap that they won't spring for tech support workers in a first world country.
>Contrariwise I consider this cultural genocide and the erasure of an entire people's way of speech.
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.
Globalisation in many forms does contribute to erasure of culture.
If that's not the case you can also tell the other guy that his dad adjusting his accent in English is in no way erasure of a Philippine culture.
> 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.
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 racism [0] and white privilege. If Canadians are getting outpriced by hard working Filipinos overseas, that just means Canadians are not competitive in that labour market. Any attempt to correct this fact is a market distortion and artificial advantaging of your own nation over others - i.e. racism.
I'm trying to convey that the moment i hear that i am speaking to a foreign contractor i know that they won't tell me "oh thomas from the dev team will probably know who worked on that part."
For people who make such calls a lot it becomes an incredibly frustrating experience and I get why they immediately try to get escalated.
>Are you Canadian or something? Your entire comment is just tantamount to a defence of racism.
What pray tell was racist about it. Sorry but your insults don't work as deflections. You're the only one that immediately has race on their mind.
It doesn't even work either when we have plenty of people living here locally of african descent.
>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.
And Philipinos doing a job, often with lower intensity and workload, yet higher wages than people in Burundi ,is the definition of what?
>If Canadians are getting outpriced by hard working Filipinos overseas,
Why the fuck do you assume I'm canadian? I'm Belgian. Flemish to be specific.
>that just means Canadians are not competitive in the labour market.
That just means the labour market expands but only towards the lowest common denominator to undercut wages and no not just the ones of those jobs being outsourced. It has wider effects.
> Any attempt to correct this fact is artificial advantaging of your own nation over others - i.e. racism.
That has nothing to do with racism. That's just....not globalism which has absolutely nothing at all to do with racism.
You might not believe it but not everyone is a proponent of unfetered hypercapitalism and rapidly growing inequality in the way that you are.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 means that I get a lower quality service as I believe my people can do it better.
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.
>but they won't because they do it for the lowest possible salary
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.
> And that lowest possible salary is so low because we allow for wage suppression tactics such as this.
When you're talking about better paid jobs you're right to point that out.
But for the bottom of the barrel jobs this doesn't hold and you can check by looking at the salaries for these jobs in the countries that can't offshore further. They're still dismal.
The real reason is that the people looking at these jobs have no negotiating power whatsoever. They have no essential irreplaceable skills or experience, nothing that's hard to find on the market. All they have usually is the desperation to do any job to make a living. They need that salary now while the company can beat around the bush with the service, throw AI chatbots at it, allow longer call queues, and so on.
If anything, a the offshore employees have more leverage with their employer because they need to speak some foreign languages to interact with customers. They can differentiate themselves from the sea of other people in their own country. A US employee in a US call center serving US customers doesn't even have that. Not that much different in Canada despite the bilingualism situation.
>But for the bottom of the barrel jobs this doesn't hold and you can check by looking at the salaries for these jobs in the countries that can't offshore further. They're still dismal.
No. It absolutely holds and the lowest common denominator is not some argument that it can't be better.
Supressing wages in higher income countries does not mean that the lowest income countries somehow get pulled up proportionally.
>The real reason is that the people looking at these jobs have no negotiating power whatsoever. They have no essential irreplaceable skills or experience, nothing that's hard to find on the market. All they have usually is the desperation to do any job to make a living.
My grandparents on one side of the family had jobs that required no (At least not after a good amount of training) essential irreplaceable skills or experience and had plenty of purchasing power. Glass cutting at a glass factory, rolling cigars, soldering on an assembly line. Their negotiating power existed based on the fact that they were good workers and would fuck off to a different factory or pressure trough a union. They did very well for themselves.
Now that negotiating power is gone. They wouldn't go to philips or so because philips doesn't manufacture here anymore. The equivalent jobs that can't be outsourced run from my experience mostly on imported workers from poorer countries who will be replaced the moment they demand better conditions.
The effects of that supression on "bottom of the barrel" job leeches upwards into jobs that people perceive as higher status without many people noticing.
After all those people that would have done them still go for a different job.
> had jobs that required no (At least not after a good amount of training) essential irreplaceable skills or experience and had plenty of purchasing power.
The world changed. The skill pool was expanded significantly and skills are distributed differently. It used to be that no formal education was needed for some things, now everyone expects a PhD.
> would fuck off to a different factory or pressure trough a union. They did very well for themselves.
You still don't get it do you? You wanted stuff so cheap that every "factory" now pays the same shitty salary, and there are no unions because they drive wages and by extension prices up.
You want more proof? Amazon drivers are safe from offshoring, you can't deliver a package in the US while being physically in India. So why are they still paid a pittance and have to pee in bottles while driving? Because they have no leverage and you wanted everything dirt cheap. Offshoring had little to do with it in real life, only in the heads of nationalists.
>The world changed. The skill pool was expanded significantly and skills are distributed differently.
For a lot of the jobs described that really isn't the big factor.
>It used to be that no formal education was needed for some things, now everyone expects a PhD.
Again more of a consequence of the "elite overproduction" and policy than anything else. I'm sure that earlier mentioned callcenter job could happen without a social sciences degree as can myriads of jobs i supported in factories.
>You still don't get it do you? You wanted stuff so cheap
>Because they have no leverage and you wanted everything dirt cheap.
a) Stop projecting
b) I'm not arguing against what individuals want when spending.
Americans such as you wanted cheaper and better cars and electronics and..... Japan provided those but not because japan was a libertarian paradise. America strongarmed them out of that position not because it is some kind of libertarian paradise.
Same with the new competition in some fields from China.
> So why are they still paid a pittance and have to pee in bottles while driving? Because they have no leverage and you wanted everything dirt cheap.
PS They have better conditions and pay in my country. It still isn't great. Again due to lack of leverage since a lot of them are migrants. I'm sure you're supportive of that eroded lack of leverage but don't project it onto me. At some point you'll just end up arguing for the relative competitive advantage of places with slavery.
> PS They have better conditions and pay in my country. It still isn't great. Again due to lack of leverage since a lot of them are migrants.
Took a while to guide to horse to water. We circled back to what I said from the first comment [0]: the lowest end jobs have very low salaries because these people have no leverage (multitude of factors, some of which I listed), not because of offshoring. This situation holds true even from jobs that are safe from offshoring.
> a) Stop projecting
> I'm sure you're supportive of that eroded lack of leverage but don't project it onto me.
The old "You don't project onto me! I project onto you!". But somehow you managed to screw up even your diss at me. Supporting the "eroded lack of leverage" means supporting the leverage. Maybe you wanted to say I "support the lack of leverage". I'm a strong supporter of everyone being able to have a good life, whether they do a job locally or from offshore. I won't get into that discussion because I don't think you care that much for anything more complex than grandparent stories.
So I'm sorry Mario but your reasoning skills are in another castle.
Shareholders can't force you to make them money. Blame is probably shared but it's your pressure to have super fast deliveries for anything because you can't wait or walk to a store that shareholders are exploiting for profit. It's your demands and expectations that make those Amazon drivers pee in bottles.
You can always boycott Amazon and the shareholders can't do anything to force you back. But you don't, you keep buying from them with fast delivery.
Same applies to everything else. Do you ever factor in the people’s pay when you select a service? Do you pick the companies that pay the best salaries even if the price is higher? If someone offers you a service from a guy who's paid more, you balk and go to another provider who gives the same service from a guy who's paid less.
The cop-out is always "but what can I do, I'm just one person?" so you keep perpetrating this.
First off, I get the nationalist instinct. I don’t think it’s bad per se.
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.
> 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.
Factory conditions in kuala lumpur scarcely reach my ears and we don't live under a single world government. It sounds exactly like in defense or argument in favor of hollowing out local economies.
> One underused avenue to make it a more even playing field, is to exports labour and safety standards from the developed world.
Because that has never been and never will be the point of the outsourcing.
The point is to undercut higher wages and bargaining power.
I don't want an even playing field. I want my country to have the advantage. It shouldn't come down to a 50/50 coin toss whether to offshore or not because they are seen as equally expensive.
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.
> I don't want an even playing field. I want my country to have the advantage.
