6 ms·

I 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 t

I 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 ago
You 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    Personally 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 ago
    The 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.
al_borland 5mo ago
Changing an accent doesn’t change the content the person on the other end receives it with. Most of my issues with overseas support is that they have no real context for my problem. It’s not just a language barrier, it’s a culture barrier. When calling support in my own country it is much faster and easier, because they intuitively understand the type of issue I’m having and can better relate. I question if changing the voice would make it more frustrating, as I’d have similar issues without the obvious explanation as to why it’s happening.
- Fogest 5mo ago
  The other issue is that this further incentivizes companies to off-shore their support. A lot of the reason companies don't use it comes back to the reputational style issue. Where people don't want to feel like they are getting crappy support and having to deal with not understanding people. This is a different kind of way of using AI to eliminate local jobs and allow them to more easily outsource it to countries with low labour costs and poor labour conditions. While I would appreciate being able to understand them better, I would not at all support this. You could maybe make an argument that using this with local staff could have some merit. As at least then they are not exploiting cheap foreign labour. There are still people living within the country of the caller who may still have strong accents like in the example you gave about yourself.
  - cik 5mo ago
    > The other issue is that this further incentivizes companies to off-shore their support Why is this a problem? Why are we so attached to the notion that a role must be completed from a specific jurisdiction (outside of regulatory). If you believe in remote work, then why should it matter from where that work is delivered? Plenty of small companies offshore early support, to reduce costs. In many cases this provides jobs in economies that otherwise doesn't have them, and can lead to a tech industry that in turn hires globally. There are several economies that received a boost this way, and now benefit. I don't see the problem. Yes, there may be uncomfortable shuffling of roles, layoffs,etc. But, as a believer in globalization, this will just happen. Yes, it will impact me as well.
henry2023 5mo ago
Regardless of tech you can always improve your speech. I had a Japanese girlfriend who went through the process and 80% of the results where accomplished by learning the ~20 vowel sounds found in American english (vs her native 5 vowel sounds).
nunez 5mo ago
I think it's dehumanizing. Yes, they have accents. English isn't their first language. TELUS decided to move jobs they could have given to Canadians offshore to save a buck or two. We're already conditioned to treat service reps like punching bags; now we're literally taking away their voices and further devaluing them. Not okay.
- Sophira 5mo ago
  On the one hand, I agree with you, and your reasoning is self-evident IMO. On the other, too many customers are complete racist dicks to people who they perceive as not "belonging to their country". I... don't think this is the solution to that problem (people will just start applying their racist views elsewhere), but it could be argued by some that it might help. I'm still against this, don't get me wrong - we absolutely should not be doing this to anybody. I can understand the appeal, though.
  - frays 5mo ago
    Not sure why you're being downvoted but this is the truth if you live in a western country (probably other countries too but I have never lived outside of a non-Western country).
  - ffsm8 5mo ago
    > On the other, too many customers are complete racist dicks to people who they perceive as not "belonging to their country" nunez alluded to the reason why people will do that. And no, it's not racist in the way you're trying to frame it. The callers are angry that they're being forced to talk with people which don't even speak their language well enough for it to be a non-issue. Despite being paying customers. Because the company had a genius MBA which wanted a bigger bonus, so they outsourced/offshored it. These workers may not deserve this treatment, but it's completely understandable - and the foreign workers ARE the representative of the company doing this shit. And thus... Framing this behavior as racism will not help your message whatsoever.
    - thedevilslawyer 5mo ago
totetsu 5mo ago
Japanese politicians and CEOs like talk about how AI and robotics will offset labor shortages. The xenophobe party goes so far as to say that this means there is no need to dilute the pure blood of japan, by offering any path to stable residency for foreign workers. But I think just as easily AI could serve to solve the real problems of integration and understanding from just accepting foreign workers. Of course this doesn't solve the imaginary race purity problems of the xenophobes.. But now I can see a path, where maybe they could just opt into some filter, where all foreign humanity and culture is just altered by AI to look like Japanese things, so they dont ever have to feel uncomfortable.
Teever 5mo ago
I hate to break it to you but like 60%+ of the time when someone is calling you claiming that they're from Telus/Rogers/Bell they actually aren't.
- mrweasel 5mo ago
  Personally I'm very suspicious of any company calling. These are businesses that have actively avoided any form of human to human contact in the past two decades, why would they suddenly want to call me?
c7b 5mo ago
I don't like it. It's inevitable, but no reason to cheer it on. I find it similar to Google Mail or YouTube autotranslating content without opt-in (and sometimes opt-out). It's continuing a trend of you can't really trust the content you see is the content someone else sees or what they sent. It says it only changes accents, soon it'll filter swear words and what else? The end game for the legal use of such tech is always injecting ads. And with this particular tech, we know that the legal uses will be a negligible fraction of the real uses.
- b112 5mo ago
