There is a huge cottage industry of "voice and accent" coaches in call centers in India, Philippines and other BPO destinations. This is part of what many of th

There is a huge cottage industry of "voice and accent" coaches in call centers in India, Philippines and other BPO destinations. This is part of what many of those operators would call pre-process training i.e., the standard training one undergoes in a call center (eg: operating the phone) that is common across processes regardless of business verticals as opposed to process training which is a specific outsourced task (eg: banking customer service). Mostly, these operators train for a neutral accent i.e., an accent that is neutral enough to minimize comprehension issues. It is a small but concrete subset of problems that the operators have a training procedure. The startup's solution seems targeted at this, but didn't anticipate the blowback. But their clients are the customer service organizations that outsource to these regions where accent neutralization is a need (most often mandated by their North-American or UK clients who are their outsourcing sponsors). Did you know that many call centers also have AI sentiment analysis on the voice calls to show whether the interaction is "neutral, angry, happy" etc., and flag the sentiment on screen for the customer service rep and prompt the appropriate script for them to refer to direct the call to a favorable outcome? That was hot about 10 years ago (although with questionable effectiveness).