Why the whole country?
Are all your countrymen equally deserving? Do all of them work as hard, care the same, and give back to their nation the same?
I too, want my nation to “win”, but I want that advantage to be something that we built and something that endures.
They need to win by just being that good, and creating an environment that allows for that to happen.
Since everyone cannot be the best and brightest, I would want a safety net that allows for a society that isn’t constantly in fight or flight.
> offshoring .. best factories from country B.
What typically happens is that factory B will offload work to factories that wont be inspected.
> use innovation to come up with a more efficient factory.
This is what is happening today. We’ve been losing more factory jobs to robotics than outsourcing for a while.
——
When manufacturing jobs are lost, the issue of underemployment and the loss of expertise is what hampers economies. Burger flipping pays far less than Foreman or specialist, and losing manufacturing hubs means no cross pollination and skill development in your populace.
This is all to say I am well aware of the issues, and sympathetic to your greater cause.
However, there is no victory for me in your ‘defeat’. The average citizen in any country has more to gain from the deepening of the middle class globally.
Healthy economies, with actual competition, create a deeper more informed citizenry. This means more people living up to their potential, more ideas, more culture, more resources to solve challenges, and a chance to live up the ideals we seem to be failing.
>The average citizen in any country has more to gain from the deepening of the middle class globally.
The deepening of the middleclass here to me has seemingly meant that more people do jobs that are seen as middle class. At the same time the "middle class" purchasing power when it comes to important thing isn't that far off from that of the lower class of the past. yes they can buy big flat screen tv's for cheap now but more important things have started to become an issue despite rapid technological advancement.
>Healthy economies, with actual competition, create a deeper more informed citizenry. This means more people living up to their potential,
You now compete with a foreign multinational which employs people at a fraction of your local wages. So you no longer compete and there's less real actual competition.
> At the same time the "middle class" purchasing power when it comes to important thing isn't that far off from that of the lower class of the past. yes they can buy big flat screen tv's for cheap now but more important things have started to become an issue despite rapid technological advancement.
You are drawing a causal line between correlated events.
The middle class globally has been weakened since the 80s.
One of the current issues we are contending with is the fact that wealth has concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.
America recently had a year where the top 10% of earners drove nearly 50% of consumer spending.
We could spend the entirety of the conversation discussing wealth concentration, and it would still be a worthwhile digression.
You can’t have a consumer driven market if the consumers don’t have anything to purchase with.
However, when you dismiss flat screen TVs offhandedly also does your own argument a disservice. By deciding what is important and what is not, you are taking on the role of arbiter of subjective merit.
This is fine, but then you have to also make arguments for how the economic incentives must be aligned to achieve your subjective goals.
——
From what I have said, you should know that I am sympathetic to the motivations behind your argument. I am not sympathetic to bad arguments.
Protectionism is fatal to economies, and simply tanks your drive. The ability of MNCs to just offshore work should be benign, but appears malignant. If work is offshored, it should also result in more productivity or higher productivity in the nation it is offshored from.
You should see higher tax revenues as a result, which should be plowed back into your local economy.
Weirdly, our economies seem to all be becoming more productive, but not much richer.
This is one of the reasons I sincerely recommend exporting labour standards more aggressively. At least you are not at a disadvantage because you have actual labour protections, and it reduces the value of labour arbitrage.
The other issue is retraining doesn’t work at the speed and scales changes happen. Our brains are not flexible enough to retrain miners into programmers and have them find jobs which are equally well paying.
If we had a number for how much retraining we can actually achieve, or how much time it would take, we could figure out how much we can outsource before it becomes impossible to retrain our citizens.
>One of the current issues we are contending with is the fact that wealth has concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.
And I'm suggesting wage bargaining power has affected that. Not on it's own. But it has had notable effect.
>By deciding what is important and what is not, you are taking on the role of arbiter of subjective merit.
I am as are you but I think I am far from alone. After all the big societal issues that spark these discussions aren't sparked by a few cents of lipstick and somewhat cheaper screens.
>Protectionism is fatal to economies, and simply tanks your drive.
Various protectionist self-serving policies are part of what made japan a threathening rapidly growing economic power untill the US and Europe strongarmed it with....protectionist policy.
It's also what made China the power it is today.
Etc
And I don't think anyone can argue it stopped japan, china, etc from innovating.
Show me the ultraliberal free for all that did well and isn't super financialized.
"drive" on the other hand is an ephemeral thing that starts falling apart when it is more clearly defined.
I can just as easily argue that my drive is hampered because there's no reason for me to attempt to enter plenty of conceivable fields (and even begin to innovate) where i would compete with a multinational utilizing sweatshop workers in Mali.
I can also point at the various industries that got internationally more and more consolidated into fewer and fewer players leading to less innovation and "drive".
>This is one of the reasons I sincerely recommend exporting labour standards more aggressively. At least you are not at a disadvantage because you have actual labour protections, and it reduces the value of labour arbitrage.
I don't get to dictate the labour policies of kuala lumpur, etc and any attempt to would be radically more involved costly and far beyond my small countries scope than simply affecting what companies do locally.
It is defending a situation with hypotheticals that rarely happen and when they happen they have often happened badly or shift the problem further.
>The other issue is retraining doesn’t work at the speed and scales changes happen. Our brains are not flexible enough to retrain miners into programmers and have them find jobs which are equally well paying.
I think this idea that everyone in the world can be part of the professional-managerial class (PMC) and this striving towards it is also self defeating.
You argue about this from a global perspective but also as if it would be good locally in a more developed place if only those with "less desired jobs" could properly retrain and such as if these same reasonings wouldn't apply there.
Those jobs that are leaving are desired to me even if I don't do them all. Those wage setting mechanics for jobs in mining, at a call center, assembling components on an assembly line also indirectly affect those wage setting pressures/purchasing power of the software dev, marketing person, etc
> Various protectionist self-serving policies are part of what made japan a threathening rapidly growing economic power untill the US and Europe strongarmed it with....protectionist policy. It's also what made China the power it is today. Etc
See when its an oversimplification of the case history, we will have divergent conclusions.
India's License Raj resulted in decades of slow growth, till the markets were opened in 1990 and incumbents were forced to shape up. Argentina is another case.
Protectionism here is far too broad a term. There are many things which were needed, such as investment in training, labour, export controls, infrastructure investment, industrial policy and more.
The Japanese market was also open to firms, and they most definitely entered and integrated into that market, so its not a one way street.
China is more egregious in that sense, since it has corporate espionage, state protection, and a market which is not really open to foreign compeition (unless you are a luxury brand).
> Show me the ultra-liberal free-for-all that did well
I am not going to ever make that case, since I don't believe that ever existed or succeeded if it did.
> I can just as easily argue that my dr
Sure, feel free to argue. However there are others who just want to make stuff, and don't spend the time arguing.
> I don't get to dictate the labour policies of kuala lumpur,
Says who? Have you ever seen an outsourcing contract? They include terms on how people should be fired, number of working days, and more. Rules vary according to jurisdiction, however the contract can include whatever terms you like.
> I think this idea that everyone in the world can be part of the professional-managerial class
Where did you get this? I am talking about retraining. You could retrain into naval captains for all I care.
> less desired jobs" could properly retrain
Not what I am saying. I am saying the argument for outsourcing used to be supported by the idea that those who lost employment could be retrained into other domains.
However, there are limits to what retraining can actually achieve, which removes the support this argument provided.
>Says who? Have you ever seen an outsourcing contract? They include terms on how people should be fired, number of working days, and more. Rules vary according to jurisdiction, however the contract can include whatever terms you like.
And for an outsourcing contract to be that way there's a certain intent that needs to exist.
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.
Not him but....Having a hypercapitalist ultraliberal and globalist worldview that exacerbates wealth inequalities and encourages cutting corners to cut of costs here and there is not the definition of sane.
Countries that have had semi-protectionist policies and tried to pull in or protect industry trough policy have done well at times.
This includes jobs people now describe as shit.
Why wouldn't I want those to exist locally and pay well?
> If you believe in remote work, then why should it matter from where that work is delivered?
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.
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.
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.