  It's also going to be a landmine. First you can't force ToS on support calls, although I've seen companies try. If a company has charged you erroneously, for example, by no means do you have to adhere to their terms to resolve such an issue. The very notion is absurd, both ethically and legally, and no recorded message telling you so holds water. My reason for mentioning this, is that there are going to be weird bugs in any such system. Systems hallucinate. Misunderstand words. I can see accent removal meaning that different words are the result, and context can mean those different words could be a disaster. This immediately opens up liability, because it doesn't matter if it was a computer, a human, or who, a company is on the hook. It also doesn't matter if another company is providing this service, your contact is with Telus. Telus may sue their company, but you're going to go after Telus. A company could agree to all sorts of things without meaning to, make fraudulent statements, and yes they are liable and always have been. That also includes hate-crime related legislation, harmful insults, snide comments, and here's the fun part... The person on the other end doesn't even know what they're saying to the person. Not accurately. This is supposed to be seamless, so they'll think that what they're saying is coming through correctly. And continue talking. Yes, humans can do all of these things. But often there's a manager walking around the room, listening, and would hear someone raising their voice, yelling at the end-user, swearing, making inappropriate statements. This would stand out. Yet here we have a system altering what's being heard, and no one is directly in the loop on that. No manager. No person on the floor. Frankly, I hope this explodes in their face. Hard. I want to see them sued so hard, that no other company tries to ever interfere with human conversation again. Go full AI? OK. Full human? OK. But this nonsense??? Absolutely not.
- 5mo ago
kennywinker 5mo ago
God forbid they hire canadians
torginus 5mo ago
I don't love this - in a forum I frequent, there has been a surge of posts theat have a distinct LLM flavor to them. Some people have argued this is a good thing as it allows non-english speakers to participate in the discussion. However, thanks to this AI 'assistance' its becoming what was actually intended to be said by the people and what was made up the LLM, with some people creating wordy pages long LLM babble. This also prevents non-native speakers from actively getting better, which is a core issue with AI general. Also I think people who are not native speakers are often overly concerned with how much other people are bothered by broken English and accents (as long as accents are clear enough that the point can be understood)
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
newsclues 5mo ago
I used to work in call centres for telcos in Canada. A) this will be used to hire non Canadian with minimal language skills and will be bad for the local labour market without objection from customers B) accents are troublesome but the biggest issues were people that don’t have the same cultural standards for things like, not lying, not dumping calls that were hard, or doing a good job with complicated systems and accurately logging cases truthfully. So many problems are created by poor workers (opps we deleted the customers account, oops I transferred them too you). These were problems that were so bad they had to have specific cultural training for specific nations to get people to the Canadian standard, and many failed. But hey, cheaper labour! Now I clean houses, and there is so much competition from people from abroad who are flooding the market and undercutting prices and I don’t get government subsidies to live in a hotel…
beloch 5mo ago
This is more likely about sales than customer service. Canadians get a lot of scam calls from Indian call centres. Whether it's furnace cleaners or somebody calling about a fraudulent amazon package you supposedly ordered, it's usually somebody with an Indian accent. It's reached the point where many people simply hang up if they hear an Indian accent on the line. If you're trying to do telemarketing, possibly using the very same call centres that run these scams, that's a huge barrier. Telus, for its part, is absolutely shameless in its use of aggressive telemarketing. I'm not surprised that they're one of the first companies to employ this sort of innovation. Unfortunately, this tech will likely spread to the scammers almost immediately, assuming it didn't originate with them. As an aside, here's one of my favourite games to play with telescammers: Pick one word to say over and over again, but attempt to give it a variety of natural inflections, ambiguities, etc. so that it sounds like you're not just saying one word. Then see how long you can keep the scammer on the line. Start your stopwatch the moment you start talking to a human. I once managed over three minutes with the word, "Fuzzy-cuffs". Every minute of their time you waste could be a minute somebody's Grandma isn't being scammed.
- Marsymars 5mo ago
  I get a ton of calls from "Telus" and "Rogers" and just hang up on all of them - I have no idea how I'd be supposed to tell which are and which aren't scams. e.g. This was in the news yesterday, but there's basically always a scam of the week/month going around: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/scammers-rogers-customers-ipads-9.7186935 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/scammers-rogers-custo...
renegade-otter 5mo ago
The first person that mentions anything about "the needful" with no accent is getting hung up on. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
whh 5mo ago
I'm Australian, I need this.
traceroute66 5mo ago
> A lot of them speak English fluently You must be very lucky to always get "a lot" of fluent English speakers. Just this week I was speaking to Microsoft (well, their Indian outsourcer, of course). As is the case 99% of the time, the guy was not at all fluent. I'm not being rude here. I live in a large city in a Western country, I have friends and colleagues who are Indian and I encounter Indians in day-to-day life. These people all speak English in a truly fluent manner. Yes they still have the strong accent, but guess what the accent has never caused me a problem. Telus thinking they can magically fix the lack of fluency through AI because the "problem" is the accent ? Now that IS being rude and disrespectful.
rkagerer 5mo ago
This is a terrible idea, and I'm far from convinced it will improve clarity. The solution is to hire people who can be understood, and empower them with the authority to be effective. Elaborate and misleading schemes to mask the problem are disrespectful and insulting to your customers. If the job involves speaking with customers, candidates for it should have the communication skills required. I've dealt on a regular basis with foreigners / ESL'ers who are perfectly capable of speaking English, French, etc. even with an accent. If the job involved regular heavy lifting, would you hire someone incapable of doing so?

