Some thoughts as a guy who worked help desk/call center for many years.
1) It's sad that we need this. However, I've talked to many, many customers that are not at all shy about being openly racist, and as long as we continue to entertain that "The customer is always right" mentality, it won't go away. I had customers who would get very hostile with my coworker adjacent to my desk who was from Pakistan but lived in the US, and often the customer would not believe that he was in the US until I audibly walked over to his desk and said in my loudest white-guy mid-Atlantic accent, "Hey, Mohammad! What seems to be the problem?"
2) I don't think this approach will work, if for no other reason than that Indian-British English has a distinctive style to it that extends beyond the accent. I once took a Udemy course (might've been on Elasticsearch?) and it was very clearly written by someone in India who then paid a white guy to read all of the slides in his American English accent. The results were hilarious, because the guy was clearly trying to do his best to make "do the needful" sound like something a Bay Area dude would naturally say, but, it simply wasn't.
3) For what it's worth, while I can immediately tell when I've called into a tech call-center based in India, I've been genuinely surprised at the relative lack of "foreign accent" when I've called into a call-center based out of Singapore or the Philippines. To my ears it sounded like non-distinct English (e.g. not quite American but not quite British either, and certainly not Indian).
It's not just racism. I cringe when I hear a strong accent on a call center call but that's not because I dislike the person on the other end. It's because it's a signal of how much the company cares about support. And as a general rule of thumb they are offshoring their call center not to increase quality but to reduce costs. And this means you're going to have fight your way through 3 layers of support before you get to anyone who know what they're doing, and has the power to fix your problem.
Of course this isn't always true. There are definitely some US call centers that are awful and some stellar offshore ones, but as a general rule of thumb this seems to be true.
But your reasoning is still riddled with assumptions, namely that "If I hear someone answer the phone with an Indian accent, it means I'm dealing with a low-skilled/low-paid outsource worker who is going to waste my time." Here's why these assumptions are flawed:
1) As I already mentioned, we had foreign-born workers living in the US, with accents. They were highly-skilled, highly-qualified, and getting the same wage as all of our other US colleagues.
2) We had coworkers in India at all levels of support, L1-L3. I'm sure payband was the motivating factor in their hire, but timezone availability was a large consideration as well. And they were eminently qualified: some of them could run circles around me from a knowledge perspective.
3) The kernel of truth which you may have touched upon and which some of our customers may have inferred is that for historical reasons, most of our L1's were in India and most of the L2's or L3's were American. So yes, if you got a guy with an American on the phone, he was probably going to be better-equipped to solve your problem--because he was an L2/L3. But the reason that guy didn't answer the phone had little to do with how much the company cares about support; it was because the L2's had more important shit to do, like filing bug reports, or code diving, or debugging. And if I'm interrupting a GDB session to take a call, I expect that an L1 has done the bare minimum of triaging first to ensure that I'm not answering a question that could have been resolved by RTFM.
We can argue all day about whether to call these assumptions "racism" or not, but I would argue that whatever their origin, they feed into that sense of customer entitlement that leads to customers screaming at my colleagues over the phone as soon as they hear an Indian accent. And that's horseshit.
I'll leave you with a final example: we had a very irate CEO customer once in a conference call for a longstanding issue, and the call on our end included several product support leads, managers, and developers. At some point we decided to bring the company's Director of Software Engineering onto the call to try to calm the customer down. The director had an Indian name and was physically in our office but was introduced by name rather than title. The CEO responded by saying, "I don't wanna talk to some freaking guy in Bangalore!"
Take, for instance, a company like Crutchfield. Their entire call center is based out of New Jersey or something like that. The important part is that it's in-house. They are all extremely knowledgeable and powerful to help you out.
If it's out-sourced to another company or country, the result is the same. They mostly can't do anything.
As a counterpoint, my company has outsourced major parts of its internal IT support to the Philippines, yet my experience is always as good as how it was before they did so.
If they can do that for internal support, it should be possible for external as well?
Some thoughts as a guy who has had to exist in a multicultural society.
1) sometimes people are hard to understand, especially with accents. It’s not “racist” if I prefer speaking to someone I can understand. I don’t care if they’re in the states or not, I just want to be able to communicate.
2) some accents are more difficult to understand than others. Usually, accents are easier to understand if I’ve encountered them in the past with some depth (e.g had a coworker with the same accent)
3) Corollary of (2): people who live further away from diverse areas often have less experience with this and are probably going to be more irritated hearing accents they have not heard before
4) people like to feign ignorance of (3) and pretend it’s all racism. Double points for assuming this because of the coincidence that flyover states are less diverse already, causing more irritation with accents, but we can pretend it’s racism because why assume anything neutral or positive if someone from a flyover state?
The inverse of the first point is also true. It’s often harder for the person on the other end to understand you if they’re not an English speaker leading to continually repeating yourself and spelling stuff out.
> trying to do his best to make "do the needful" sound like something a Bay Area dude would naturally say, but, it simply wasn't.
I grew up in the Midwest and hadn't encountered this phrase until I moved out to Seattle and started working in tech. Indian folks definitely use it the most, but I also hear it regularly from the American-born guys who did a stint at Microsoft in the Aughts. Given more time, it might end up being one of those West Coast-isms.
it's not racist, it's called suspicious. I have gotten too many scam calls from people speaking in a foreign accent to _immediately_ put myself on the defensive.
A company I worked for heavily invested in having all its call center staff based in the Philippines partly for the reason of accents. It's an accent that is, as you say "non-distinct" and generally considered pretty neutral by western ears.
The Philippines call center isn't that surprising to me. It was a US colony for 48 years. During US colonialism in the Philippines a school system was established with English as the primary instruction language. By 1950 20% of the population spoke English. After WWII a large portion of their media was in English. The Philippines 1987 Constitution established Filipino and English as co-official languages.
I live in an area with a lot of Philippine immigrants. Even kids that just immigrated here speak English as well as the locals.
Between 2 and uncanny valley problems, ignoring societal implications, I wouldn't touch this startup. Getting the tech to the point of marketable product seems doable, but getting it to where it needs to be to actually work will be incredibly hard. Text to speech has come a long way, but it's still not there, and it's an easier problem.
