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Telus Uses AI to Alter Call-Agent Accents
- gnabgib 5mo agoOriginal source (please submit): https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-telus-ai-accents-customer-service-agents/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-telus-ai-ac... Related last year: AI Accent Conversion for call centers (48 points, 70 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43514141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43514141 Call centres using AI to 'whiten' Indian accents (8+6 points, 0+6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43246376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43246376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43292311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43292311
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- parpfish 5mo ago[flagged]
- ofjcihen 5mo agoRight? Like can we do this everywhere? It can even be a two way thing if that makes it easier for BOTH parties to understand each other. My current company is global and while everyone can speak English well sometimes accents make it almost impossible to communicate.
- b40d-48b2-979e 5mo agoMy current company is global Maybe we aren't meant to have global companies that exist to exploit tax and labor laws? Neoliberalism is a large reason for why the world is how it is now.
- mikestorrent 5mo agoIt strikes me as being more like defense against racism, but I can see how it's also erasure. Still, imagine having it built into a hearing aid?
- energy123 5mo ago> Still, imagine having it built into a hearing aid? Modifying sensory inputs is going to become more of a thing for sure. The modification I want is smarter noise cancelling. The modification I'll probably get is something more dystopian and adversarial.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- guessmyname 5mo agoI think this is a good idea. Almost every time I get a call from TELUS about a new service or promotion, it’s someone from the Philippines or India. A lot of them speak English fluently, but the accent and phrasing can be pretty different from what I’m used to, and I don’t always catch everything they’re saying. Sometimes I feel like I’m guessing a big chunk of the conversation, which makes me not want to engage, especially on sales calls. It matters more when I’m the one calling them for billing or technical support. In those cases, clarity really counts, and it can get frustrating when I have to keep asking for repeats or try to piece things together. Honestly, I’d love something like this for my own speech too. I’m Japanese and have a fairly strong accent, and it would be nice if people could understand me more easily without having to guess.
- lukev 5mo agoYou get calls about a new service or promotion, and it's the diction of the caller that makes you not wish to engage...?!
- philangist 5mo agoI believe this applies to a large segment of the population. Diction, tonality, and "vibe" have a big effect on how open recipients are to cold calls, at least according to my SDR friends. OP likely just has more self-awareness than most in being able to be honest about it.
- bluefirebrand 5mo agoPersonally I'm just not open to cold calls, period, ever. Not ever I don't actually understand why anyone would be. Please don't waste my time trying to sell to me. If I'm in the market for your service, I'll let you know
- gwbas1c 5mo agoThe problem with cold calls is that you expect random people to stop what they are doing and listen to an advertisement; often for something they don't want or need. Whatever you interrupted is far more important to them than whatever you're selling; especially if you haven't introduced enough filters in your process to ensure you're calling the right people. We should either ban cold calling completely or introduce enough friction to the process that cold callers are incentivized to more closely filter who they call. (IE, I get cold calls trying to sell solar panels. The caller knows my address, and can see the solar panels on my roof on satellite photos. They just shouldn't bother calling me.) It's because there's an imbalance of cost: It's cheaper to just nag me than to actually research if I've already bought the product or are interested in the product.
- Brajeshwar 5mo agoOh! Dear Lord. I still want to hear my Indian friends speak Indian to me during Support Calls. These days, I’m hearing American accents trying to calm me down over my complaints on that excess masala in the idli-dosa-pav-bhaji butteerr-chicken combo in the El Camino Eatery in the outskirts of Jhalandar.
- rolph 5mo agoi enjoy good eating also. a sweet korma, or a vindaloo are my most favorite.
- aidenn0 5mo agoAnytime one of those "you can eat cuisine from one region of the world for the rest of your life" memes comes up, I'm baffled that anybody would fail to pick the region that contains both South and Southeast Asia.
- decimalenough 5mo ago> idli-dosa-pav-bhaji butteerr-chicken Is this actually a thing? (Translating to American, it's the culinary equivalent of crepe-pizza-burger-clam chowder.)