lukev 5mo ago

You 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Personally 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 ago
  The 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.

al_borland 5mo ago

Changing an accent doesn’t change the content the person on the other end receives it with. Most of my issues with overseas support is that they have no real context for my problem. It’s not just a language barrier, it’s a culture barrier. When calling support in my own country it is much faster and easier, because they intuitively understand the type of issue I’m having and can better relate. I question if changing the voice would make it more frustrating, as I’d have similar issues without the obvious explanation as to why it’s happening.

Fogest 5mo ago
The other issue is that this further incentivizes companies to off-shore their support. A lot of the reason companies don't use it comes back to the reputational style issue. Where people don't want to feel like they are getting crappy support and having to deal with not understanding people. This is a different kind of way of using AI to eliminate local jobs and allow them to more easily outsource it to countries with low labour costs and poor labour conditions. While I would appreciate being able to understand them better, I would not at all support this. You could maybe make an argument that using this with local staff could have some merit. As at least then they are not exploiting cheap foreign labour. There are still people living within the country of the caller who may still have strong accents like in the example you gave about yourself.
- cik 5mo ago
  > The other issue is that this further incentivizes companies to off-shore their support Why is this a problem? Why are we so attached to the notion that a role must be completed from a specific jurisdiction (outside of regulatory). If you believe in remote work, then why should it matter from where that work is delivered? Plenty of small companies offshore early support, to reduce costs. In many cases this provides jobs in economies that otherwise doesn't have them, and can lead to a tech industry that in turn hires globally. There are several economies that received a boost this way, and now benefit. I don't see the problem. Yes, there may be uncomfortable shuffling of roles, layoffs,etc. But, as a believer in globalization, this will just happen. Yes, it will impact me as well.

henry2023 5mo ago

Regardless of tech you can always improve your speech. I had a Japanese girlfriend who went through the process and 80% of the results where accomplished by learning the ~20 vowel sounds found in American english (vs her native 5 vowel sounds).

nunez 5mo ago

I think it's dehumanizing. Yes, they have accents. English isn't their first language. TELUS decided to move jobs they could have given to Canadians offshore to save a buck or two. We're already conditioned to treat service reps like punching bags; now we're literally taking away their voices and further devaluing them. Not okay.