That said, people today often use "mid Atlantic accent" to mean the standard "region-less" accent used by, for example, TV announcers. It is more and more the standard accent of America's educated elite in urban centers, regardless of location.
Generally any everyday local news host has a variation of this kind of accent. There are different regional accents around the country, but generally news show hosts tend to have a plain sounding generic American sound that may not match up with the local drawl. For example, Alabama/Georgia populations have a particular southern accent but news out of Mobile and Atlanta doesn't sound local. Similar for Boston or NYC, etc.
I have no problem with call center worker with accents, I have a problem with call centers that are basically a human reading me an FAQ with no power to solve my problem. They have basically become heatsinks for frustration, not a way to get help.
The accents bother me when I cannot understand what they are saying despite asking them to repeat themselves multiple times. Nobodies fault, just difficult communication. Anything that can help this is welcome.
It's not just the accent, I wish people would make this differentiation more often. When someone has a completely different way of communicating due to cultural or upbringing reasons and happen to have an accent the thing to focus on here is not the accent. Arnold Schwarzenegger has one of the thickest accents you can find yet he's also one of the most easily comprehensible human beings ever lived.
>I have a problem with call centers that are basically a human reading me an FAQ
There is so much terrible design in both automated and human customer support. For instance, you ask a question in chat and there is no response for a few minutes. After a few minutes, you'll see the 'typing ..' indicator, but it'll be some generic bullshit platitude about how they value you or something. This is frustrating to no end. Even in voice systems, there is so much drivel. "It'll be just a moment while a look this up ", and then some keys clacking in the background. Who falls for this ?
But now they will read the FAQ with a perfect white "american" accent.
Now many years ago someone said that in US 2 people from 2 different neighborhouds (of the same city) can not underestand each other so i wonder how this accent will sound like.
As a student in the UK, I had to deal with a call centre, specially designed for foreign students, sited in Glasgow. Glaswegian accent is easily one of the strongest UK accents, and can be impenetrable to even native non-British speakers (scratch that, many southerners won't understand a particularly strong Glaswegian accent).
I mean, yes there is maybe a racist angle to this story, but also, I wish I could use this box back then. The call centre people were very nice, very helpful, and used to repeating stuff n times over, but that's still suboptimal.
To be fair, I don't think that's what's going on here. I think every American is familiar with the "Indian call center accent". That is, it's a unique accent specifically because it is "people with an Indian accent trying to speak with an 'Americanish/Canadianish' accent". It's kind of like the famous "mid Atlantic dialect". Nobody actually speaks it naturally; they are trained to do so.
Point being, this Indian call center accent, while unmistakable, IMO is also extremely easy to understand. I find call center workers speak more slowly and with more "rounded" vowels to try to mimic an American accent. So lack of intelligibility isn't the reason to try to hide this.
But I think trying to hide even this accent isn't so much about racism, it's about trying to fool customers into thinking their support request hasn't been outsourced to the lowest bidder. I'll admit, when I know a call is being handled from India, I immediately think that if my problem isn't a common one that can be handled by a script, that I'll be disappointed.
The article (written by a black person, I'll note) seems to include heavily editorialized racially charged undertones that may not even exist with regards to the actual product.
It's a simple fact that there is no such thing as "sounding white" as others have pointed out, non-white people of any nationality can have American accents, or any accent.
I feel it's racist to define people as "sounding white" - people do not sound like their race, they sound like their nationality. Who is the author to make the judgement that American accent == white person on the phone? Racist and quite frankly, stupid. Though I guess I shouldn't expect much more from Vice.
While there isn’t a formal definition of “sounding white” anecdotally I have plenty of friends of color that routinely joke about pulling out their “white voice” in certain settings (professional, addressing “authority”, etc). This YouTube series covers it quite a bit:
Myself I have a very vanilla non-regional American accent (think Walter Cronkite) and they often point out just how “white” I sound.
I also have family with more regional American accents (Upper Midwest, Southern) and as a child they’d often make fun of my “accent”. My response was always “turn on your TV, they sound like I do everywhere”:
Tha's 'cause we seen it a'fore an' unnerstan' contex' clooooz, not 'cause izuh ac'rate phraaaze. (<- approximately my hick-ass "white" accent & dialect if I let myself slip, or have been hanging out around family too much)
Meanwhile, most of us white folk have to work to "sound white", too, when we want/need to, because our usual accent doesn't "sound white" in the way that's meant. In plenty of cases this is quite far from our ordinary, or at least childhood (some of us all but obliterate it by adulthood, on purpose) accent. It's a poor term in this kind of context, and better ones exist.
"General American is thus sometimes associated with the speech of North American radio and television announcers, promoted as prestigious in their industry,[45][46] where it is sometimes called "Broadcast English"[47] "Network English",[4][48][49][50] or "Network Standard".[2][49][51] Instructional classes in the United States that promise "accent reduction", "accent modification", or "accent neutralization" usually attempt to teach General American patterns.[citation needed] Television journalist Linda Ellerbee states that "in television you are not supposed to sound like you're from anywhere",[52] and political comedian Stephen Colbert says he consciously avoided developing a Southern American accent in response to media portrayals of Southerners as stupid and uneducated.[45][46]"
(Wikipedia, "General American English")
That's what's intended. Not "white". They surely aren't trying to make them sound like most of the American white people I know who haven't deliberately trained away their natural accent & dialect—and I don't even live in the South!
Why did you feel the need to note the author is black? If what you say is your true opinion then race doesn't matter, but if it isn't it's a good way to ensure certain people discount his article and thoughts.
I see it's common in America to conflate race and nationality.
There's hundreds of millions, if not billions of white people who are not native english speakers, and also there's millions of americans who are not white. There are different accents in America, but that doesn't depend so much of the race as it depends on geographical areas or communities. Some of those communities happen to have certain racial origin, like African Vernacular English / Ebonics, or Latino/Hispanic communities, for different reasons.
There's for example American people of Indian heritage who were born in USA and are native english speakers, who would according to the article "sound white", which is ridiculous.
And it's also common in the US to call someone from South America or Spain non-white, which is hilarious because there's a lot of people from South America who is white, and most people in Spain are white. They even called Antonio Banderas non-white!