- alephnerd 5mo agoFYI OP is from India and is complaining about Indian customer service calls using AI-enhanced American accents. That said, Sarvam, Gnani, and a number of other Indian AI companies are working on dialect aware TTS for localization usecases.
- wewewedxfgdf 5mo agoDoesn't matter. As soon as I hear the "Mr Firstname and how are you today?" I hang up. Call spammers have not worked out that a formal polite greeting is a big giveaway.
- walrus01 5mo agoDon't tell the call spammers this or they'll train all their "agents" to start phone calls with "what's up, bro" or something they think is the stereotypical opposite of formal.
- tehlike 5mo ago"Good morning, am i speaking with Mr. xxx" is how most formal stuff happens with me in the US.
- serf 5mo agoit's a huge red flag for me if I hear that without an origin. "Am I speaking with X? This is Y from Z Corp." is okay. "Am I speaking with X?..." is a spammer, a complaint, or someone trying to serve me papers. (in the US)
- tehlike 5mo agoCorrect. Nearly all calls i get go to voicemail by default, it's been a great filter with its voice transcription!
- dude250711 5mo agoWho even calls? It's 2026.
- whatisthiseven 5mo agoThe second one is almost always used by Healthcare companies in my experience, in a backwards attempt at HIPPA compliance. They want to make sure they called the right person. Except they know everyone hates getting called like this, so they take "who is this?" as affirmation and then proceed to tell you their company and the call.
- ares623 5mo agoLike all things AI, this one's tricky. Scam calls sounding "more legitimate" because it passes the (unfortunately racist) filters most people have.
- inventor7777 5mo agoIn my case at least, (for support calls) it's not a "racist filter", it's that I sometimes simply cannot understand what they are saying.
- SV_BubbleTime 5mo agoI had a contractor group come highly recommended, but I literally had to focus so hard on each word that I couldn’t make it work. I don’t know where they were from but I heard easier to understand accents in Delhi. I realized quickly how it was changing my thinking process to devote so much to each word.
- not_a_bot_4sho 5mo agoLanguage fluency isn't racism.
- kennywinker 5mo agoFluency is different from accent.
- caonidaye 5mo agoUsually the title goes: XXX uses AI to replace Call-Agents
- isaisabella 5mo ago[dead]
- superkuh 5mo agoComcast (Xfinity) is doing this too. I was absolutely convinced I was talking to an artificial voice but the human-like capabilities of that voice to respond were far beyond what I'd expect out of LLMs. I think it must have just been done to hide the accent.
- stacktraceyo 5mo agoI had the same experience. Im glad I’m not crazy
- aspicytaco4me 5mo agoMy agent actually said just so you know sir, I am not ai, they are just using ai to change my voice. I think that this is an ugly reflection on American's attitudes about people with accents.
- eowln 5mo agoOr an ugly reflection on the intelligibility of some accents.
- stuxnet79 5mo agoI've been having issues with Xfinity and have spent hours calling their support numbers, and a few of the conversations I had gave me an eerie feeling. At first I thought the agents were being trained to inflect their accented English to something akin to received pronunciation but their voices had a robotic quality to them that I found odd and couldn't make sense of.
- j45 5mo agoThis will also let the telco further train agents to handle calls without the humans once enough scenarios are in place. Still, they could just give the employees training to learn additional accents. The English accents around the world were left behind with the subsets of English people were taught to be able to aspire to entry level administrative jobs. Someone recommended this to read, not sure if anyone else has read it: https://archive.org/details/educationascultu00carn https://archive.org/details/educationascultu00carn It feels like it bears some underpinning and contextual relevance.
- kelseydh 5mo agoDoes anybody have a demo of this technology in use? I'm very curious to see how it sounds in practice. Uncanny or hyperrealistic?