Sophira 5mo ago
On the one hand, I agree with you, and your reasoning is self-evident IMO. On the other, too many customers are complete racist dicks to people who they perceive as not "belonging to their country". I... don't think this is the solution to that problem (people will just start applying their racist views elsewhere), but it could be argued by some that it might help. I'm still against this, don't get me wrong - we absolutely should not be doing this to anybody. I can understand the appeal, though.
- frays 5mo ago
  Not sure why you're being downvoted but this is the truth if you live in a western country (probably other countries too but I have never lived outside of a non-Western country).
- ffsm8 5mo ago
  > On the other, too many customers are complete racist dicks to people who they perceive as not "belonging to their country" nunez alluded to the reason why people will do that. And no, it's not racist in the way you're trying to frame it. The callers are angry that they're being forced to talk with people which don't even speak their language well enough for it to be a non-issue. Despite being paying customers. Because the company had a genius MBA which wanted a bigger bonus, so they outsourced/offshored it. These workers may not deserve this treatment, but it's completely understandable - and the foreign workers ARE the representative of the company doing this shit. And thus... Framing this behavior as racism will not help your message whatsoever.
  - thedevilslawyer 5mo ago

totetsu 5mo ago

Japanese politicians and CEOs like talk about how AI and robotics will offset labor shortages. The xenophobe party goes so far as to say that this means there is no need to dilute the pure blood of japan, by offering any path to stable residency for foreign workers. But I think just as easily AI could serve to solve the real problems of integration and understanding from just accepting foreign workers. Of course this doesn't solve the imaginary race purity problems of the xenophobes.. But now I can see a path, where maybe they could just opt into some filter, where all foreign humanity and culture is just altered by AI to look like Japanese things, so they dont ever have to feel uncomfortable.

Teever 5mo ago

I hate to break it to you but like 60%+ of the time when someone is calling you claiming that they're from Telus/Rogers/Bell they actually aren't.

mrweasel 5mo ago
Personally I'm very suspicious of any company calling. These are businesses that have actively avoided any form of human to human contact in the past two decades, why would they suddenly want to call me?

c7b 5mo ago

I don't like it. It's inevitable, but no reason to cheer it on. I find it similar to Google Mail or YouTube autotranslating content without opt-in (and sometimes opt-out). It's continuing a trend of you can't really trust the content you see is the content someone else sees or what they sent. It says it only changes accents, soon it'll filter swear words and what else? The end game for the legal use of such tech is always injecting ads. And with this particular tech, we know that the legal uses will be a negligible fraction of the real uses.

b112 5mo ago
It's also going to be a landmine. First you can't force ToS on support calls, although I've seen companies try. If a company has charged you erroneously, for example, by no means do you have to adhere to their terms to resolve such an issue. The very notion is absurd, both ethically and legally, and no recorded message telling you so holds water. My reason for mentioning this, is that there are going to be weird bugs in any such system. Systems hallucinate. Misunderstand words. I can see accent removal meaning that different words are the result, and context can mean those different words could be a disaster. This immediately opens up liability, because it doesn't matter if it was a computer, a human, or who, a company is on the hook. It also doesn't matter if another company is providing this service, your contact is with Telus. Telus may sue their company, but you're going to go after Telus. A company could agree to all sorts of things without meaning to, make fraudulent statements, and yes they are liable and always have been. That also includes hate-crime related legislation, harmful insults, snide comments, and here's the fun part... The person on the other end doesn't even know what they're saying to the person. Not accurately. This is supposed to be seamless, so they'll think that what they're saying is coming through correctly. And continue talking. Yes, humans can do all of these things. But often there's a manager walking around the room, listening, and would hear someone raising their voice, yelling at the end-user, swearing, making inappropriate statements. This would stand out. Yet here we have a system altering what's being heard, and no one is directly in the loop on that. No manager. No person on the floor. Frankly, I hope this explodes in their face. Hard. I want to see them sued so hard, that no other company tries to ever interfere with human conversation again. Go full AI? OK. Full human? OK. But this nonsense??? Absolutely not.
5mo ago