Right but it's not like they don't know about flying and can't be instructed and coached? I don't mean to me dismissive, maybe (quite possibly) things are more complicated than that, but ...? Like, okay when an Indian person is working for an Indian airline they're instructed "hey, here's the departures binder." But when they're hired by Lufthansa they get oriented using whatever system and processes are in place at that company. And "hey, don't be rude. To western people, here's what that means beyond what's intuitive to you." How does their previous experience with a binder mean they can't relate to you on a support call?
Spent the last year building a customer-facing AI agent for a Miami law firm with operations in Colombia. The accent question never came up in the build. The knowledge question came up constantly.
Half the inbound clients were Colombian families navigating US immigration. The agent had to know which apostilled documents the Cancillería typically processes in 3 days vs 3 weeks, that "documento de identidad" in Colombia is the cédula not the DNI, that the consulate in Bogotá closes early on Fridays. None of that is in any LLM's pretraining; we hand-built and update the knowledge files monthly.
Your binder-table-at-the-airport story is the deeper one. AI can fake the voice. It can't fake the lived experience. Cheaper to invest in the knowledge files than in the accent layer.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
It would often happen to me mid escalation. The local SEA attendant escalating for the purposes of higher level technical support. Most calls like this the caller was relieved to be away from the level 1 support person.
>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?
I think its partially the australian reputation for being assholes overseas, and partly a sort of unionistic culture that tries to demand locals do everything to maximise employment. I got a similar vibe from people in the phillipines, just not to the same extent.
The stereotype is of Australians going over to Singapore for a holiday and being drunk and rude. It's a stereotype, but that's where that hate comes from.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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???
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Regardless of tech you can always improve your speech. I had a Japanese girlfriend who went through the process and 80% of the results where accomplished by learning the ~20 vowel sounds found in American english (vs her native 5 vowel sounds).
I used to work in call centres for telcos in Canada.
A) this will be used to hire non Canadian with minimal language skills and will be bad for the local labour market without objection from customers
B) accents are troublesome but the biggest issues were people that don’t have the same cultural standards for things like, not lying, not dumping calls that were hard, or doing a good job with complicated systems and accurately logging cases truthfully.
So many problems are created by poor workers (opps we deleted the customers account, oops I transferred them too you).
These were problems that were so bad they had to have specific cultural training for specific nations to get people to the Canadian standard, and many failed. But hey, cheaper labour!
Now I clean houses, and there is so much competition from people from abroad who are flooding the market and undercutting prices and I don’t get government subsidies to live in a hotel…
This is more likely about sales than customer service.
Canadians get a lot of scam calls from Indian call centres. Whether it's furnace cleaners or somebody calling about a fraudulent amazon package you supposedly ordered, it's usually somebody with an Indian accent. It's reached the point where many people simply hang up if they hear an Indian accent on the line. If you're trying to do telemarketing, possibly using the very same call centres that run these scams, that's a huge barrier.
Telus, for its part, is absolutely shameless in its use of aggressive telemarketing. I'm not surprised that they're one of the first companies to employ this sort of innovation. Unfortunately, this tech will likely spread to the scammers almost immediately, assuming it didn't originate with them.
As an aside, here's one of my favourite games to play with telescammers: Pick one word to say over and over again, but attempt to give it a variety of natural inflections, ambiguities, etc. so that it sounds like you're not just saying one word. Then see how long you can keep the scammer on the line. Start your stopwatch the moment you start talking to a human. I once managed over three minutes with the word, "Fuzzy-cuffs". Every minute of their time you waste could be a minute somebody's Grandma isn't being scammed.
I get a ton of calls from "Telus" and "Rogers" and just hang up on all of them - I have no idea how I'd be supposed to tell which are and which aren't scams.
Personally I'm very suspicious of any company calling. These are businesses that have actively avoided any form of human to human contact in the past two decades, why would they suddenly want to call me?
This is a terrible idea, and I'm far from convinced it will improve clarity.
The solution is to hire people who can be understood, and empower them with the authority to be effective. Elaborate and misleading schemes to mask the problem are disrespectful and insulting to your customers. If the job involves speaking with customers, candidates for it should have the communication skills required. I've dealt on a regular basis with foreigners / ESL'ers who are perfectly capable of speaking English, French, etc. even with an accent.
If the job involved regular heavy lifting, would you hire someone incapable of doing so?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The second one is almost always used by Healthcare companies in my experience, in a backwards attempt at HIPPA compliance.
They want to make sure they called the right person. Except they know everyone hates getting called like this, so they take "who is this?" as affirmation and then proceed to tell you their company and the call.
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.
I've been having issues with Xfinity and have spent hours calling their support numbers, and a few of the conversations I had gave me an eerie feeling. At first I thought the agents were being trained to inflect their accented English to something akin to received pronunciation but their voices had a robotic quality to them that I found odd and couldn't make sense of.
My agent actually said just so you know sir, I am not ai, they are just using ai to change my voice. I think that this is an ugly reflection on American's attitudes about people with accents.
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.
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.
It's a sign of people with an extremely small bubble; it's not hard to understand other accents. It requires only a little consideration and acclimatisation.
It's not inherently racist, just very lazy, but it can quickly lead to racism.
You say it requires a little acclimatisation, but the caller may well just not know anyone with that specific accent/have never had the chance to acclimatise to it other than this phone call, there's an awful lot of accents in the world.
Additionally I find even though I can understand an Indian accent for example quite well in person, I really struggle with it over the phone due to the compression causing quite poor sound quality and lack of facial expressions to be able to read (which I would be using in person to help me understand a strong unfamiliar accent), whereas when accent is more familiar to me, the poor audio quality and lack of body language isn't nearly as much of an issue, presumably as I just have way way more exposure to the accent so can fill in gaps better.
You don't need to accustom yourself to every individual accent; you need to practice hearing people say things in different ways. Once you are comfortable with some voices that are different to yours, it's much easier to understand other differences as well.
I'm sympathetic to audio quality issues. No one would object if they developed tech to improve call quality, but they didn't.
I think you’re not taking into account that there are people from hundreds of countries out there whose native language is not English, that are not exposed to different English accents at all other than watching movies etc, and suddenly having to deal with weird accents.
> It's a sign of people with an extremely small bubble; it's not hard to understand other accents.
This seems to be written from the perspective of a native English speaker only, rather than taking the world population into account, which is in itself racist.
English has a wide variety of accents, expose yourself enough and its probably healthy for your brain. I used to not be able to understand different American accents and I'm from the Midwest. Context and patience is king.
You realize that there are more people in the world that are non-native English speakers? Do you think it’s realistic for them to learn all different accents when they’re barely exposed to English in the first place? Don’t you think it’s useful to have some standardized way to pronounce things?
I couldn’t care less whether it’s American English, British English, or whatever.
But to expect everyone in the world to be comfortable with all possible English accents in the world is madness.
I’m Australian, I’ve had many yanks ask me to my face what language I speak, be shocked we use different money, shocked summer is winter in the southern hemisphere, shocked we drive on the other side of the road, shocked we have atms, etc etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anytime one of those "you can eat cuisine from one region of the world for the rest of your life" memes comes up, I'm baffled that anybody would fail to pick the region that contains both South and Southeast Asia.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
> Still, imagine having it built into a hearing aid?
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.
Maybe we aren't meant to have global companies that exist to exploit tax and labor laws? Neoliberalism is a large reason for why the world is how it is now.
I had a contractor group come highly recommended, but I literally had to focus so hard on each word that I couldn’t make it work. I don’t know where they were from but I heard easier to understand accents in Delhi.
I realized quickly how it was changing my thinking process to devote so much to each word.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
It's mostly the "voice smoothing" part of this technology that I have morality issues with.
This isn't any different from (usually white) teachers telling (usually black) kids to "speak better" simply because they consider the way they speak "wrong." Or, since TELUS is in Canada, like the Residential school system [^0] that their First People were forced to attend that did the same thing.
I believe that your voice makes you _you_. Taking that away because some people have trouble understanding dialects is literally taking away a foundational piece of one's humanity.
It's also a slippery slope: what's there to stop companies that do this from going straight to making everyone sound like a collection of voice profiles? Such a move would only make it easier to justify gutting customer service departments entirely.