I suppose that comes from the notion of WASP (White Anglo-saxon Protestant), and so they call non-white anyone who is not WASP?
I'm Spanish, white (and with blue eyes) and atheist, so I'm not WASP. I speak english well but i do have an accent. I suppose I would be called non-white in the USA?
You are not putting enough focus on the "American" in the title. The software makes them "sound American", and sound like a specific group of Americans. It doesn't make them "sound white" and sound like a specific group of whites. The concept of whites has no meaning outside of a particular society's definition of it (in this case the US).
And yes, if you're born in the US and grew up there your accent will be closer to your school/general society than your parents, in my experience. If the school isn't high percentage Indian, then you will "sound white [American]".
On point. What does "white" mean anyways? In Spain for example there's a mix of iberian-celtic tribes, fenicians, greeks, romans, visigoths (which were germanic tribes), arabic (Al-Andalus califate lasted around 700 years and controlled more than half the iberian peninsula), etc and more recently instead of conquest, there's inmigration from South America, Africa, Asia...
Here is my trick to survive as a Western European in a culturally American environment: just entirely ignore any discussions involving races, racism or progressivism entirely.
You might think the world translates to your language and you could participate. You might have trouble understanding or be shocked by the reasoning and think asking will help you get it. You might even think you should have an opinion as you have the mistaken idea that your culture is close to the American one. You would be wrong.
The way these subjects are entwined with the American psyche and identity defies entendement and reasoning. In my experience it’s best to treat it like you would a foreign religion.
I always found it useful to consider the fact that America was at one point an aparthied nation. Its origins relied on the attempted extinction of a race of people who already lived here, then it lived for over a century with an entire race of people as literal property, breeding them like dogs or cats and separating their families with no respect to their humanity. A swathe of america fought a civil war to continue this treatment of this race of humans and the attempt as a nation to reconcile this failed within a generation.
There are still members of this enslaved race that, when they were born, were deprived the right to vote because of their race.
In this historical context, America's relationship with race does not defy reasoning. It's the only reasonable outcome of a nation that began with humans of one skin color being 3/5 of humans of another skin color.
Just quietly listen with a soft smile and then change the subject when your coworker goes off on a diatribe they’re sure everyone around them agrees with.
I'm a Dutch person living in Spain and my British accent can make it super difficult for some Spaniards to understand me. I tend to have a lot of trouble understanding Greek English.
This article lacks so much perspective, Europe is filled with white people having trouble understanding each others English.
It's not that weird that once you start jumping continents this effect simply gets stronger.
I was once told by an ethnically Japanese person who was born in Mexico (and when he spoke English he sounded like a Mexican national) that his hardware and software didn't match.
What Americans consider "white" is not fixed. Jews are white or not depending on the time and context. Cubans would be considered Latino or something today, and yet the most popular TV show of the 50's (I Love Lucy) featured an American woman married to a Cuban man at a time when interracial marriage would never have been shown on TV.
> I suppose that comes from the notion of WASP (White Anglo-saxon Protestant), and so they call non-white anyone who is not WASP?
"White" != "WASP": Catholics of Irish descent are definitely not "WASP": not Protestant; many would also say Celtic or Anglo-Celtic not Anglo-Saxon; yet they are considered "white".
Really what much of this comes from, I think, is some people in the US today are so focused on race, they will reinterpret other forms of cultural/ethnic discrimination as being racial – even though that doesn't make a lot of sense. The "Irish didn't use to be white" claim is retconning religious hatreds – anti-Irish sentiment in the 19th century US was primarily driven by anti-Catholicism – into racial ones.
This reinterpretation also reveals a narrowly US-centric view of the world: Australia is another country which received significant Irish immigration (10-30% of Australians have at least partial Irish ancestry, depending on how you measure it), yet "Irish aren't white" or "Irish didn't used to be white" is a thought which would have never occurred in Australia: Australia's historical racially discriminatory immigration policy (the "White Australia Policy") always counted Irish as "white"
When people used to say that Irish weren't white, it has nothing to do with what you just said, it had to do with them being the outsider subjugated class, they're akin to the other minorities at the time who were in the same situation. This is how they became known as non-white. Jews got the same rap during this time.
WASPS have long been happy to discriminate against Catholics.
They will discriminate on multiple axes. You can be white and not check off enough boxes to be just like them and you will then be discriminated against.
It depends on skin color. Rabiblancos like Raphael Cruz (Ted Cruz) and Marco Rubio come across as white in both appearance and accent. In the U.S. those who speak Spanish who are darker skinned would be referred to as “Mexican” even though millions of them have roots in Central and South America. In the past we pretty much referred to anyone who speaks Spanish as Spanish. This why it’s a bit complicated when a person who speaks Spanish is actually from Spain. Such a person who has a light skin tone should be considered white but might be called Mexican.
That's the first time I come across the term "rabiblancos", it seems it's something they say in Panama to refer to rich white people of European origin, sounds derogatory. I suppose a more common term would be "Criollos" or in french Creole.
Well calling "mexican" to everyone with a darker skin who speaks spanish it's plainly as racist as calling any asian person "chinese", etc.
AFAIK the term Latino in USA refers to anyone from South America (including Brazil), which would exclude Spain, Italy, France... while Hispanic technically includes people from Spain as much as from any other spanish speaking countries from South America (so it would exclude Brazil).
Wikipedia tells me that Ted Cruz's father was born and raised in Cuba, but his father was Spanish (from Canary Islands), and his mother was born in Delaware, with irish-italian parents. Why would you say he comes across as white? He is white. That's why I mean with the use of "white" in USA, he's not WASP so he's not "white" but comes across as "white".
I doubt you'd be called non-white but it's probably contextual. I have a hard time imagining a scenario where it would be likely to come up. You would not be confused with sounding like a "white American", though.
The ridiculousness of what it means to "sound white" is the subject of lots of humor. I think Dave Chappelle did a pretty good mockery of it with his news reporter character. There's also a pretty funny scene in Sorry to Bother You where Danny Glover is explaining his call center success to LaKeith Stanfield.
