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 wa

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).