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AI Accent Conversion for call centers

• throwaway48476 2y ago
  Coming to a scam call center soon.
  • userbinator 2y ago
    Maybe the accent is a "filter", just like misspelling and grammar mistakes in phishing emails.
    • throwaway48476 2y ago
      If you were trying to educate people about scams filtering out certain accents would be very effective.
      • fnordian_slip 2y ago
        I don't think that's meant by "filter" in this context. I believe instead that it is a reference to scammers filtering out those people who would likely catch on anyway at some point in the scam, so that they can concentrate on the more naive potential victims. Those victims who ignore things like spelling mistakes are much more likely to ignore other warning signs, too.
        • throwaway48476 2y ago
          This is an antiquated theory and it was never really true. The mistakes weren't intentional and wasn't effective for filtering victims. Phishing campaigns and scammers try to make as few mistakes as possible.
          • fnordian_slip 2y ago
            Interesting, thanks for correcting me. Do you have any sources or further insight into this? That theory always intuitively made sense for me, so I never questioned it. But of course a lot of theories like this are repeated precisely because they sound plausible, regardless of the actual truth behind them.
            • throwaway48476 2y ago
              I don't have any direct sources because I'm not in the scam industry. I am generally aware of scam forums and groups where they share TTPs etc. The goal is always to improve and limit the flaws. Personally I've also noticed the refined scam attempts, eg the package texts use proper grammar.
          • hnbad 2y ago
            I guess it feels plausible because it sounds similar to how advertising works: discount supermarkets and dollar stores intentionally try to look cheap and tacky because it makes customers expect their prices to be relatively lower than the competition (whether that is universally true or not). They specifically want to attract people looking for cheap, so they try to look cheap - in their branding, advertising, print materials, etc. Of course scammers aren't literally looking for people trying to be scammed, so the comparison breaks down there. Plus of course there are other strategies than just spray-and-pray (where lower upfront costs by not investing in good copy or plausible design may actually be a good strategy because you can't handle too many marks at once) and with many of those better quality investment definitely increases the chance of success (e.g. spear phishing or whaling).
    • yapyap 2y ago
      haha yeah, if that’s the case it’s an unintended filter though cause the Indian or Nigerian scam call stereotype works cause they have a lot of scam call centres there.
  • trash3 2y ago
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• 3np 2y ago
  Listened to the demos. Did not improve comprehension vs original (all of which were clear enough). Besides now they sound like soulless robots, which is distracting and would at least make me very suspicious if I am speaking to a human at all.
• Springtime 2y ago
  It's an interesting use case. They show two examples of the accent modification: Indian and Filipino. In my experience every Filipino call center I've interacted with (from auto redirected customer support numbers) have learned American accents. While Indian redirected calls ime have had their native accent.
  • hnbad 2y ago
    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.
    • eru 2y ago
      > 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. Any company anywhere always has to look for the best talent at the best price. Otherwise, you'd only hire Nobel laureates, and go bankrupt immediately.
      • hnbad 2y ago
        > Any company anywhere always has to look for the best talent at the best price. Surely you understand the difference between wanting to hire superstars but then adjusting your targets downward based on what salaries you can offer versus wanting to pay as little as possible for call center agents and then adjusting your targets upward based on what you can get away with. "I want the best I can get but I need to be able to afford it" vs "I want to pay nothing but I need to spend enough to get something that works". Expectations for customer service tend towards rock bottom for many businesses. It's something they have to provide or their customers will get very upset (or they might even get them into legal trouble) but it only has to be good enough to be serviceable. And for call centers this usually means you end up having people closely follow a script anyway so you're literally just paying people to be human dialog trees. It's a nuisance but you can't get away with not having it, so you want to pay as little as possible. You're talking about cut-offs for price ranges - that's indeed a given which is why I thought it doesn't bear mentioning. I'm talking about whether you go over the resulting list sorting from lowest to highest ("best of the cheapest") or highest to lowest ("cheapest of the best").