I found Sorry to Bother You quite funny, a bit scary, fairly accurate (as someone who worked in several call centers) and unusual in many ways-- it's also extremely relevant to this thread.
> I see it's common in America to conflate race and nationality.
Please don't base your perceptions of America on a Vice article. Clearly non-white people are capable of speaking in an "American" accent too, but Vice is the sort of news outlet that must make things divisive on racial lines as often as possible.
I once got in an argument with a Puerto Rican coworker when I told him Spanish people are white. He genuinely could not fathom it, and was very pissed off about it. I guess he thought Latinos are direct descendants of Spaniards?
> There's hundreds of millions, if not billions of white people who are not native english speakers, and also there's millions of americans who are not white.
reminds me of this time I joined up with a german fellow and we were walking around talking to girls in ukraine. They were enamored with him and asked him to teach him english. He meanwhile was growing more and more disturbed at how they would completely ignore me. At one point he points to me and goes, "I'm german, I have a very obvious german accent. He on the other hand is American!!"
For some side amusement, here’s an email I received about a technical course I published. For context, I have an Indian name:
————-
Are you able to share what text-to-speech or voice acting service you used to produce your videos? I'm working on producing some internal training videos for my workplace that may be released externally and since 'generic North American male voices' seem to poll best with viewers I was thinking I'd "re-dub" my content either using a voice actor or text-to-speech is real-sounding enough I'd use that to read my course content.
My biggest problem with dealing with call centers is actually the technology. For some reason every time I talk with Amazon or Google call centers, every 10th second or so drops out from the call which is often a crucial piece of info which i'll have to ask to be repeated. It's quite frustrating that in 2022 this is still such a consistent problem.
I've always wondered what's going on from a technical side. Is it some sort of "signal delay adjustment protocol" that instead of speeding up and distorting the speech of the speaker like happens on video calls, these call center tech companies have chosen to just drop an entire second from the conversation? Or is it some other glitch?
Similar: A growing chunk of my support calls have the audio SO LOW that I have to turn on speakerphone and shove the thing halfway down my ear canal to decipher what they're saying. Asking the agent to speak up gets a response like I'm the first person all day to complain about this.
I guess "due to COVID", companies "just can't control" the quality of the microphone their support staff are using. Surely this has nothing to do with the side effects: it's impossible to make a usable recording of the call (to hold them accountable), I'm frustrated with the experience (and less likely to consume their support resources in the future), and maybe I'll even give up now (saving them money on a product exchange, credit, or whatever I'm calling about).
See also: long holds with noisy corpaganda instead of music, keeping you on the phone while we "fill some things in", "oops the system is loading", and so on.
Its not like these are unsolvable problems. But, money. And regulatory capture.
I'd chalk some of it up to VOIP being inherently more complex & less stable than old analog phone systems, and the rest most likely due to the agent messing with their mute button.
When I worked in call centers, a lot of us would toggle that mute very frequently while conversing with co-workers. Sometimes to help each other out, but mostly to complain about or make fun of callers. Quite a bit of jaded cynicism in that scene.
Aren't they multiplexing the service people between a dozen different calls? Only half joking - a second might not be enough time to give the impression that you're being assisted.
Could be the monitoring that they always warn you about at the start. When a supervisor steps in or off the line it can create that sort of pause or click associated with "someone is listening in". I agree the tech should be better by now, but I don't know enough about what's going on to know exactly why.
Feels like phone latency is getting longer and longer as we move to VoIP for everything and I hate it.
Wouldn't be surprised if majority of the customers of this are call center scammers rather than actual call center companies. Amazing ingenuity from the standford grads though, they were able to raise 32 millions for some lines of code.
From my understanding, being hard to understand, bad grammar is helpful to the scammer. If you have a recipient who is unlikely to pick up on those red flags, then they are also unlikely to notice the scam.
Currently a simple heuristic (don't mean to sound racist here) would be 'don't trust anyone with an Indian accent who calls you'. It's obvious from watching all the scam baiting YT channels like Jim Browning, Scammer Payback and so on.
But yeah, a better one is probably 'don't trust anyone who calls you', which people will need to adapt eventually.
I have an Indian name but I am born and raised in Midwest America. Whenever a random call center would call me - I could easily detect whether this was originating from South Asia or not merely by their opening salutation and choice of invoking the "correct/traditional" pronunciation of my name. This data leakage alone, betrayed all of their further attempts at sounding like a "white American" with a fake flattened accent. The illusion was broken.
> Say 'Hi' to Raul
>
> A friend and fellow Stanford engineering student, we started Sanas for him.
>
> During school, he was forced to take a leave of absence and return home to Nicaragua. He started looking for jobs with high English proficiency. But, as he hadn't matriculated yet, he only had his high school diploma. With those credentials, the highest paying job he could find was in a call center.
>
> Working there he was faced with daily bias associated with his accent. He was verbally abused and discriminated against over the phone. And found himself underperforming at a job for which he was vastly overqualified. Unsurprisingly, he decided to leave the job after a few months.
>
> Knowing he wasn't alone, we started Sanas to ensure people around the world could take back the power of their own voice.
I don't know if this is real or just something they made up but I get where they're coming from. Call centres have to deal with tons of abuse and accents are easy pickings for the racists and other horrible people.
This solution doesn't try to do anything racist; it's a simple, practical solution to avoid a very specific type of hate and toxicity some people encounter during their day job. It's not saying "start speaking anglo-saxon, white, protestant, male English", it's "let's try not to give racists any fuel".
Honestly, I think the solution doesn't solve anything. The end result sounds computerized and fake. Even if it didn't, it's just a step back. People who abuse call centre workers shouldn't be treated with satin gloves to avoid triggering their sensibilities, they should be dealt with professionally. With products like these, companies can avoid having to fire customers or employees by preventing incidents.
Call center workers aren't dumb, they're by design not to deviate from the script and allowed procedures. For want of a better phrase they're human admin panels. Look at any Reddit post on customer service giving incorrect advice (because they misunderstood or because they had the wrong information) and see the responses - the blame goes straight to "the company" for not being wrong. Minimising the deviation from the norm helps massively in avoiding these situations.
