Telus Uses AI to Alter Call-Agent Accents
letsdatascience.com144 points by debo_ 7 hours ago
144 points by debo_ 7 hours ago
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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 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 concept, especially when it gets to the point where Filipinos will actively practice out any trace of their accent to sound as white as possible. You are now altering your identity in order to appease some racist shithead overseas and fit into their projection of what the world ought to look and sound like.
My mother was proud of the fact that she had "no accent" and laboured for years to make that the case. Contrariwise I consider this cultural genocide and the erasure of an entire people's way of speech.
Just goes to show how fucking full of shit Canadians are when they parade around their "commitment to diversity and inclusion." Orwellian lies and lip service, from both Telus for enacting these measures, and the callers who presumably spurred Telus to take this action.
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.
>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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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 suppresion 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 assemblyline. 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
>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?
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.
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.
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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 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)
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).
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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)
Correct.
Nearly all calls i get go to voicemail by default, it's been a great filter with its voice transcription!
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
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 would rather speak an actual AI rather than an offshore operator using AI to disguise their accent.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
1) stop picking up the phone
2) if that's not an option, have a pick-up-the-phone agent pick it up
Does anybody have a demo of this technology in use? I'm very curious to see how it sounds in practice. Uncanny or hyperrealistic?
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.
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.
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.
Usually the title goes: XXX uses AI to replace Call-Agents
Doesn't matter. Whenever Telus calls my standard answer is the call blocker.
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.
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 ...
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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.
My current company is global
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.