• hnbad 2y ago
  This is incredibly dehumanizing. I understand the logic behind this product but the entire motivation still boils down to wanting to outsource labor to lower wage countries without the downsides. There's nothing wrong with the "Indian accent". It's not challenging. It's Indian English. There's nothing wrong with Phillipine English either. Those are just different regional varieties of English and people who speak them are often native speakers. These are native languages in their countries and they were introduced at the barrel of a gun. We don't call American accents "challenging" to speakers of other varieties of English either - the only reason other native speakers genuinely tend to not find the General American accent challenging is that they grew up on a diet of American media, there's nothing special about the accent itself. As a European, I do find Indian English more difficult to listen to. But that's because I have less exposure to it (or rather had less exposure in my formative years - it's omnipresent if you work in tech these days). But that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with their variety of English or "accent". The reason this product exists isn't to aid communication or "break down barriers", it's to allow American companies to outsource call center jobs to lower wage countries without having their customers complain about being exposed to foreign accents when trying to access customer service. This solves one superficial "problem" (at least if it worked better than in the demo and actually masked the accent completely rather than "fixing" some of the "challenges") without actually improving service for customers. It merely reduces some of the friction introduced by purely profit-seeking cost cutting measures. Not to mention that because this literally targets the bottom feeders who want to mask the fact they outsourced their call centers, this will also enable scammers to create even more plausible fake personas (now that most elderly people have wisened up to be suspicious when "Jim from Chase Bank" has a thick "Indian accent"). EDIT: "Notice how my natural tone and personality shine through. This mode allows me to stay authentic, making every interaction more personal" she says while reading out a prewritten script word-by-word. It's not about maintaining authenticity or personality, it's only about still appearing as humans so customers don't think you've gone all the way and just replaced these jobs with AI entirely (and maybe feel bad about yelling at them when they get upset with your products or services).
  • userbinator 2y ago
    Call centres are already essentially humans acting like robots, so direct your complaints about "dehumanizing" to the concept itself. At least this might make it easier to understand them.
• devonsolomon 2y ago
  Humans are incredibly perceptive, and the soft robotic buzz (as in the demos) will do as much to diminish rapport as a foreign accent.
• delichon 2y ago
  I work in a team with several Indian developers. After around three years of that I still struggle with some of their accents. I'd love to have real-time accent conversion in our daily standups. Or subtitles. The same goes for a thoroughly locally accented colleague who mumbles a lot. I imagine it won't be long before this tech starts showing up in hearing aids.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • jwally 2y ago
    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.
    • nehal3m 2y ago
      The prospect of inserting a plausible bullshit generator owned by a tech megacorp between myself and the outside world seems more dystopian than making my life better.
  • devsda 2y ago
    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.
  • dzhiurgis 2y ago
    Or a zoom and slack plugin. I can’t imagine Apple or Google adding this to tho, far too “unethical”.
• jll29 2y ago
  A few years ago, Edinburgh-based Rhetorical Systems produced custom corporate voices. They were unsuccessful due to lack of demand and high cost), and (the company that is today called) Nuance snapped them up. Now, with LLMs, voice morphing and custom voices will be possible at much more reasonable price points and you might not have to spend hours in the studio recording piles of words that contain all triphones you need to sample.
• keybored 2y ago
  Everyone understands Indian accents if they are just accents and not poorly spoken English as well. See the demo. Both are perfectly understandable. It does not enhance communication. So what would be the point? Maybe to disassociate from Indian scammers. Maybe to enhance trust by fooling people into thinking that they are talking to a person from a similar culture (the AI doesn’t sound not Indian by the way though) them instead of an outsourced worker on the other side of the world.
  • rightbyte 2y ago
    I think the pitch is that you can make Texan and Scottish customers both think the call centre is local.
• johnisgood 2y ago
  It is going to be perfect for Indian scammers, but then again, we already had this where you could use anyone's voice, called voice cloning, voice synthesis. Scammers already use the relative of the target's voice at times.
• kleiba 2y ago
  Interesting use case, but I can hear lots of audio artifacts in the demo video. This doesn't seem consumer-ready just yet. Apart from that, it also raises some ethical question. Your voice, the tone and its expression, is probably one of the most important features that define you as a person. I cannot imagine anybody being psyched about their voice being changed in a way that's out of their control.
  • johnisgood 2y ago
    I can hear the artifacts, too, and I can still tell it is an Indian speaking.
    • kleiba 2y ago
      In all fairness, I don't think the goal is to hide that completely, just to mask the accent to some degree in order to improve intelligibility for speakers from different accent regions.
      • johnisgood 2y ago
        Yeah, for that there is voice cloning anyway.