Frankly 95+% of my complaints have been resolved by these front line workers (I want to cancel an X, my Y hasn't arrived),so it clearly works.
They’re not just not dumb, they are intentionally disempowered, you’re not talking to a person, you’re talking to the willfull ignorance of an MBA intentionally limiting contact to reduce interaction time, drop the 5% or so tail of expensive interactions and save money. It’s not a defect, it’s by design.
I think most Americans just want the person on the phone to speak English as their first language. We don’t care what your skin color or country of origin just that we speak the same language.
There is a great youtube video I was once linked (that I sadly lost the link to since) that was a recording of an international phone call between the American, Australian, British, and Indian office, and a few non-native English speaker's offices. Each of them spoke English but the native speakers had a hard time understanding at least one or two other people on the call.
"English" is just too broad a term. Indian English is different from American English in pronunciation, preferred synonyms and even grammar. In fact, the way small grammatical features can tell the difference between "white" American English and African American Vernacular English causes some Americans to code switch to "white". Even "American English" isn't a single kind of English. Of course, you won't hear anyone but the most racist people openly complain about someone speaking AAVE but the unintentional bias towards preferring people speaking in their own accents is real and in some cases very problematic.
I think most Americans want the person on the phone to speak American English (or their preferred flavour of North American Spanish, depending on their native tongue), preferably in an accent close to theirs. That's the language, culture, and subset of dialects that they understand. It's not just Americans, of course, it's people in general; we humans like it when things are easy for us, and the less we need to pay attention to decipher what the others are saying, the better.
You have an optimistic view of the amount of bigotry of the average American or avg person of any country. People likely wont care that much because they want their issue solved, but many people do care in a negative way.
The person who first convinced someone to start using call centers with people answering the phone who not only speak terrible English but also have undecipherable accents was a hell of a salesman.
Client: Sold. Can you do accounting? HR? IT? Actually, I just want everything you sell. I know there's a language barrier but we can sort out the details later, let's roll this out now.
Why do they say “sound like white Americans” when there is a large variation in accent among Americans of any skin colour? Compare a New York accent to Tennessee or Texas or California or Minnesota and all the other places.
Sure some idiots in the Northeast can't end words with R and southerners do some weird stuff but for the most part English accents within North America are pretty much a non issue. It's diction that causes most communication problems and even then these are generally not a big deal in business settings. When you start talking about English speakers from other continents where English pronunciation is being influenced by some other primary language that's where the accent problems arise.
They are not making them sound white, what does white sound like? A Caucasian from Germany, Russia and Alabama all sound very different even when speaking English fluently. They are giving them a generic American accent. Its not a race thing, a large number of call centers are based out of India and for a good number of Americans the Indian accent is hard to understand. I personally have a very hard time with it and because I work in tech that is a disadvantage for me. There are also many Indian accents. Now to be clear, I mean 'India' as the country, there is no standard accent for people of Indian descent that grew up in Britain or Florida for example. With that said, that's my problem, the speakers are my co-workers and just as good or better than me at their jobs which is building software. After a couple of conversations, I adjust and I am able to communicate freely with them but its very much an adjustment on a per person bases. Again, though that's my problem, not theirs.
Now when dealing with call centers, many of them are sales focused and losing sales because your customer base can't understand your salesmen is a very real problem. Editing their accents to encourage more sales is not a race thing, because again, what does 'White' sound like? Its just smart business. Same with customer service, if an American calls in to get help from your company and they cant understand the person speaking with them they are going to get frustrated and the business is going to lose clients.
tldr: I wish everyone would stop making everything a race thing.
Interesting tech, though I can't help imagining it's solving an auxiliary issue and not the core problem with many call centers, which is that these workers are usually unable to solve the customer's problem but are there only to serve as a punching bag.
From the article, "It’s not hard to imagine scenarios where the introduction of Sanas results in companies demanding more of their workers because they now have “accent matching" that is supposed to increase their performance with customers—-a typical outcome when workplaces with minimal autonomy implement performance-boosting software."
As a non-native english speaker, i have no problem to understand plain american/canadian english, but i got lost fast when the speaker have some strong accent. So i can see that such product may improve usability of call centers for non-native speakears. The author should check their english-native-speaker privilege.
Pretty ingenious. If the difficulty of understanding is accent related (although I think it's mostly grammar and a difficulty of finding the precise words) it could possibly make call center operations more effective.
I don't totally like it, but it seems like it could be a successful idea.
If people have never seen you, they make a mental image of you based solely of your voice. If you are working the phones there are certain things you can do to make their mental image of you very positive and in this familiar and authoritative tone gets you high scores and in return positive responses.
If your target audience is a median American, having an American accent will help you, if that is the only parameter that you can improve on.
The Wolf of Wallstreet guy has an entire book on this about his method of phone salesmanship. It's a good read.
Haha. For me (EU) the first voice has a slight indian accent, while the second one a slight east asian accent.
But i'm sure they are working to achieve perfection ( i.e. British royal family accent).
I've had less of a problem recently with call center accents, and actually a surprising problem with call center employees who stutter. I don't hold stuttering against them, but it has literally taken twice to three times as long to solve the problem that it should have. It's just not a good job fit for their skills.
That won't be enough to fool anyone. Anyone who has dealt with foreign csr and local (American) csr knows the difference is night and day. Foreign csr basically just read a script and never deviate. If you ask a question that isn't on their script, they're lost.
Honestly, my issue with calling a call center is never the accent or nationality of the other person. It's that they're usually either incompetent or forced to behave as if they're incompetent by corporate policy. Every HN user has likely had the same experience described in XKCD 806 [1] and wished there really was a code word to get to talk to someone who actually knows something.
One of the more annoying ones for me is contacting tech support with extensive debugging information/logs and only being able to talk to people who can't understand what I'm talking about and insist on power cycling the device (which of course may momentarily resolve an intermittent issue, and is enough for them to "close" the case).
Quote from one of the founders: “We want to build a very inclusive work culture and we think this could be an extremely great product and technology to actually bring people closer.”
Yeah… this is dystopian, offensive, racist, utterly thoughtless, completely lacking in any sort of understanding of human cultures… this is wrong on so many levels.
