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.
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.
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.
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.
What Telus is doing with this is to be able to hire even more marginal customer service reps.
But hey, its all global and its all the same, so why not just deal with the marginal english speaker Telus hired.
Telus also has lots of indians they could hire in Abbotsford, but they fired all of them to replace them with indians in india, and now even more marginally english speaking indians.
If you've flown Spirit and Emirates you'll soon learn that its not all the same everywhere, there are very different experiences you get with different companies. Anyone who has dealt with Telus knows they are just doing this to make an even crappier experience for their customers.
The problem is not the accents, its Telus corporate ethos. And yes, I dont use Telus, just like I only flew Spirit once.
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 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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When calling support in my own country it is much faster and easier, because they intuitively understand the type of issue I’m having and can better relate. I question if changing the voice would make it more frustrating, as I’d have similar issues without the obvious explanation as to why it’s happening.
This is a different kind of way of using AI to eliminate local jobs and allow them to more easily outsource it to countries with low labour costs and poor labour conditions.
While I would appreciate being able to understand them better, I would not at all support this. You could maybe make an argument that using this with local staff could have some merit. As at least then they are not exploiting cheap foreign labour. There are still people living within the country of the caller who may still have strong accents like in the example you gave about yourself.
If I’m trying to convey an issue about a flight, per your example, it may very well be to someone who’s never flown or has very different expectations for what it looks like to fly. At one of the airports I was at in India, I was trying to find my gate and was pointed to a guy at a card table with a 3-ring binder, where he flipped through to find the flight. This was maybe 10 years ago; I had never experienced anything like that in the US, even going back several decades. This is a cultural and experiential difference. If someone from that airport in India called me for help (prior to that experience), I would have had an really hard time parsing their problem, as I wouldn’t have any context for seeing a man with a binder about finding gate information. Someone saying that wouldn’t have made any sense to me. Other airports there were more akin to what I’m used to in the US, but still had their local quirks.
This same type of issue could play out regardless of the country. India was the example brought up, but I’ve run into confusion due to cultural differences everywhere I’ve been to some degree. How impactful this is to support will vary based on how common the issue is, but I’m usually not calling support for common issues now that most of those can be handled via a website.
And yes, cultural difference matters. Americans often have more agency to take initiative, on average. Knowing there's an American on the other side puts me at ease, mentally.
But hey, its all global and its all the same, so why not just deal with the marginal english speaker Telus hired.
Telus also has lots of indians they could hire in Abbotsford, but they fired all of them to replace them with indians in india, and now even more marginally english speaking indians.
If you've flown Spirit and Emirates you'll soon learn that its not all the same everywhere, there are very different experiences you get with different companies. Anyone who has dealt with Telus knows they are just doing this to make an even crappier experience for their customers.
The problem is not the accents, its Telus corporate ethos. And yes, I dont use Telus, just like I only flew Spirit once.
Obviously not enough of them. Most are used to under-bidding and being stretched to take the lowest possible price.
It's not X, it's Y = AI pattern.
funny you are using AI to write this comment while AI also rewrites your comment without cultural context. /s
Yeah, a human has never used this pattern before! Good thing AI always leaves this digital signature which is never wrong, so you always know if the person on the other end has used AI.
—Some human that actually uses em-dashes
OP likely just has more self-awareness than most in being able to be honest about it.
I don't actually understand why anyone would be. Please don't waste my time trying to sell to me. If I'm in the market for your service, I'll let you know
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.
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
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/2c42fdd7045b26c60c180ca...
Is this actually a thing? (Translating to American, it's the culinary equivalent of crepe-pizza-burger-clam chowder.)
That said, Sarvam, Gnani, and a number of other Indian AI companies are working on dialect aware TTS for localization usecases.
a sweet korma, or a vindaloo are my most favorite.
My current company is global and while everyone can speak English well sometimes accents make it almost impossible to communicate.
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.
Scam calls sounding "more legitimate" because it passes the (unfortunately racist) filters most people have.
I realized quickly how it was changing my thinking process to devote so much to each word.