AI Accent Conversion for call centers

In the case of a customer service transaction I don’t really care about someone’s individuality. I just want to understand what they are saying. I once checked into a hotel in London and couldn’t understand the Indian staff for the life of me. How is it better to make them say every sentence three times. Indians are often harder to understand for me than someone who just speaks English badly because their vocabulary might actually be large and varied and they use very foreign to me phrasing. If someone is just a foreigner with little knowledge of English their 1-2k vocabulary will be much easier to understand even if their pronounciation is strange.

> I just don't like the subtext of forcing people to sound like some core "good" voice. What will be lost in that?

Would you have a problem with using full translation?

The difference here is that the (accent) translator doesn't have to do as much work.

Also it should work both ways: foreign language/voices can be converted to local Indian languages/accents too.

> I am not in love with the idea that the fate of AI is to boil down each person to a lowest common denominator.

Are you kidding, that's the holy grail! When I need customer service I want every interaction to be by the book, zero personality, from them or from me.

The problem is it's not right now: when somebody with a non-Western English accent answers a call to a Western company (Airbnb, your bank, etc) it's pretty much a guarantee that you're about to deal with massive incompetence and apathy. You don't notice this until you live long-term in a homogenous country, where the people answering customer service calls are the same people you see on the bus/train after work. It's like a lightning blast into your brain: "holy cow, customer service actually works here?".

And you might say, "well incompetence and apathy is all call center people who work for American companies are empowered to give you, regardless of the accent or geography".

But that's not true: Filipino/a call center employees are gushing with upbeat script-following good humor, but they never solve your problem.

Whereas "Dave" from the midwest sighs and rolls his eyes before taking every call but he actually figures out the reason you're calling and uses his brain to try to resolve it, in the boundaries he's empowered within.

That's not a popular thing to think or say, but I know I'm not the only one who, after literally hundreds of these interactions, has developed this heuristic.

And you might say, "well 'Dave' from the midwest is by definition higher up the ladder and more empowered to solve your problem, because otherwise you'd be getting someone in the Philippines/India who's only allowed to follow their script".

Sure. But that's why it'd be great if there was one common-denominator: anybody who answers your call has as much ability to resolve issues as anybody else, tries as hard as anybody else, communicates as clearly as anybody else... that's the holy grail.

I dunno man, Capitalism wants us all to be the same grey goo buying slop, but it's clear people and mammals in aggregate desire to be individualized, and these two forces are in opposition but only one of them is currently taking over the world in authority and power.

Never even though of the implications for AI+AR for mundane seeming applications like hearing aides. Really cool. Even when you remove the flood of johnny-come-lately, "just add AI" marketing - the amount of things that can be enhanced to legitimately make peoples lives better truly does seem staggering.

This is fine for online meetings but for in-person meetings, it is a minefield of interpersonal relationship risks if not used discreetly. Can't predict how the other party reacts.

I have had a mix of colleagues with diverse backgrounds, none of them were particularly challenging to understand except for one native chinese speaker. In the beginning, we have indirectly asked for clarifications but stopped doing that after someone candidly mentioned that there's risk of offending the other person. Now we just send meeting minutes to avoid misunderstandings.

Or a zoom and slack plugin. I can’t imagine Apple or Google adding this to tho, far too “unethical”.

Maybe the accent is a "filter", just like misspelling and grammar mistakes in phishing emails.

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Phillipine English is apparently exported to much of Asia via Filipino English teachers (as they're native speakers of their variety of English) so this is likely not just about the Phillipines.

Indian English on the other hand is of course about India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc.

It's pretty obvious what this product is for and who the target market is. Companies don't outsource their call centers to countries where these varieties of English are spoken by the majority of English speakers because they are looking for the best talents.

Yeah in the examples, while the demo is good, it is, at the same time, noticeable and there's a different type of distortion

(I know they don't do this, but it would be funny if it converted the customer accent back into the agent's accent)

Having visited and spent time in .ph. The accident is not "learned" its thr default.

I can hear the artifacts, too, and I can still tell it is an Indian speaking.