Not only is the Indian to “White American” demo offensive in the obvious racism way but it also represents the removal of cross cultural exposure, the parallels to “news bubble” and the problems they can lead to are obvious and it’s extremely irritating as a potential customer to be lied to like this (its a great example of the sort of thing that leads to customers boycotting a company once its discovered)... and my ultimate example of why this is an bad company (not a bad technology, as technology is simply a tool, the ethics of which depend on the humans putting it to use) imagine it backwards, a “White American” using this to sound “Indian” … hopefully the offensive nature of selling this as a product was obvious before that example but yeah. This is toxic ethical swamp territory that I hope their investors end up watching their money slowly sink into before it eventually disappears.
"Imagine it backwards, a “White American” using this to sound “Indian”"
I'm white, I don't find this offensive at all, why would I? The only way I would is if I was looking for offense. If my job was calling people to make sales and they couldn't understand me I would leap at the chance to change my accent so they could. Sales is a commission based job, more sales by leveraging an available software tool means a better life for my family, especially if I am based in a third world economy.
If my options as a call center business owner are to 1) use foreign workers and lose customers due to the communication gap, 2) use foreign workers and leverage software to negate the communication gap or 3) use more expensive US based workers; how is it racist to acknowledge the facts on the ground and choose the second option? Your argument is that the call center operators should be forced to lose customers and business because not to do so is racist?
India is also a country, a guy of Indian descent from Britain sounds just like a white guy from Britain, same with people from Florida or NY. To conflate race and nationality is a flawed argument. What does 'White American' sound like? Do people from Alabama and NYC sound the same? If a black kid and a white kid are adopted as babies and raised in the same family they will sound the same. Accent is a regional thing, not a racial one.
Not everything is racist, stop trying to find things to be outraged about.
If your solution to racism is to disguise as a white man it's not a solution to racism. The tool is almost the complete opposite of what their selling pitch is
And let's not play dumb here, the end goal is too milk workers from third world countries
> it also represents the removal of cross cultural exposure
I don't call a call center to be exposed to new cultures. I call them to fix a problem.
Waiting 20 minutes then ending with someone who has a terrible mic that seems like it's 10 feet from their face then throw on an accent of any type (heck, I've had agents with US Southern accents that I can't understand) and I end up hanging up to pull the lever on another agent.
Like yeah, is it racist? Probably. But would it fix a problem without hurting anyone? Yes.
Accents can be genuine communication barriers. It isn’t racist to acknowledge that or to desire to find ways to resolve those issues. That is, ways that don’t involve asking a person to repeat what they’ve said over and over or to have your issue completely misunderstood because the worker also has trouble understanding your accent.
Some thoughts as a guy who worked help desk/call center for many years.
1) It's sad that we need this. However, I've talked to many, many customers that are not at all shy about being openly racist, and as long as we continue to entertain that "The customer is always right" mentality, it won't go away. I had customers who would get very hostile with my coworker adjacent to my desk who was from Pakistan but lived in the US, and often the customer would not believe that he was in the US until I audibly walked over to his desk and said in my loudest white-guy mid-Atlantic accent, "Hey, Mohammad! What seems to be the problem?"
2) I don't think this approach will work, if for no other reason than that Indian-British English has a distinctive style to it that extends beyond the accent. I once took a Udemy course (might've been on Elasticsearch?) and it was very clearly written by someone in India who then paid a white guy to read all of the slides in his American English accent. The results were hilarious, because the guy was clearly trying to do his best to make "do the needful" sound like something a Bay Area dude would naturally say, but, it simply wasn't.
3) For what it's worth, while I can immediately tell when I've called into a tech call-center based in India, I've been genuinely surprised at the relative lack of "foreign accent" when I've called into a call-center based out of Singapore or the Philippines. To my ears it sounded like non-distinct English (e.g. not quite American but not quite British either, and certainly not Indian).
It's not just racism. I cringe when I hear a strong accent on a call center call but that's not because I dislike the person on the other end. It's because it's a signal of how much the company cares about support. And as a general rule of thumb they are offshoring their call center not to increase quality but to reduce costs. And this means you're going to have fight your way through 3 layers of support before you get to anyone who know what they're doing, and has the power to fix your problem.
Of course this isn't always true. There are definitely some US call centers that are awful and some stellar offshore ones, but as a general rule of thumb this seems to be true.
But your reasoning is still riddled with assumptions, namely that "If I hear someone answer the phone with an Indian accent, it means I'm dealing with a low-skilled/low-paid outsource worker who is going to waste my time." Here's why these assumptions are flawed:
1) As I already mentioned, we had foreign-born workers living in the US, with accents. They were highly-skilled, highly-qualified, and getting the same wage as all of our other US colleagues.
2) We had coworkers in India at all levels of support, L1-L3. I'm sure payband was the motivating factor in their hire, but timezone availability was a large consideration as well. And they were eminently qualified: some of them could run circles around me from a knowledge perspective.
3) The kernel of truth which you may have touched upon and which some of our customers may have inferred is that for historical reasons, most of our L1's were in India and most of the L2's or L3's were American. So yes, if you got a guy with an American on the phone, he was probably going to be better-equipped to solve your problem--because he was an L2/L3. But the reason that guy didn't answer the phone had little to do with how much the company cares about support; it was because the L2's had more important shit to do, like filing bug reports, or code diving, or debugging. And if I'm interrupting a GDB session to take a call, I expect that an L1 has done the bare minimum of triaging first to ensure that I'm not answering a question that could have been resolved by RTFM.
We can argue all day about whether to call these assumptions "racism" or not, but I would argue that whatever their origin, they feed into that sense of customer entitlement that leads to customers screaming at my colleagues over the phone as soon as they hear an Indian accent. And that's horseshit.
I'll leave you with a final example: we had a very irate CEO customer once in a conference call for a longstanding issue, and the call on our end included several product support leads, managers, and developers. At some point we decided to bring the company's Director of Software Engineering onto the call to try to calm the customer down. The director had an Indian name and was physically in our office but was introduced by name rather than title. The CEO responded by saying, "I don't wanna talk to some freaking guy in Bangalore!"
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This is what it is for me.
