this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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honestly, this is brilliant. Not only is it going to make it easier to understand people with really thick accents -- I've worked with lots of Indian people before (hotel industry) and I still get tripped up from time to time, especially over a crappy phone line -- but it'll also probably cut down on a lot of the racist shit they may take from customers. I can imagine the average call center employee with a thick accent takes a fair bit more abuse than call center employees who speak without an accent.
on the other hand, this might also make it harder to identify a scam call immediately if this becomes commonplace. Not that perfect English speakers aren't also capable of scamming you, but, usually the scam callers aren't perfect English speakers.
about the racist part: it is a bit like saying women should cover their head it will protect from men staring at them. very slippery slope
I feel like people with thick accents will not be understood by the Speech model either
It's what the models are trained on.
My Filipino wife, with a strong but perfectly clear accent, gets called Indian all the time and they ask for someone American.
Racists will be racists. I've been called anything ranging from Indian to French. One especially racist guy got very angry that I didn't get offended at him making fun of my pencil mustache.
For context, I'm Mexican. You'd think people who legitimately believe their country is being taken over by Mexicans would have heard enough of us to at least recognize the accent.
I mean you're not wrong about any of this, but I think the not so subtle racism in this AI tool is reprehensible.
It's not racism to acknowledge that accents can have a major negative impact on effective communication and design a product to address the issue.
Yeah... most complaints about accents in customer service agents have nothing to do with understanding them.
Definitely true. We had a German professor with an essentially incomprehensible accent teaching calculus at our college. Basically everyone had to learn it from the textbook.
When I visited India, there were people who spoke English to me with such a strong accent that I didn't even realize that they were speaking English. Bias against people speaking with an Indian accent is real, but so is the need to facilitate communication.
I totally agree with you. I can't read the article because it requires an account. What I'm concerned about is the highly likely anglo-centric nature of this tool; as in it likely only alters the Indian accent for the convenience of the english speaking customer and likely does nothing to facilitate the work for the employee whose first language is likely not english.
Also, white North Americans are already culturally sheltered enough as it is, last thing I think we need is automation that neutralizes manifestations of culture for the sake of convenient communication.
Yeah, it would be great to adjust accents on demand. When I speak a foreign (to me) language, I would like to be understood, and adjusting my accent for the listener can really help smooh over my tongue fumbling over unfamiliar sounds.
I work in 911 dispatch in the US, in addition to my local callers who come from a variety of backgrounds with various accents and speech impediments, I also get calls from alarm companies and a lot of them seem to be outsourcing their call centers or at least hiring a lot of non-native speakers (looking at you, Johnson Controls)
When their accents are so thick that you can't even understand a basic address, like 123 Main St in Springfield, and you're counting on a timely dispatch for a fire alarm, that's a problem.
We also have access to a translation service, but that really slows everything down because everything has to go through the interpreter, so off the bat it's taking twice as long, and often significantly longer because I can't know when to cut my caller off because the interpreter can't really start until the caller finishes talking, so I don't know if the 3 minute rant the caller went on actually is pertinent information I need to know, or are they just rambling and repeating the same useless details over and over again.
I sometimes have to use that translation service when the caller actually speaks pretty decent English but their accent is just totally incomprehensible to my English-speaking ears (especially when you throw in a bad phone connection, I swear some of my callers have found a way to make a phone call from a kazoo.) I've gotten a pretty good ear for the more common accents we get- Spanish, Korean, Hindi, Haitian Creole, Arabic, etc. but every once in a while a curveball gets thrown at me, I legitimately don't think I'd ever heard someone speak Berber or Albanian until I got a call from someone who did, so I've never had a chance to train my ear to those accents.
You even get some situations where due to different dialects and regional accents, even the interpreters sometimes have trouble understanding the caller. For example, different Arabic dialects for example can have a lot of variation, and there's some variation in Spanish dialects. If the interpreter is mostly fluent in Egyptian Arabic or Castilian Spanish, they can sometimes have a hard time understanding a caller who speaks Saudi Arabic or Guatemalan Spanish.
I'm not convinced that the AI tech is ready to be inserted into a 911 call, but if it ever does get to that point it could be a very useful tool for some of my callers. If we can sort of neutralize their accents, we may not need to use translators as often when the caller speaks OK English, and I may not have to ask the alarm to operator to repeat themselves 3 times to understand that they're saying the alarm is at the "Wendy's" (I would have sworn that they were saying "Landis," we have a couple businesses by that name in the area, but none in that shopping center)
Even people who are native English speakers can be kind of hard to understand because of accents. Once in a while I get someone from the UK, or the US south, or hell, even just certain neighborhoods of the city I live just outside of, that can be hard to understand.
And don't get me wrong, I love all the different accents, I'm proud of my own local linguistic quirks, I'm sad that my own ancestors didn't keep their native languages alive with their children (I would be able to speak at least 4 or 5 different languages if they did) and these people who speak English with a heavy accent speak more languages than I can, so I can't really talk shit on them. But it does present a significant barrier to communication and being able to smooth that out would be really useful sometimes
I get where you're coming from, but having talked with lot of people over phone and VoIP meetings from all around the world with crazy accents it's fucking god sent people are working on technology like this.
Even within my small circles at northern Europe, trying to listen to some swedes talk in English can be real pain in the ass and I'd almost want to re-learn Swedish to not speak in English with them. Might be biased because I'm a Finn but yeah lol
And straight up punch at french so they stop talking.
On the other hand, I feel like this might remove some of the "real persona" of the person you're talking with
I have to say that I absolutely love all of the nordic accents in English. Also, I find that nordic English speakers are the most comprehensible of all non-native speakers. Often y'all speak a cleaner and more beautiful sounding English than anything you'll find in North America, especially in terms of vocabulary. It's just so nice and flowery. Any time I hear a nordic accent the speaker immediately has my full attention. Lol
I lived in France for eight months a couple years back and yeah, it can be hard to understand when they speak English, but sometimes it can be captivating too. It really depends on the speaker.