[^0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_sc...
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".
> It's already demeaning to expect them to "learn an accent"
The concept of an accent is broad, but at least part of it you need to learn together with the language, as speaking a non-native language with a thick accent is partly based on the fact that you have yet to learn.
Without being exhaustive, things that might fall into the "speaks with an accent" concept in this thread:
> It's already demeaning to expect them to "learn an accent"
Uh, what? Excuse me?
The purpose of spoken language is communication. Accents can frustrate or enhance communication. In this case, conforming to the accent of the client enhances communication, because it is what the client is familiar with.
You do realize that the obligations of service are on the agent, right? It is the agent, as representative of the company providing a service, who is serving the client. If the aim of an agent is to assist a client, then using an accent that is more intelligible to the client is part of serving them.
You might as well claim that - given that language is part of culture - learning to speak another language at all is "pretending" that you're from a different culture. It's a ridiculous take.
> It is dehumanising to any person that their own human voice is no longer heard when performing a job involving human contact.
What does this even mean? What is your "own human voice" here? Accents are learned. They are conventional, even if they have objective properties that allow them to be compared. An agent's job isn't about him; it is about the client. It's not about "being heard" (whatever that means), but being understood by the client within the context of the purpose of the job.
Imagine if diplomats thought the way you do. Diplomats serve and represent their country, just as agents serve and represent their company. It is in the interest of the diplomat, his country, and the other party to communicate as effectively as possible with the other party.
> Not quite dehumanising, but it is certainly patronising that the company has an opinion as to what voice their customers can or cannot understand.
This, too, is nonsensical. Given that companies record calls, it is fair to assume that the company has statistical evidence concerning the accents of their agents and how well they're understood by their clients.
Now, if you want to criticize the use of AI in such cases on independent grounds, maybe you can make a case. I don't think it would be a very strong case, as this is such a trivial matter. But you cannot claim that learning accents is "dehumanizing". Accent is part of language. If you wish to communicate with a people, you need to speak a common language. That generally means learning their language. The better you speak that language, the better you can communicate with them. If you are serving, the burden is on you to speak in a way that can assist understanding. It's that simple.
But accent and pronunciation are different things, and the fact that you don't have a particular accent doesn't mean that you don't speak the language well, what matter most is pronunciation. Sometimes it can get ridiculous like when Trump had a interpreter for a guy that was native in English but had an accent or that other leader from africa that Trump asked where he learned English when it was it's native language. Coming back to accent is different than pronunciation, in any English test like IELTS or Cambridge accent won't be qualified
> But accent and pronunciation are different things [...]
This isn't true in the way you are thinking of. An accent can pronounce words the same way that another accent distinguishes. An accent can pronounce word x that another accent pronounces word y. What comes to mind immediately: in Indian English accents, RP/GA fricative "th" is pronounced as the aspirate, while the RP/GA aspirated "t" is pronounced retroflex, so naively, "three" can be misheard as "tree".
The working-class accent that I use where I'm from (not India) is syllable-timed (stress does not lengthen the duration of a syllable), and uses pitch lexical stress, rather than intensity/loudness for it, and stress itself is frequently very differently located compared to RP or GA. For "th" as well, we collapse it into t/d.
All in all, for someone who has heard it for the first time or rarely, it can be extremely disorienting to listen to a very distant foreign accent.
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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.
By that same argument, taken naively, film and video are dehumanizing, but not deplorably so: certainly the intensity of emotion and experience through film is far less present than say immersive theater, but we may be more comfortable with this modality, and also, benefit from the economies of scale.
Similarly, a call center worker may not care about having their accent being heard, but wants to get their numbers up, without struggling with a customer that isn't familiar with their accent, and enjoys the ease of speaking in their own accent than having to use one that distant customers are accustomed to. Likewise a customer probably just wants their problem fixed, without the effort of getting accustomed to an accent that they rarely encounter. This meets your definition of deplorable, but analogous to the former scenario, perhaps not deplorably so.
And photos steal a person's soul? Or something like that.
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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)
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs-rgvkRfwc
Newfoundland
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u9eTOIGZkOI
> heavily accented, not unlike other English native speakers
One could just as well argue the opposite position.
Dunno, a ton of UK born and raised people have accents so thick that I struggle to make out what they're saying.
I am from a Canadian maritime province. I have had Americans (particularly from the south) who at least claimed they couldn't easily understand me, despite me understanding them just fine.
I had a Newfie friend from a Newfie family growing up, all good no problem.
The Newfie barber they introduced me to I had to smile and nod because I couldn’t understand a word he said. And neither could they.
There are accents and then there’s accints.
Agree!
I play destiny in a clan, most of them are from UK. I don't understand a single word from some of them...
And i honestly don't think they would get hired for a call center job.
> 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.
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.
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?
> 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.
Would the cuwotmers also be willing to pay 2x the price for the product or service? These decisions do not happen in a vacuum.
What a strawman
1. The price would not be double. It'd be at most a marginal change. No company I've ever seen has more the a single digit percentage of their revenue in customer service
2. The customer was never given the decision wherever theyd be willing to pay ~1-5% more for better service, hence entirely useless to discuss
3. How the hell do you think that makes the people calling customer service racist? Or was my comment too challenging for you to read and comprehend?
> Would the cuwotmers also be willing to pay 2x the price for the product or service?
Would the executives, especially the C-suite, be willing to make $8M instead of only $10M in salary and bonuses?
You're making the assumption people with accents are necessarily foreign-based workers. You can be a US or Canadian citizen and have an accent. I worked in a call center in Canada servicing Americans, I was born in Canada and lived here my entire life and I can assure you I definitely sound canadian but customer still accused me of being located in India, a place I have never even visited. So I don't think customer opinions on the matter are 100% justified and fair.
> So I don't think customer opinions on the matter are 100% justified and fair.
Neither do I though? I said it's understandable. Abusing people - even just verbally - is pretty much never justifiable.
But that still doesn't make the people doing so racist.
They're just angry (justifiable) and venting it at the representative of the company they're angry about (less so). Framing this issue as racist will just alienate all discourse, that was my point.
It's unlikely to be racism, since the customer likely has no idea what the representative's race / skin color is. OP's point was (I believe) that the customers he's talking about would not behave that way if the representative sounded sufficiently native to the customer's own nationality. "Xenophobic" might fit better.
I worked in call centres for Telus and Shaw. I’m a white guy from southern Ontario. I’ve had at least 100+ calls where a customer went on a racist tirade directed at me. I think you’re underestimating how much of a role racism plays
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).
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?
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.
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.
Literally the thesis of Sorry to Bother You (2018).
Boots Riley is one of the most underrated American artists of our time. "I'm a Virgo" is also great if you haven't seen it.
I fucking hate this. This is a literally racist technology. What's next? Painting everyone's face white on Zoom? Why don't you just fucking ask for clarification?
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-image, 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.
What if I genuinely don’t understand what they’re saying, and neither does anyone in my team? This happened many times. Is this racism or a practical inconvenience?
I find the sensitivity on this topic regarding racism kind of overshadowing the practical aspect of not being able to understand what the other person is saying.
We offer people in our company English language training, because we’re a world wide remote company and everyone should be able to understand each other. Is this racism as well?
> What if I genuinely don’t understand what they’re saying, and neither does anyone in my team?
This sounds like a severe deficiency in your team, but it's not hard for you to learn to handle other accents.
Learned helplessness is not an excuse.
So everyone in the world should just be capable of speaking all different accents of English there are, just because of.. what? Fabricated outrage?
Do you even realize just how special it is that English is the defacto standard language and that this happens to work? And now you’re saying it’s realistic for everyone to also learn all different accents of every country?
You do realize that Filipinos have difficulty understanding Indians and vice versa? Should they both be completely comfortable with each others’ accents, rather than a single standard way to pronounce things?
This is such a ridiculous take.
I don't think the ability to understand the accents of the people you may interact with at work is an unreasonable baseline job requirement, at least not these days of very diverse teams. Many people have to learn an entire foreign language (English) as a job requirement! If I went to work at a German company, I might be both expected to learn German fluently and be able to understand regional accents, too.
