New voice-altering AI technology removes call center workers accents no matter where they are in the world
New voice-altering AI technology removes call center workers accents no matter where they are in the world
A NEW artificial intelligence program for scrubbing accents
has been introduced to international customer service call centers.
Critics of the technology say the AI minimizes
culture and identity while call service agents claim to have a better
experience while on the phone.1
An AI program can minimize accents in
real-time to clear up communication between American customers and foreign call
center operators
Businesses
began to outsource call centers to cut costs in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
NPR reported
that businesses have come to rely so intensely on India as a source of IT and
customer support that its nicknamed "the world's back office" in some
circles.
Sanas is an artificial intelligence brand
that is reinventing the offshore call center for businesses with predominately
American and Western clients.
Their algorithm shaves off linguistic tells
that the customer service agent is not American in real time - an amazing feat
of fast-acting AI.
As a
result, the caller is met with an operator who sounds like a 'white American',
regardless of the agent's actual voice inflection or accent.
“If that customer is upset about their bill
being high or their cable not working or their phone not working or whatever,
they’re generally going to be frustrated as soon as they hear an accent,” Sanas
president Marty Massih Sarim explained to The Guardian.
"They’re going to say, 'I want to talk
to somebody in America.'"
"The call centers don’t route calls back
to America, so now the brunt of that is being handled by the agent."
Call
center agents with Sanas' technology are able to activate the voice modulator
with autonomy.
Sanas co-founder Sharath Keshava Narayana
says agents who do apply the technology operate with a stronger sense of
confidence.
While the technology was built with improving
the operator experience in mind - Narayana was, at a time, a call center agent
- some are concerned about cultural erasure.
“Like so many of the things that are pitched
as the solution, it doesn’t take into account people’s dignity or
humanity,” Chris Gilliard told The Guardian.
Gilliard is an academic with experience exposing
subtle discrimination in technologies that are
supposedly designed without bias.
He said of the accent-minimizing technology:
"It seems like an attempt to boil everybody down to some homogenized,
mechanical voice that ignores all the beauty that comes from people’s languages
and dialects and cultures. It’s a really sad thing.”
The company has raised nearly $40million in
funding in two rounds of raising capital.
Next time you interface with a customer service line, the voice you hear might not be the genuine tone of the agent.
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