AI ‘accent masking’ at overseas call centres sparks union backlash in Canada

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https://globalnews.ca/news/11832217/canada-ai-accent-masking-call-centres/

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They can do this but not block out the background noise of 3 other agents chatting coming through or hold music that feels like a knife to the eardrums.

Fuck off. Also, name the company. Name them.

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They intentionally add the background noise in.

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Do they? That makes me incredibly angry.

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Here’s something more to annoy you:

The call system we have at work has an option for a “minimum queue time” So you can make sure that people always have to wait at least a certain amount of time, even with free agents.

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Are you aware of the reason(s) for this? To discourage would be callers from following through?

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I can think of a couple

  • expectation management: sometimes call volume is genuinely high, and if you set a floor at say 10 minutes it only feels like a 5 minute difference if the caller’s actual wait time is 15
  • engineering downtime to allow agents time to complete paperwork or catch up on emails
  • make us all so annoyed with the process of waiting in line we welcome AI agents as liberators
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(My guess, best case scenario) Make queue times during non-busy hours more similar to the queue times during busy hours, so that there doesn’t seem to be a “better” time of day to call, hopefully spreading the call volume throughout the day and creating a more consistent wait time when calling (even if that means the experience is worse than actually necessary at times).

At least that’s probably how someone in management sold the idea.

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I’m sure it’s to give you a sense of “pride and accomplishment” when you give up and fix it yourself “adopt digital self‑solve”.

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If you can look it up yourself quickly, or just ask a person on the phone quickly, lots of people will call.

But if the phonecall is at least 15 minutes of listening to annoying my music first, looking it up yourself might seem like a better idea.

People who really need to talk to a person might be annoyed, but it won’t make them consider a competitor.

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Can we make arson legally allowable for these cases?

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It’s Telus.

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Krisp also has software for this. It certainly does not “capture their natural tone and speaking voice”. It’s very uncanny and doesn’t capture verbal cues like a “heh”.

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“You have to ask yourself, would we be doing this if it was for an accent from Australia or the U.K.?” Grossman questioned.

Welsh and Scottish accents have joined the voice call
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Research has actually shown that people respond better to people with Scottish accents. Apparently at least one big company (might have been British Gas?) factored this into their decision about where to base their upper tier customer service call centres

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If I can hear the person I couldn’t care less. Some of those accents are thick as fuck.

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Double win for right wing thinking: fill the pockets of techbros while white washing the underclass labor force.

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This would be awesome if it also adjusted Canadian accents and made them match the native support tech accent for the support tech.

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Monkey’s paw: everyone is now from Newfoundland

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Comments in Technology@lemmy.zip

Yoo what. AI’s going to give everyone white voice?

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Sorry to Bother You getting too close to reality

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The venn diagram between surveillance capitalism and organised crime will continue to join until they are a circle.

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Free market baby, yeah!

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In the past, call centre workers in India and other low-wage countries would first go though courses teaching them how to pass for someone from the country they were specialising in, where they’d choose a name and persona, learn the accent/dialect and some basics that locals would be expected to know: if they, say, were doing Australia, they may end up watching some episodes of Neighbours, choosing a name like Shane or Kylie, and picking a footy team they support; if England, it’d be Eastenders, Premier League and something like Gareth or Nicky. They’d presumably do this at their own expense, though perhaps the call centre company might forward them the money and get it back from their pay.

Getting AI to make them sound like they’re from Bondi or Essex is probably more cost effective.

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I used to work at a call center for US-Americans in the US, where I was born. The number of times people responded with something like “lol no it’s not,” when I told them my name was infuriating. People used to ask me the weather or about my state history as a test, and I had a guy once call me padme the whole time, I think because he confused India and Naboo.

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But you understand why that happened, right?

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Racism, yes.

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Hate to say it. But after the vast majority of calls you receive from an Indian person are scams. You kinda have to assume they are all scams.

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You’ve never spoken to an Indian person outside of the context of a scam? Under which rock are you living, brother?

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On the phone? Nope never in my life have I received a phone call from a person with an Indian accent that wasn’t a scammer or telemarketer.

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It was an inbound call center, they called the number on their insurance card and got me.

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If they were working Australia they wouldn’t do shit accent-wise, mate. All our call centres are full of pakistanis

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The issue is offshoring of jobs.

If you put a disclaimer that “you’ll be speaking with Rajiv in Ontario and AI will be used to lighten accent for clearer communication” I don’t have a problem with that.

But flip that into a “you’ll be speaking with Bob in Nicaragua and AI will be used to lighten accent for clearer communication” and the sentiment suddenly shifts.

Canadian companies should support local labour and create local jobs.

Clear communication is kinda important, but competency is importanter and Canadian jobs are importantest.

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Canadian companies should support local labour

I suspect Telus is barely a Canadian company.

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It’s a nice sentiment but call centers are going to be entirely AI run before they return to higher income nations. It’s just too much of a competitive disadvantage unless you want to create a locked environment that requires corporations to run them locally even if at a higher cost.

The more likely outcome is Rogers or Bell will run their customer service via AI entirely and some American company will be collecting rent on every token processed.

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Oh don’t get me wrong, you’re probably right and I’m not arguing with that.

But also the solution of forcing them to employ actual people locally is a good solution as far as I’m concerned.

Overall I just don’t give a shit about their bottom line and would rather see them go bankrupt than continue to fuck us over while pulling record profits, be it by offshoring or AI.

Same sentiment for grocery stores and the like too

Pay the people who actually live here and they will put that money back into our economy, cuz the other ones certainly will not.

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“hello mister” -> “ayy cunt”

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Oprima el 2 para español…..para español Mexicano, oprima el pinche tres hijo de su re-puta madre pues que la chingada carnal, estese agusado caray….for English press one.

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laughs in Australian

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I thought we were supposed to just be able to talk to the AI directly… Are things not going so well with turning word guessers into general intelligence brains?

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