        • kleiba 2y ago
          Online though?
          • johnisgood 2y ago
            I am pretty sure they do exist as online services, in fact, there may be more online solutions than offline, considering how much people love those. Gotta have your recordings.
      • dzhiurgis 2y ago
        Makes far more sense to use this on receiving end then
• topynate 2y ago
  It's not perfect but it does make speech easier to understand, which is the ostensible purpose. There's a slight uncanny valley effect. Latency requirements are very tight, and Indian English is actually timed differently to American or British English, so it's a hard problem. The company should consider targeting RP instead of General American. In my experience attempting the latter with a slight Asian tinge makes you sound like you're trying to be a WASP, while speaking the former with the same small errors makes you sound like you studied PPE at Oxford.
• robviren 2y ago
  The processing made them sound robotic in my opinion. I'm certain enough engineering dollars thrown at the problem and you could make anybody sound like anybody else live. I am not in love with the idea that the fate of AI is to boil down each person to a lowest common denominator. I'm curious what others think, at what point between totally unprocessed source material and everyone sounding like the same four marketable AI voices does a solution like this become problematic? I get the intention of the product, appreciate the focus on clear communication, but can't help feeling some will take it further and I just don't like the subtext of forcing people to sound like some core "good" voice. What will be lost in that?
  • cyanydeez 2y ago
    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.
  • nasmorn 2y ago
    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.
    • robviren 2y ago
      I agree, but business won't leave it there. Will you be as comfortable if people in India or China use helpful technology to clear up your confusing accent if you hoped to learn another language? I have never seen a technology stay in the box we want it to. What I have seen is tech foisted onto society without a second thought as to the impact. Clear communication is a laudable goal. But I fear what might be lost in the ruthless pursuit of it.
• gertrunde 2y ago
  I'm not sure this is as significant as their marketing folk would have us believe. (I know, shocking). Accent is rarely the whole issue in dealing with non-native language call centres, it's just one part of the language skills package. - It's not going to help if the caller isn't very good with the callee's language. - It's not going to help the caller understand the callee any better. - In effect, I feel the only language barrier it's helping to overcome, is the callee's feelings towards the caller - although I'm sure that is of some help. (It maybe doesn't help their case that their test cases use people with reasonably good english language skills anyway).
• dwighttk 2y ago
  If AI is so good why not just shut down the call center and build a new server farm?
  • 3np 2y ago
    All in due time. This is one step on the way.
    • dwighttk 2y ago
      Seems orthogonal
• bcowde 2y ago
  "preserving the speaker’s voice for authenticity" - I knew we'd get to this point, but masking your accent seems like the most inauthentic practice - and, dare I say, downright deceitful.
• seanvelasco 2y ago
  majority of Filipinos DO NOT speak like that. the Filipino actors in the demo particularly perform a caricature of a what a Filipino sounds like that's exaggerated. i know for a fact the actors don't speak like that in real life. in professional settings, Filipinos are known for a lack of accent. they are more known for mispronouncing words that are commonly accepted in Filipino-English. i feel like it should be the other way around. accents should be converted FOR the caller or call center. callers can be trained to speak a certain way. but it's more difficult for them to develop the "ear" to understand accents from other nationals.
• Havoc 2y ago
  Indian accents to me seem to be quite regional as well. Ranges all the way from I don't even consciously register it to I literally can't understand a thing. In both cases native Indians physically in India so I'm not talking "westernized" Indian accent. For the later, where it is an obstacle to communicating a tool like this seems reasonable. It's not that different from a translation tool across languages.
• booleandilemma 2y ago
  Maybe it's because I work with Indians every day, but the people in the videos sounded fine even without the software. They should try it on someone with a really thick accent, like this guy: https://youtu.be/pj705DvCSxg?si=Am1Z2ILqfu9wvu_I https://youtu.be/pj705DvCSxg?si=Am1Z2ILqfu9wvu_I Do they have software for the reverse case? Can it give someone an Indian accent, for example?
• ohgr 2y ago
  I had a scammer calling me using this a while ago. The accent was perfect but the English grammar was terrible.
• dzhiurgis 2y ago
  Wonder what’s the latency like. I’ve noticed some agents are so quick they ask “hello?” 500ms later. Might be pressuring tactic tho.
• mariaelisabeth 2y ago
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• mariaelisabeth 2y ago
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