- 14 5mo agoFound a video from a couple years back using this tech. Wasn't Telus in the video but they demonstrated it and the change was subtle but definitely noticable. See how it was 2 years old I am certain the technology has greatly improved since that time.
- maxrmk 5mo agoI ran into this (or a similar service) when cancelling comcast a few weeks ago. It worked _really_ well. It was slightly uncanny, but I think most people wouldn’t notice anything. It was only some awkward phrasing that made it obvious to me.
- DANmode 5mo agoCurious: How could you differentiate it from a foreign-educated English-speaking human?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- jorisw 5mo agoI wonder about latency especially. Does the AI wait for sentences to finish?
- ing33k 5mo agohttps://www.sanas.ai/#playground https://www.sanas.ai/#playground check the Accent Translation section
- chris_explicare 5mo ago[flagged]
- sjtgraham 5mo agoI would rather speak an actual AI rather than an offshore operator using AI to disguise their accent.
- allthetime 5mo agoI prefer neither
- mrweasel 5mo agoThe problem with almost all call centers is that their "agents" aren't given any agency. They can attempt to convince you that your bill is actually correct, or escalade our issue to technical support, which may or may not get back to you. I don't see how any amount of AI will fix the complete lack of trust that many companies seems to have in their agents, regardless of them being software or humans. Most modern call centers / support is completely pointless and almost nothing would be lost by not having them. This is assuming that you'd provide just a half decent self service and have actual information available, written in a clear, easy to read, language.
- diego_moita 5mo agoDoesn't matter. Whenever Telus calls my standard answer is the call blocker.
- dlenski 5mo agoWhile this is interesting and newsworthy, especially for those of us who live in Canada and have to deal with Canada’s Telco/Internet monopolies… this "article" itself appears to be a crappy LLM summary of some other piece of information. Anyone have the original source?
- duskdozer 5mo agoIt also has a lot of annoying vibecoded UX smells.
- cormorant 5mo agoSource publications cited in first sentence but not linked. https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/2026/05/05/telus-uses-ai-to-change-agent-accents-rogers-and-bell-wont/ https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/2026/05/05/telus-uses-ai-to-ch... , https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-telus-ai-accents-customer-service-agents/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-telus-ai-ac...
- shevy-java 5mo agoDagnabbit - I was so used to imagining Apu from Simpsons in callcenters. Now I have to deal with unknown language dialects of fake-AI-agents wasting my time ... Oldschool callcenters often had a human! Now I "interact" with AI ...
- baq 5mo ago1) stop picking up the phone 2) if that's not an option, have a pick-up-the-phone agent pick it up
- penguin_booze 5mo agoThis is positive news, although my use-case is different. I've been looking for a tool that'll mask off the diarrhea of 'like', 'I mean', and 'you know' from some americans' speak. MEGA: Make English Great Again!
- 48848585959 5mo ago[flagged]
- b0ner_t0ner 5mo agoStartup is selling tech to make call center workers sound like white Americans (2022): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32591709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32591709
- stingraycharles 5mo agoThat’s a significantly more rage-bait-y title. As a foreigner myself that deals with customers all over the world, it’s sometimes genuinely difficult to understand people with thick accents. You get better at it when you’re exposed to the same accents frequently, but you still have awkward moments where the other person has to repeat themselves several times (or worse, a colleague taking over), which just makes everyone feel bad. This happens often in video calls as well. I wonder if it doesn’t make more sense to do it on the client side. I would love to have an app installed on my machine that does this for me, because then I also have the option to turn it on and off.
- worthless-trash 5mo agoI had 'accent neutralization' training as part of my hire for a US company in 2004. Americans could not understand my Australian accent. It still affected my accent to this day.
- stingraycharles 5mo agoThis is normal, and I don’t think it’s racist.
- franktankbank 5mo agoEnglish has a wide variety of accents, expose yourself enough and its probably healthy for your brain. I used to not be able to understand different American accents and I'm from the Midwest. Context and patience is king.