Take, for instance, a company like Crutchfield. Their entire call center is based out of New Jersey or something like that. The important part is that it's in-house. They are all extremely knowledgeable and powerful to help you out.
If it's out-sourced to another company or country, the result is the same. They mostly can't do anything.
As a counterpoint, my company has outsourced major parts of its internal IT support to the Philippines, yet my experience is always as good as how it was before they did so.
If they can do that for internal support, it should be possible for external as well?
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There are people with strong accents in the US working customer service.
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Globalization :)
Some thoughts as a guy who has had to exist in a multicultural society.
1) sometimes people are hard to understand, especially with accents. It’s not “racist” if I prefer speaking to someone I can understand. I don’t care if they’re in the states or not, I just want to be able to communicate.
2) some accents are more difficult to understand than others. Usually, accents are easier to understand if I’ve encountered them in the past with some depth (e.g had a coworker with the same accent)
3) Corollary of (2): people who live further away from diverse areas often have less experience with this and are probably going to be more irritated hearing accents they have not heard before
4) people like to feign ignorance of (3) and pretend it’s all racism. Double points for assuming this because of the coincidence that flyover states are less diverse already, causing more irritation with accents, but we can pretend it’s racism because why assume anything neutral or positive if someone from a flyover state?
You really hit it out of the park here.
The inverse of the first point is also true. It’s often harder for the person on the other end to understand you if they’re not an English speaker leading to continually repeating yourself and spelling stuff out.
> trying to do his best to make "do the needful" sound like something a Bay Area dude would naturally say, but, it simply wasn't.
I grew up in the Midwest and hadn't encountered this phrase until I moved out to Seattle and started working in tech. Indian folks definitely use it the most, but I also hear it regularly from the American-born guys who did a stint at Microsoft in the Aughts. Given more time, it might end up being one of those West Coast-isms.
Along with “I am sending this to you timely, please revert.”
It’s just corp-speak propagation where a heavy proportion is alternative grammars.
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it's not racist, it's called suspicious. I have gotten too many scam calls from people speaking in a foreign accent to _immediately_ put myself on the defensive.
A company I worked for heavily invested in having all its call center staff based in the Philippines partly for the reason of accents. It's an accent that is, as you say "non-distinct" and generally considered pretty neutral by western ears.
The Philippines call center isn't that surprising to me. It was a US colony for 48 years. During US colonialism in the Philippines a school system was established with English as the primary instruction language. By 1950 20% of the population spoke English. After WWII a large portion of their media was in English. The Philippines 1987 Constitution established Filipino and English as co-official languages.
I live in an area with a lot of Philippine immigrants. Even kids that just immigrated here speak English as well as the locals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_English
Between 2 and uncanny valley problems, ignoring societal implications, I wouldn't touch this startup. Getting the tech to the point of marketable product seems doable, but getting it to where it needs to be to actually work will be incredibly hard. Text to speech has come a long way, but it's still not there, and it's an easier problem.
I worked in an Indian call center decades ago. Being yelled racial abuses was normal and expected part of the job. I got used to it pretty fast.
Curious... What does a mid-Atlantic accent sound like?
William F. Buckley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTyZAul60ok
Mr. Burns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=othBTFk_W1Y
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I really like this (no longer updated) website devoted to north american accents https://www.aschmann.net/AmEng/
Old Hollywood movies: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent
That said, people today often use "mid Atlantic accent" to mean the standard "region-less" accent used by, for example, TV announcers. It is more and more the standard accent of America's educated elite in urban centers, regardless of location.
Generally any everyday local news host has a variation of this kind of accent. There are different regional accents around the country, but generally news show hosts tend to have a plain sounding generic American sound that may not match up with the local drawl. For example, Alabama/Georgia populations have a particular southern accent but news out of Mobile and Atlanta doesn't sound local. Similar for Boston or NYC, etc.
It's the accent you hear on TV when you think the speaker has no accent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent
I have no problem with call center worker with accents, I have a problem with call centers that are basically a human reading me an FAQ with no power to solve my problem. They have basically become heatsinks for frustration, not a way to get help.
The accents bother me when I cannot understand what they are saying despite asking them to repeat themselves multiple times. Nobodies fault, just difficult communication. Anything that can help this is welcome.
It's not just the accent, I wish people would make this differentiation more often. When someone has a completely different way of communicating due to cultural or upbringing reasons and happen to have an accent the thing to focus on here is not the accent. Arnold Schwarzenegger has one of the thickest accents you can find yet he's also one of the most easily comprehensible human beings ever lived.
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To that point, there are a plethora of YouTube videos I would love to use this on.
Heatsinks dissipate heat.
Call centers are more like heat pumps for frustration.
>I have a problem with call centers that are basically a human reading me an FAQ
There is so much terrible design in both automated and human customer support. For instance, you ask a question in chat and there is no response for a few minutes. After a few minutes, you'll see the 'typing ..' indicator, but it'll be some generic bullshit platitude about how they value you or something. This is frustrating to no end. Even in voice systems, there is so much drivel. "It'll be just a moment while a look this up ", and then some keys clacking in the background. Who falls for this ?
But now they will read the FAQ with a perfect white "american" accent. Now many years ago someone said that in US 2 people from 2 different neighborhouds (of the same city) can not underestand each other so i wonder how this accent will sound like.
As a student in the UK, I had to deal with a call centre, specially designed for foreign students, sited in Glasgow. Glaswegian accent is easily one of the strongest UK accents, and can be impenetrable to even native non-British speakers (scratch that, many southerners won't understand a particularly strong Glaswegian accent).
I mean, yes there is maybe a racist angle to this story, but also, I wish I could use this box back then. The call centre people were very nice, very helpful, and used to repeating stuff n times over, but that's still suboptimal.
To be fair, I don't think that's what's going on here. I think every American is familiar with the "Indian call center accent". That is, it's a unique accent specifically because it is "people with an Indian accent trying to speak with an 'Americanish/Canadianish' accent". It's kind of like the famous "mid Atlantic dialect". Nobody actually speaks it naturally; they are trained to do so.