Does your company offer courses to help you speak English with a more Filipino accent? If not, why not?
I actually happen to be in The Philippines right now, so funny you mention that.
No of course we don’t, and neither do we offer one with a more Spanish, French, Russian, Polish, Thai or German accent. This is because we decided upon American-English as the language, which is also reflected in the grammar choices on our website (despite being a French company).
The courses are entirely optional. Some colleagues don’t take them, and they have problems communicating with customers, which is very frustrating. I’ve had an Indian manager of a customer complain that one of our Thai support engineers was incomprehensible, and my boss complain that this Indian manager was incomprehensible. It’s just a mess all around.
I’m Dutch myself and these languages courses have benefited me a lot to remove some of my Dutch accent, which helps during business conversations. I’ve traveled the world pretty much constantly over the past 12 years, so I’m quite tolerant of many types of accents, but even just arriving in the Philippines for the first time last week required some recalibration, because they have their own way of pronouncing things.
If you are in the Phillipines, you might notice that English is an official language of the Phillipines - unlike Spain, France, Russia, Poland, Thailand, or Germany (or the Netherlands). This means that the Filipino English accent is just as much a native accent as the Scottish, Canadian, or American, Indian, Australian, etc. accents. And yet, no one is requiring people from London to change the way they speak their language, even if it's sometimes hard to understand for people from NYC.
According to state news, 47% of Filipinos are “competent” with English [1]. They care.
We all know what this is about. We’ve all had CS calls with accent friction.
What’s the point of using word games to sidestep a problem and the discussion of a real-world implementation of a solution?
[1]: https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1207936
I've had significant accent friction when I started watching British television after a long time of learning English from simply watching only American television. But I don't expect people in Britain to "fix" their accent.
Good for you. Now tell everyone in all 195 countries in the world to learn all 195 different accents that exist.
How much effort do you expect people to put into learning all variants of English? Do you even realize how biased your own perspective is?
You know that people studying a second language often study native pronunciation, right? Thats just standard curricula for language acquisition. Youre fishing for racism where theres none.
English is one of the two official languages of the Philippines, so their English accent is native, just as much as the English accent, Scottish accent, American accent, NYC accent, etc.
Sure, there's no such thing as a native accent. In the end these are all concepts and if you dig down the semantic value of the label is blurry at the edges. Language is a malleable construct of agreement which corresponds to an ever flowing ever changing loosely defined idea, and you cannot point to a proper category that transcends cultural and social norms and stratification. We can play the post-structuralist game, but you're not engaging in good faith.
Language is useful insofar as it lets you communicate, and if you lack the phonemes the meaning of your words will be misinterpreted and misunderstood. Learning a more common accent is a reality that has incredible utility and is not in itself racist. At any rate, there's enough variation between the English commonly spoken by Philippinos that it's considered a dialect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_English.
There's definitely racism in a global apartheid.
I understand the words you are saying, but struggling to make sense of what you are trying to say. We're talking in this thread about learning a native accent in a second language. I do the same when I am learning Hungarian, as the phonemes are different than what I am used to in my native tongues.
I had a Southern accent and had to train it out because my northern colleagues kept making fun of it. I noticed that I was perceived as "smarter" without it. My story is not exactly uncommon and there are a bunch of famous people (e.g. Stephen Colbert) who did the same thing.
The technology discussed here is reinforcing that stereotype
It has less to do with reinforcing stereotypes and more with fooling customers into thinking the company they're trying to get support from isn't so fucking cheap that they won't spring for tech support workers in a first world country.
Wait until they find out that Huntsville, AL is basically an enclave for rocket scientists.
Some of them rocket scientists double down on the accent in Hunts-vuhl.
Sadly, the You Must Be Ignorant lot is as ignorant of that conclave of cosmic capsule constructors as it is of the proper pronunciation of y'all
> Filipinos will actively practice out any trace of their accent to sound as white as possible
Oh, so they have strong Swedish accents? Or South African?
On the topic of racism, skin colors don't have a particular sound.
It's also hard to describe the feeling of watching the entire world infiltrate your culture.
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>Contrariwise I consider this cultural genocide and the erasure of an entire people's way of speech.
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.
Having a more difficult support experience is in no way erasure of a culture
Globalisation in many forms does contribute to erasure of culture. If that's not the case you can also tell the other guy that his dad adjusting his accent in English is in no way erasure of a Philippine culture.
> 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.
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 racism [0] and white privilege. If Canadians are getting outpriced by hard working Filipinos overseas, that just means Canadians are not competitive in that labour market. Any attempt to correct this fact is a market distortion and artificial advantaging of your own nation over others - i.e. racism.
[0] DiAngelo 2011
>What the fuck does this have to do with accents?
I'm trying to convey that the moment i hear that i am speaking to a foreign contractor i know that they won't tell me "oh thomas from the dev team will probably know who worked on that part." For people who make such calls a lot it becomes an incredibly frustrating experience and I get why they immediately try to get escalated.
>Are you Canadian or something? Your entire comment is just tantamount to a defence of racism.
What pray tell was racist about it. Sorry but your insults don't work as deflections. You're the only one that immediately has race on their mind.
It doesn't even work either when we have plenty of people living here locally of african descent.
>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.
And Philipinos doing a job, often with lower intensity and workload, yet higher wages than people in Burundi ,is the definition of what?
>If Canadians are getting outpriced by hard working Filipinos overseas,
Why the fuck do you assume I'm canadian? I'm Belgian. Flemish to be specific.
>that just means Canadians are not competitive in the labour market.
That just means the labour market expands but only towards the lowest common denominator to undercut wages and no not just the ones of those jobs being outsourced. It has wider effects.
> Any attempt to correct this fact is artificial advantaging of your own nation over others - i.e. racism.
That has nothing to do with racism. That's just....not globalism which has absolutely nothing at all to do with racism. You might not believe it but not everyone is a proponent of unfetered hypercapitalism and rapidly growing inequality in the way that you are.
So, better if they have no jobs because of things that arent under their control?
Technology is supposed to make life easier and better
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.
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.
> 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.
It's wage suppression. Plain and simple.
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.
>Why is this a problem?
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 means that I get a lower quality service as I believe my people can do it better.
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.
>but they won't because they do it for the lowest possible salary
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.
> And that lowest possible salary is so low because we allow for wage suppression tactics such as this.
When you're talking about better paid jobs you're right to point that out.
But for the bottom of the barrel jobs this doesn't hold and you can check by looking at the salaries for these jobs in the countries that can't offshore further. They're still dismal.
The real reason is that the people looking at these jobs have no negotiating power whatsoever. They have no essential irreplaceable skills or experience, nothing that's hard to find on the market. All they have usually is the desperation to do any job to make a living. They need that salary now while the company can beat around the bush with the service, throw AI chatbots at it, allow longer call queues, and so on.
If anything, a the offshore employees have more leverage with their employer because they need to speak some foreign languages to interact with customers. They can differentiate themselves from the sea of other people in their own country. A US employee in a US call center serving US customers doesn't even have that. Not that much different in Canada despite the bilingualism situation.
>But for the bottom of the barrel jobs this doesn't hold and you can check by looking at the salaries for these jobs in the countries that can't offshore further. They're still dismal.
No. It absolutely holds and the lowest common denominator is not some argument that it can't be better. Supressing wages in higher income countries does not mean that the lowest income countries somehow get pulled up proportionally.
>The real reason is that the people looking at these jobs have no negotiating power whatsoever. They have no essential irreplaceable skills or experience, nothing that's hard to find on the market. All they have usually is the desperation to do any job to make a living.
My grandparents on one side of the family had jobs that required no (At least not after a good amount of training) essential irreplaceable skills or experience and had plenty of purchasing power. Glass cutting at a glass factory, rolling cigars, soldering on an assembly line. Their negotiating power existed based on the fact that they were good workers and would fuck off to a different factory or pressure trough a union. They did very well for themselves.
Now that negotiating power is gone. They wouldn't go to philips or so because philips doesn't manufacture here anymore. The equivalent jobs that can't be outsourced run from my experience mostly on imported workers from poorer countries who will be replaced the moment they demand better conditions. The effects of that supression on "bottom of the barrel" job leeches upwards into jobs that people perceive as higher status without many people noticing. After all those people that would have done them still go for a different job.