- stingraycharles 5mo agoYou realize that there are more people in the world that are non-native English speakers? Do you think it’s realistic for them to learn all different accents when they’re barely exposed to English in the first place? Don’t you think it’s useful to have some standardized way to pronounce things? I couldn’t care less whether it’s American English, British English, or whatever. But to expect everyone in the world to be comfortable with all possible English accents in the world is madness.
- franktankbank 5mo agoNo I don't really have any expectation at all, just sharing my experience how hard it is even with a pretty bog standard native English upbringing.
- worthless-trash 5mo agoNeither did I. It is interesting to know that it can absolutely be trained out of you.
- redsocksfan45 5mo ago[dead]
- Ozzie-D 5mo ago[flagged]
- cyanf 5mo agoI had a strange call with a support rep recently. They sounded a tinge strange, like they’ve almost crossed the uncanny valley, only to succumb at the final 3% stretch. I was suspicious, but their ability to understand my complex request and the relatively low latency make an LLM -> TTS or e2e voice model unlikely. This post finally solved the mystery.
- SkyeCA 5mo agoTelus is completely out of touch. The issue hasn't been the accents of most agents, at least not for years at this point, it's the horrendous quality microphones the agents are given and the noisy conditions they're forced to work in. It's hard to decipher anyone when you can hear 30 other people in the background and the audio is choppy.
- Marsymars 5mo agoNot Telus, but I was getting an insurance quote last week and actually gave up after five minutes and told the agent they were just too difficult to understand with their poor microphone and background noise.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- LurkandComment 5mo agoHere's how its dehumanizing: You say they're not good enough, they smell, they don't fit in, but you take their culture, their clothing, their food and rebrand it as scandinavian, high fashion, chic fitness, pumpkin spice. They do the things you value but for their skin color. You pay them colored people wages, with colored people working conditions with no social mobility outside of where they live, but you literally rob them of voice. Your lack of ability to see "why this is dehumanizing is" why you're replacing yourselves with A.I. "AI is better" f*k. AI is controlled by a few platform owners. Once everyone is replaced with AI they're jacking up the cost and no one of any color is eating. Just a few rich. So yeah, i can understand why you think it isn't dehumanizing. You don't see when you do it to others, or when we do it to ourselves.
- skinfaxi 5mo agoWho said it wasn't dehumanizing? I didn't get that takeaway from the limited article.
- LurkandComment 5mo agoIn the comments.
- throw0101c 5mo agoAccent training for call centres is a thing as well: * https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20160317-inside-the-secret-world-of-accent-training https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20160317-inside-the-sec...
- NickC25 5mo agoSad. I think companies that have a near or quasi monopoly over regulated utilities should be banned from hiring cheap labor from developing countries. Canada, USA, doesn't matter - if our taxes subsidize a market or entrench a player within an important market (telecom, physical infrastructure, etc), they should be mandated to keep the money in local economies. I'm American, and find it deeply offensive if a company wants to offshore despite getting tax breaks, government protections against new market entrants, etc. I'm not paying tax money so a utility can raise prices, pay its executives more, spend more on lobbying, and outsource labor to 3rd world or developing countries. I don't give a fuck how well those folks in those countries speak English.
- Marsymars 5mo agoI had a particularly frustrating experience recently with a heavily accented customer service rep. I had to give them various pieces of information that had to be accurately transcribed, e.g. a Hide My Email - generated email address. Normally for this like this, I tell rep that I'm going to read the full email, then spell it out using the NATO phonetic alphabet, then read it out again, and this usually works great. This particular rep was entirely unfamiliar with the NATO phonetic alphabet and couldn't reliably make out make bog-standard North American accent, so I spent probably five minutes on the phone to just read off my email address with various iterations of "T AS IN TANGO"... "did you say M as in mango?". By the end I still was not confident that they'd accurately taken down my email. I don't think AI accent-altering would have fixed this exchange.
- appz3 5mo ago[flagged]