kennywinker 5mo ago

God forbid they hire canadians

torginus 5mo ago

I don't love this - in a forum I frequent, there has been a surge of posts theat have a distinct LLM flavor to them. Some people have argued this is a good thing as it allows non-english speakers to participate in the discussion. However, thanks to this AI 'assistance' its becoming what was actually intended to be said by the people and what was made up the LLM, with some people creating wordy pages long LLM babble. This also prevents non-native speakers from actively getting better, which is a core issue with AI general. Also I think people who are not native speakers are often overly concerned with how much other people are bothered by broken English and accents (as long as accents are clear enough that the point can be understood)

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

newsclues 5mo ago

I used to work in call centres for telcos in Canada. A) this will be used to hire non Canadian with minimal language skills and will be bad for the local labour market without objection from customers B) accents are troublesome but the biggest issues were people that don’t have the same cultural standards for things like, not lying, not dumping calls that were hard, or doing a good job with complicated systems and accurately logging cases truthfully. So many problems are created by poor workers (opps we deleted the customers account, oops I transferred them too you). These were problems that were so bad they had to have specific cultural training for specific nations to get people to the Canadian standard, and many failed. But hey, cheaper labour! Now I clean houses, and there is so much competition from people from abroad who are flooding the market and undercutting prices and I don’t get government subsidies to live in a hotel…

beloch 5mo ago

This is more likely about sales than customer service. Canadians get a lot of scam calls from Indian call centres. Whether it's furnace cleaners or somebody calling about a fraudulent amazon package you supposedly ordered, it's usually somebody with an Indian accent. It's reached the point where many people simply hang up if they hear an Indian accent on the line. If you're trying to do telemarketing, possibly using the very same call centres that run these scams, that's a huge barrier. Telus, for its part, is absolutely shameless in its use of aggressive telemarketing. I'm not surprised that they're one of the first companies to employ this sort of innovation. Unfortunately, this tech will likely spread to the scammers almost immediately, assuming it didn't originate with them. As an aside, here's one of my favourite games to play with telescammers: Pick one word to say over and over again, but attempt to give it a variety of natural inflections, ambiguities, etc. so that it sounds like you're not just saying one word. Then see how long you can keep the scammer on the line. Start your stopwatch the moment you start talking to a human. I once managed over three minutes with the word, "Fuzzy-cuffs". Every minute of their time you waste could be a minute somebody's Grandma isn't being scammed.

Marsymars 5mo ago
I get a ton of calls from "Telus" and "Rogers" and just hang up on all of them - I have no idea how I'd be supposed to tell which are and which aren't scams. e.g. This was in the news yesterday, but there's basically always a scam of the week/month going around: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/scammers-rogers-customers-ipads-9.7186935 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/scammers-rogers-custo...

renegade-otter 5mo ago

The first person that mentions anything about "the needful" with no accent is getting hung up on. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

whh 5mo ago

I'm Australian, I need this.

traceroute66 5mo ago

> A lot of them speak English fluently You must be very lucky to always get "a lot" of fluent English speakers. Just this week I was speaking to Microsoft (well, their Indian outsourcer, of course). As is the case 99% of the time, the guy was not at all fluent. I'm not being rude here. I live in a large city in a Western country, I have friends and colleagues who are Indian and I encounter Indians in day-to-day life. These people all speak English in a truly fluent manner. Yes they still have the strong accent, but guess what the accent has never caused me a problem. Telus thinking they can magically fix the lack of fluency through AI because the "problem" is the accent ? Now that IS being rude and disrespectful.

rkagerer 5mo ago

This is a terrible idea, and I'm far from convinced it will improve clarity. The solution is to hire people who can be understood, and empower them with the authority to be effective. Elaborate and misleading schemes to mask the problem are disrespectful and insulting to your customers. If the job involves speaking with customers, candidates for it should have the communication skills required. I've dealt on a regular basis with foreigners / ESL'ers who are perfectly capable of speaking English, French, etc. even with an accent. If the job involved regular heavy lifting, would you hire someone incapable of doing so?