> had jobs that required no (At least not after a good amount of training) essential irreplaceable skills or experience and had plenty of purchasing power.
The world changed. The skill pool was expanded significantly and skills are distributed differently. It used to be that no formal education was needed for some things, now everyone expects a PhD.
> would fuck off to a different factory or pressure trough a union. They did very well for themselves.
You still don't get it do you? You wanted stuff so cheap that every "factory" now pays the same shitty salary, and there are no unions because they drive wages and by extension prices up.
You want more proof? Amazon drivers are safe from offshoring, you can't deliver a package in the US while being physically in India. So why are they still paid a pittance and have to pee in bottles while driving? Because they have no leverage and you wanted everything dirt cheap. Offshoring had little to do with it in real life, only in the heads of nationalists.
>The world changed. The skill pool was expanded significantly and skills are distributed differently.
For a lot of the jobs described that really isn't the big factor.
>It used to be that no formal education was needed for some things, now everyone expects a PhD.
Again more of a consequence of the "elite overproduction" and policy than anything else. I'm sure that earlier mentioned callcenter job could happen without a social sciences degree as can myriads of jobs i supported in factories.
>You still don't get it do you? You wanted stuff so cheap >Because they have no leverage and you wanted everything dirt cheap.
a) Stop projecting
b) I'm not arguing against what individuals want when spending. Americans such as you wanted cheaper and better cars and electronics and..... Japan provided those but not because japan was a libertarian paradise. America strongarmed them out of that position not because it is some kind of libertarian paradise. Same with the new competition in some fields from China.
> So why are they still paid a pittance and have to pee in bottles while driving? Because they have no leverage and you wanted everything dirt cheap.
PS They have better conditions and pay in my country. It still isn't great. Again due to lack of leverage since a lot of them are migrants. I'm sure you're supportive of that eroded lack of leverage but don't project it onto me. At some point you'll just end up arguing for the relative competitive advantage of places with slavery.
> PS They have better conditions and pay in my country. It still isn't great. Again due to lack of leverage since a lot of them are migrants.
Took a while to guide to horse to water. We circled back to what I said from the first comment [0]: the lowest end jobs have very low salaries because these people have no leverage (multitude of factors, some of which I listed), not because of offshoring. This situation holds true even from jobs that are safe from offshoring.
> a) Stop projecting
> I'm sure you're supportive of that eroded lack of leverage but don't project it onto me.
The old "You don't project onto me! I project onto you!". But somehow you managed to screw up even your diss at me. Supporting the "eroded lack of leverage" means supporting the leverage. Maybe you wanted to say I "support the lack of leverage". I'm a strong supporter of everyone being able to have a good life, whether they do a job locally or from offshore. I won't get into that discussion because I don't think you care that much for anything more complex than grandparent stories.
So I'm sorry Mario but your reasoning skills are in another castle.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48033641
> You wanted stuff so cheap
No, I don't decide shit. Shareholders wanted profit margins so wide.
Funny how good you are at understanding bargaining power in labor markets and how dogshit you are at understanding it in consumer goods.
> No, I don't decide shit.
Shareholders can't force you to make them money. Blame is probably shared but it's your pressure to have super fast deliveries for anything because you can't wait or walk to a store that shareholders are exploiting for profit. It's your demands and expectations that make those Amazon drivers pee in bottles.
You can always boycott Amazon and the shareholders can't do anything to force you back. But you don't, you keep buying from them with fast delivery.
Same applies to everything else. Do you ever factor in the people’s pay when you select a service? Do you pick the companies that pay the best salaries even if the price is higher? If someone offers you a service from a guy who's paid more, you balk and go to another provider who gives the same service from a guy who's paid less.
The cop-out is always "but what can I do, I'm just one person?" so you keep perpetrating this.
Never the fault of owners, always the fault of consumers or labor. Always. Responsibility!
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First off, I get the nationalist instinct. I don’t think it’s bad per se.
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.
> 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.
Factory conditions in kuala lumpur scarcely reach my ears and we don't live under a single world government. It sounds exactly like in defense or argument in favor of hollowing out local economies.
> One underused avenue to make it a more even playing field, is to exports labour and safety standards from the developed world.
Because that has never been and never will be the point of the outsourcing. The point is to undercut higher wages and bargaining power.
I don't want an even playing field. I want my country to have the advantage. It shouldn't come down to a 50/50 coin toss whether to offshore or not because they are seen as equally expensive.
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.
> I don't want an even playing field. I want my country to have the advantage.
Why the whole country?
Are all your countrymen equally deserving? Do all of them work as hard, care the same, and give back to their nation the same?
I too, want my nation to “win”, but I want that advantage to be something that we built and something that endures.
They need to win by just being that good, and creating an environment that allows for that to happen.
Since everyone cannot be the best and brightest, I would want a safety net that allows for a society that isn’t constantly in fight or flight.
> offshoring .. best factories from country B.
What typically happens is that factory B will offload work to factories that wont be inspected.
> use innovation to come up with a more efficient factory.
This is what is happening today. We’ve been losing more factory jobs to robotics than outsourcing for a while.
——
When manufacturing jobs are lost, the issue of underemployment and the loss of expertise is what hampers economies. Burger flipping pays far less than Foreman or specialist, and losing manufacturing hubs means no cross pollination and skill development in your populace.
This is all to say I am well aware of the issues, and sympathetic to your greater cause.
However, there is no victory for me in your ‘defeat’. The average citizen in any country has more to gain from the deepening of the middle class globally.
Healthy economies, with actual competition, create a deeper more informed citizenry. This means more people living up to their potential, more ideas, more culture, more resources to solve challenges, and a chance to live up the ideals we seem to be failing.
Not him but my 2 cents:
>The average citizen in any country has more to gain from the deepening of the middle class globally.
The deepening of the middleclass here to me has seemingly meant that more people do jobs that are seen as middle class. At the same time the "middle class" purchasing power when it comes to important thing isn't that far off from that of the lower class of the past. yes they can buy big flat screen tv's for cheap now but more important things have started to become an issue despite rapid technological advancement.
>Healthy economies, with actual competition, create a deeper more informed citizenry. This means more people living up to their potential,
You now compete with a foreign multinational which employs people at a fraction of your local wages. So you no longer compete and there's less real actual competition.
> At the same time the "middle class" purchasing power when it comes to important thing isn't that far off from that of the lower class of the past. yes they can buy big flat screen tv's for cheap now but more important things have started to become an issue despite rapid technological advancement.
You are drawing a causal line between correlated events.
The middle class globally has been weakened since the 80s.
One of the current issues we are contending with is the fact that wealth has concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.
America recently had a year where the top 10% of earners drove nearly 50% of consumer spending.
We could spend the entirety of the conversation discussing wealth concentration, and it would still be a worthwhile digression.
You can’t have a consumer driven market if the consumers don’t have anything to purchase with.
However, when you dismiss flat screen TVs offhandedly also does your own argument a disservice. By deciding what is important and what is not, you are taking on the role of arbiter of subjective merit.
This is fine, but then you have to also make arguments for how the economic incentives must be aligned to achieve your subjective goals.
——
From what I have said, you should know that I am sympathetic to the motivations behind your argument. I am not sympathetic to bad arguments.
Protectionism is fatal to economies, and simply tanks your drive. The ability of MNCs to just offshore work should be benign, but appears malignant. If work is offshored, it should also result in more productivity or higher productivity in the nation it is offshored from.
You should see higher tax revenues as a result, which should be plowed back into your local economy.
Weirdly, our economies seem to all be becoming more productive, but not much richer.
This is one of the reasons I sincerely recommend exporting labour standards more aggressively. At least you are not at a disadvantage because you have actual labour protections, and it reduces the value of labour arbitrage.
The other issue is retraining doesn’t work at the speed and scales changes happen. Our brains are not flexible enough to retrain miners into programmers and have them find jobs which are equally well paying.
If we had a number for how much retraining we can actually achieve, or how much time it would take, we could figure out how much we can outsource before it becomes impossible to retrain our citizens.
>One of the current issues we are contending with is the fact that wealth has concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.
And I'm suggesting wage bargaining power has affected that. Not on it's own. But it has had notable effect.
>By deciding what is important and what is not, you are taking on the role of arbiter of subjective merit.
I am as are you but I think I am far from alone. After all the big societal issues that spark these discussions aren't sparked by a few cents of lipstick and somewhat cheaper screens.
>Protectionism is fatal to economies, and simply tanks your drive.
Various protectionist self-serving policies are part of what made japan a threathening rapidly growing economic power untill the US and Europe strongarmed it with....protectionist policy. It's also what made China the power it is today. Etc
And I don't think anyone can argue it stopped japan, china, etc from innovating.
Show me the ultraliberal free for all that did well and isn't super financialized.
"drive" on the other hand is an ephemeral thing that starts falling apart when it is more clearly defined. I can just as easily argue that my drive is hampered because there's no reason for me to attempt to enter plenty of conceivable fields (and even begin to innovate) where i would compete with a multinational utilizing sweatshop workers in Mali. I can also point at the various industries that got internationally more and more consolidated into fewer and fewer players leading to less innovation and "drive".
>This is one of the reasons I sincerely recommend exporting labour standards more aggressively. At least you are not at a disadvantage because you have actual labour protections, and it reduces the value of labour arbitrage.
I don't get to dictate the labour policies of kuala lumpur, etc and any attempt to would be radically more involved costly and far beyond my small countries scope than simply affecting what companies do locally. It is defending a situation with hypotheticals that rarely happen and when they happen they have often happened badly or shift the problem further.
>The other issue is retraining doesn’t work at the speed and scales changes happen. Our brains are not flexible enough to retrain miners into programmers and have them find jobs which are equally well paying.
I think this idea that everyone in the world can be part of the professional-managerial class (PMC) and this striving towards it is also self defeating. You argue about this from a global perspective but also as if it would be good locally in a more developed place if only those with "less desired jobs" could properly retrain and such as if these same reasonings wouldn't apply there. Those jobs that are leaving are desired to me even if I don't do them all. Those wage setting mechanics for jobs in mining, at a call center, assembling components on an assembly line also indirectly affect those wage setting pressures/purchasing power of the software dev, marketing person, etc
> Various protectionist self-serving policies are part of what made japan a threathening rapidly growing economic power untill the US and Europe strongarmed it with....protectionist policy. It's also what made China the power it is today. Etc
See when its an oversimplification of the case history, we will have divergent conclusions.
India's License Raj resulted in decades of slow growth, till the markets were opened in 1990 and incumbents were forced to shape up. Argentina is another case.
Protectionism here is far too broad a term. There are many things which were needed, such as investment in training, labour, export controls, infrastructure investment, industrial policy and more.
The Japanese market was also open to firms, and they most definitely entered and integrated into that market, so its not a one way street.
China is more egregious in that sense, since it has corporate espionage, state protection, and a market which is not really open to foreign compeition (unless you are a luxury brand).
> Show me the ultra-liberal free-for-all that did well
I am not going to ever make that case, since I don't believe that ever existed or succeeded if it did.
> I can just as easily argue that my dr
Sure, feel free to argue. However there are others who just want to make stuff, and don't spend the time arguing.
> I don't get to dictate the labour policies of kuala lumpur,
Says who? Have you ever seen an outsourcing contract? They include terms on how people should be fired, number of working days, and more. Rules vary according to jurisdiction, however the contract can include whatever terms you like.
> I think this idea that everyone in the world can be part of the professional-managerial class
Where did you get this? I am talking about retraining. You could retrain into naval captains for all I care.
> less desired jobs" could properly retrain
Not what I am saying. I am saying the argument for outsourcing used to be supported by the idea that those who lost employment could be retrained into other domains.
However, there are limits to what retraining can actually achieve, which removes the support this argument provided.
>Says who? Have you ever seen an outsourcing contract? They include terms on how people should be fired, number of working days, and more. Rules vary according to jurisdiction, however the contract can include whatever terms you like.
And for an outsourcing contract to be that way there's a certain intent that needs to exist.
> they are seen as equally expensive
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.
Putting it politely, I think you may have xenophobic tendency. And for all your buster, I suggest you work on having a more sane world view.
Not him but....Having a hypercapitalist ultraliberal and globalist worldview that exacerbates wealth inequalities and encourages cutting corners to cut of costs here and there is not the definition of sane. Countries that have had semi-protectionist policies and tried to pull in or protect industry trough policy have done well at times. This includes jobs people now describe as shit.
Why wouldn't I want those to exist locally and pay well?
> If you believe in remote work, then why should it matter from where that work is delivered?
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.
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.
Hey, J, I sent you an email.
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.
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.
Right but it's not like they don't know about flying and can't be instructed and coached? I don't mean to me dismissive, maybe (quite possibly) things are more complicated than that, but ...? Like, okay when an Indian person is working for an Indian airline they're instructed "hey, here's the departures binder." But when they're hired by Lufthansa they get oriented using whatever system and processes are in place at that company. And "hey, don't be rude. To western people, here's what that means beyond what's intuitive to you." How does their previous experience with a binder mean they can't relate to you on a support call?
Spent the last year building a customer-facing AI agent for a Miami law firm with operations in Colombia. The accent question never came up in the build. The knowledge question came up constantly.
Half the inbound clients were Colombian families navigating US immigration. The agent had to know which apostilled documents the Cancillería typically processes in 3 days vs 3 weeks, that "documento de identidad" in Colombia is the cédula not the DNI, that the consulate in Bogotá closes early on Fridays. None of that is in any LLM's pretraining; we hand-built and update the knowledge files monthly.
Your binder-table-at-the-airport story is the deeper one. AI can fake the voice. It can't fake the lived experience. Cheaper to invest in the knowledge files than in the accent layer.
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.
>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.
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.
It’s either that, or letting more people meet their demise for rudeness.
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.
It would often happen to me mid escalation. The local SEA attendant escalating for the purposes of higher level technical support. Most calls like this the caller was relieved to be away from the level 1 support person.
>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?
I think its partially the australian reputation for being assholes overseas, and partly a sort of unionistic culture that tries to demand locals do everything to maximise employment. I got a similar vibe from people in the phillipines, just not to the same extent.
That may be true, but I find Australian accents the most beautiful.
The stereotype is of Australians going over to Singapore for a holiday and being drunk and rude. It's a stereotype, but that's where that hate comes from.
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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.
> 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.
FFS enough with these goddamn witch-hunt anti-shibboleths. It is neither reliable nor clever nor funny.
—Some human that actually uses em-dashes
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
You get calls about a new service or promotion, and it's the diction of the caller that makes you not wish to engage...?!
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Regardless of tech you can always improve your speech. I had a Japanese girlfriend who went through the process and 80% of the results where accomplished by learning the ~20 vowel sounds found in American english (vs her native 5 vowel sounds).
I used to work in call centres for telcos in Canada.
A) this will be used to hire non Canadian with minimal language skills and will be bad for the local labour market without objection from customers
B) accents are troublesome but the biggest issues were people that don’t have the same cultural standards for things like, not lying, not dumping calls that were hard, or doing a good job with complicated systems and accurately logging cases truthfully.
So many problems are created by poor workers (opps we deleted the customers account, oops I transferred them too you).
These were problems that were so bad they had to have specific cultural training for specific nations to get people to the Canadian standard, and many failed. But hey, cheaper labour!
Now I clean houses, and there is so much competition from people from abroad who are flooding the market and undercutting prices and I don’t get government subsidies to live in a hotel…
This is more likely about sales than customer service.
Canadians get a lot of scam calls from Indian call centres. Whether it's furnace cleaners or somebody calling about a fraudulent amazon package you supposedly ordered, it's usually somebody with an Indian accent. It's reached the point where many people simply hang up if they hear an Indian accent on the line. If you're trying to do telemarketing, possibly using the very same call centres that run these scams, that's a huge barrier.
Telus, for its part, is absolutely shameless in its use of aggressive telemarketing. I'm not surprised that they're one of the first companies to employ this sort of innovation. Unfortunately, this tech will likely spread to the scammers almost immediately, assuming it didn't originate with them.
As an aside, here's one of my favourite games to play with telescammers: Pick one word to say over and over again, but attempt to give it a variety of natural inflections, ambiguities, etc. so that it sounds like you're not just saying one word. Then see how long you can keep the scammer on the line. Start your stopwatch the moment you start talking to a human. I once managed over three minutes with the word, "Fuzzy-cuffs". Every minute of their time you waste could be a minute somebody's Grandma isn't being scammed.
I get a ton of calls from "Telus" and "Rogers" and just hang up on all of them - I have no idea how I'd be supposed to tell which are and which aren't scams.
e.g. This was in the news yesterday, but there's basically always a scam of the week/month going around: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/scammers-rogers-custo...
I hate to break it to you but like 60%+ of the time when someone is calling you claiming that they're from Telus/Rogers/Bell they actually aren't.
Personally I'm very suspicious of any company calling. These are businesses that have actively avoided any form of human to human contact in the past two decades, why would they suddenly want to call me?
This is a terrible idea, and I'm far from convinced it will improve clarity.
The solution is to hire people who can be understood, and empower them with the authority to be effective. Elaborate and misleading schemes to mask the problem are disrespectful and insulting to your customers. If the job involves speaking with customers, candidates for it should have the communication skills required. I've dealt on a regular basis with foreigners / ESL'ers who are perfectly capable of speaking English, French, etc. even with an accent.
If the job involved regular heavy lifting, would you hire someone incapable of doing so?
I'm Australian, I need this.
God forbid they hire canadians
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
Refreshed gift link: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/ac7e9825b17af566d8cdb52...
Gift link
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Gift expired.
Email the mods and they can change the link
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?
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...
It also has a lot of annoying vibecoded UX smells.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Good morning, am i speaking with Mr. xxx" is how most formal stuff happens with me in the US.
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)
The second one is almost always used by Healthcare companies in my experience, in a backwards attempt at HIPPA compliance.
They want to make sure they called the right person. Except they know everyone hates getting called like this, so they take "who is this?" as affirmation and then proceed to tell you their company and the call.
Correct.
Nearly all calls i get go to voicemail by default, it's been a great filter with its voice transcription!
Who even calls? It's 2026.
I’d actually be entertained by this.
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.
I've been having issues with Xfinity and have spent hours calling their support numbers, and a few of the conversations I had gave me an eerie feeling. At first I thought the agents were being trained to inflect their accented English to something akin to received pronunciation but their voices had a robotic quality to them that I found odd and couldn't make sense of.
My agent actually said just so you know sir, I am not ai, they are just using ai to change my voice. I think that this is an ugly reflection on American's attitudes about people with accents.
Or an ugly reflection on the intelligibility of some accents.
I had the same experience. Im glad I’m not crazy
I would rather speak an actual AI rather than an offshore operator using AI to disguise their accent.
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.
I prefer neither
Accent training for call centres is a thing as well:
* https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20160317-inside-the-sec...
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.
This is normal, and I don’t think it’s racist.
It's a sign of people with an extremely small bubble; it's not hard to understand other accents. It requires only a little consideration and acclimatisation.
It's not inherently racist, just very lazy, but it can quickly lead to racism.
You say it requires a little acclimatisation, but the caller may well just not know anyone with that specific accent/have never had the chance to acclimatise to it other than this phone call, there's an awful lot of accents in the world.
Additionally I find even though I can understand an Indian accent for example quite well in person, I really struggle with it over the phone due to the compression causing quite poor sound quality and lack of facial expressions to be able to read (which I would be using in person to help me understand a strong unfamiliar accent), whereas when accent is more familiar to me, the poor audio quality and lack of body language isn't nearly as much of an issue, presumably as I just have way way more exposure to the accent so can fill in gaps better.
You don't need to accustom yourself to every individual accent; you need to practice hearing people say things in different ways. Once you are comfortable with some voices that are different to yours, it's much easier to understand other differences as well.
I'm sympathetic to audio quality issues. No one would object if they developed tech to improve call quality, but they didn't.
I think you’re not taking into account that there are people from hundreds of countries out there whose native language is not English, that are not exposed to different English accents at all other than watching movies etc, and suddenly having to deal with weird accents.
You expect everyone to learn every accent?
> It's a sign of people with an extremely small bubble; it's not hard to understand other accents.
This seems to be written from the perspective of a native English speaker only, rather than taking the world population into account, which is in itself racist.
English has a wide variety of accents, expose yourself enough and its probably healthy for your brain. I used to not be able to understand different American accents and I'm from the Midwest. Context and patience is king.
You realize that there are more people in the world that are non-native English speakers? Do you think it’s realistic for them to learn all different accents when they’re barely exposed to English in the first place? Don’t you think it’s useful to have some standardized way to pronounce things?
I couldn’t care less whether it’s American English, British English, or whatever.
But to expect everyone in the world to be comfortable with all possible English accents in the world is madness.
No I don't really have any expectation at all, just sharing my experience how hard it is even with a pretty bog standard native English upbringing.
Neither did I. It is interesting to know that it can absolutely be trained out of you.
So, let’s say you have a team with 10 different nationalities. And they need to interact with all your hundreds of customers all over the world.
You expect everyone to be comfortable with all different accents that exist?
I think this whole discussion is framed from an extremely American perspective, which is extremely ironic as that’s a very racist attitude.
Standardization of pronunciation is not a bad thing.
Just to be clear, I was responding to
"I dont think its racist".
I’m Australian, I’ve had many yanks ask me to my face what language I speak, be shocked we use different money, shocked summer is winter in the southern hemisphere, shocked we drive on the other side of the road, shocked we have atms, etc etc.
Can’t help poor education.
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.
Does anybody have a demo of this technology in use? I'm very curious to see how it sounds in practice. Uncanny or hyperrealistic?
https://www.sanas.ai/#playground check the Accent Translation section
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.
Curious: How could you differentiate it from a foreign-educated English-speaking human?
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.
I wonder about latency especially. Does the AI wait for sentences to finish?
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.
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/educationascultu00carn
It feels like it bears some underpinning and contextual relevance.
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.
FYI OP is from India and is complaining about Indian customer service calls using AI-enhanced American accents.
That said, Sarvam, Gnani, and a number of other Indian AI companies are working on dialect aware TTS for localization usecases.
> idli-dosa-pav-bhaji butteerr-chicken
Is this actually a thing? (Translating to American, it's the culinary equivalent of crepe-pizza-burger-clam chowder.)
i enjoy good eating also.
a sweet korma, or a vindaloo are my most favorite.
Anytime one of those "you can eat cuisine from one region of the world for the rest of your life" memes comes up, I'm baffled that anybody would fail to pick the region that contains both South and Southeast Asia.
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.
Who said it wasn't dehumanizing? I didn't get that takeaway from the limited article.
In the comments.
Startup is selling tech to make call center workers sound like white Americans (2022):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32591709
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.
Usually the title goes: XXX uses AI to replace Call-Agents
Doesn't matter. Whenever Telus calls my standard answer is the call blocker.
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 ...
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.
1) stop picking up the phone
2) if that's not an option, have a pick-up-the-phone agent pick it up
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It strikes me as being more like defense against racism, but I can see how it's also erasure. Still, imagine having it built into a hearing aid?
> Still, imagine having it built into a hearing aid?
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.
Right? Like can we do this everywhere? It can even be a two way thing if that makes it easier for BOTH parties to understand each other.
My current company is global and while everyone can speak English well sometimes accents make it almost impossible to communicate.
Like all things AI, this one's tricky.
Scam calls sounding "more legitimate" because it passes the (unfortunately racist) filters most people have.
In my case at least, (for support calls) it's not a "racist filter", it's that I sometimes simply cannot understand what they are saying.
I had a contractor group come highly recommended, but I literally had to focus so hard on each word that I couldn’t make it work. I don’t know where they were from but I heard easier to understand accents in Delhi.
I realized quickly how it was changing my thinking process to devote so much to each word.
Language fluency isn't racism.
Fluency is different from accent.
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!
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