Point being, this Indian call center accent, while unmistakable, IMO is also extremely easy to understand. I find call center workers speak more slowly and with more "rounded" vowels to try to mimic an American accent. So lack of intelligibility isn't the reason to try to hide this.
But I think trying to hide even this accent isn't so much about racism, it's about trying to fool customers into thinking their support request hasn't been outsourced to the lowest bidder. I'll admit, when I know a call is being handled from India, I immediately think that if my problem isn't a common one that can be handled by a script, that I'll be disappointed.
The article (written by a black person, I'll note) seems to include heavily editorialized racially charged undertones that may not even exist with regards to the actual product.
It's a simple fact that there is no such thing as "sounding white" as others have pointed out, non-white people of any nationality can have American accents, or any accent.
I feel it's racist to define people as "sounding white" - people do not sound like their race, they sound like their nationality. Who is the author to make the judgement that American accent == white person on the phone? Racist and quite frankly, stupid. Though I guess I shouldn't expect much more from Vice.
While there isn’t a formal definition of “sounding white” anecdotally I have plenty of friends of color that routinely joke about pulling out their “white voice” in certain settings (professional, addressing “authority”, etc). This YouTube series covers it quite a bit:
https://youtu.be/H1KP4ztKK0A
Myself I have a very vanilla non-regional American accent (think Walter Cronkite) and they often point out just how “white” I sound.
I also have family with more regional American accents (Upper Midwest, Southern) and as a child they’d often make fun of my “accent”. My response was always “turn on your TV, they sound like I do everywhere”:
https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/196999/why-do-newsca...
This can be seen in a somewhat-humorous old YouTube clip:
https://youtu.be/g-Neg4NmChk
> there is no such thing as "sounding white" as others have pointed out
And yet, despite not existing, we all know exactly what it means. Kind of odd that we can all easily identify something that isn't real.
Tha's 'cause we seen it a'fore an' unnerstan' contex' clooooz, not 'cause izuh ac'rate phraaaze. (<- approximately my hick-ass "white" accent & dialect if I let myself slip, or have been hanging out around family too much)
Meanwhile, most of us white folk have to work to "sound white", too, when we want/need to, because our usual accent doesn't "sound white" in the way that's meant. In plenty of cases this is quite far from our ordinary, or at least childhood (some of us all but obliterate it by adulthood, on purpose) accent. It's a poor term in this kind of context, and better ones exist.
"General American is thus sometimes associated with the speech of North American radio and television announcers, promoted as prestigious in their industry,[45][46] where it is sometimes called "Broadcast English"[47] "Network English",[4][48][49][50] or "Network Standard".[2][49][51] Instructional classes in the United States that promise "accent reduction", "accent modification", or "accent neutralization" usually attempt to teach General American patterns.[citation needed] Television journalist Linda Ellerbee states that "in television you are not supposed to sound like you're from anywhere",[52] and political comedian Stephen Colbert says he consciously avoided developing a Southern American accent in response to media portrayals of Southerners as stupid and uneducated.[45][46]"
(Wikipedia, "General American English")
That's what's intended. Not "white". They surely aren't trying to make them sound like most of the American white people I know who haven't deliberately trained away their natural accent & dialect—and I don't even live in the South!
> It's a simple fact that there is no such thing as "sounding white"
Sounds like you need to watch Sorry to Bother You (2018)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorry_to_Bother_You
Why did you feel the need to note the author is black? If what you say is your true opinion then race doesn't matter, but if it isn't it's a good way to ensure certain people discount his article and thoughts.
I see it's common in America to conflate race and nationality.
There's hundreds of millions, if not billions of white people who are not native english speakers, and also there's millions of americans who are not white. There are different accents in America, but that doesn't depend so much of the race as it depends on geographical areas or communities. Some of those communities happen to have certain racial origin, like African Vernacular English / Ebonics, or Latino/Hispanic communities, for different reasons.
There's for example American people of Indian heritage who were born in USA and are native english speakers, who would according to the article "sound white", which is ridiculous.
And it's also common in the US to call someone from South America or Spain non-white, which is hilarious because there's a lot of people from South America who is white, and most people in Spain are white. They even called Antonio Banderas non-white!
I suppose that comes from the notion of WASP (White Anglo-saxon Protestant), and so they call non-white anyone who is not WASP?
I'm Spanish, white (and with blue eyes) and atheist, so I'm not WASP. I speak english well but i do have an accent. I suppose I would be called non-white in the USA?
Race is a social construct, news at 11.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_th... - many groups that used to be called non-white, are now called white.
You are not putting enough focus on the "American" in the title. The software makes them "sound American", and sound like a specific group of Americans. It doesn't make them "sound white" and sound like a specific group of whites. The concept of whites has no meaning outside of a particular society's definition of it (in this case the US).
And yes, if you're born in the US and grew up there your accent will be closer to your school/general society than your parents, in my experience. If the school isn't high percentage Indian, then you will "sound white [American]".
On point. What does "white" mean anyways? In Spain for example there's a mix of iberian-celtic tribes, fenicians, greeks, romans, visigoths (which were germanic tribes), arabic (Al-Andalus califate lasted around 700 years and controlled more than half the iberian peninsula), etc and more recently instead of conquest, there's inmigration from South America, Africa, Asia...
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> many groups that used to be called non-white, are now called white.
Like which ones?
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It often depends on whether the speaker considers "white" to be good or bad and whether they like the person they're talking about.
Who you marry and have children with and where you choose to raise them is a social construct too.
Here is my trick to survive as a Western European in a culturally American environment: just entirely ignore any discussions involving races, racism or progressivism entirely.
You might think the world translates to your language and you could participate. You might have trouble understanding or be shocked by the reasoning and think asking will help you get it. You might even think you should have an opinion as you have the mistaken idea that your culture is close to the American one. You would be wrong.
The way these subjects are entwined with the American psyche and identity defies entendement and reasoning. In my experience it’s best to treat it like you would a foreign religion.
I always found it useful to consider the fact that America was at one point an aparthied nation. Its origins relied on the attempted extinction of a race of people who already lived here, then it lived for over a century with an entire race of people as literal property, breeding them like dogs or cats and separating their families with no respect to their humanity. A swathe of america fought a civil war to continue this treatment of this race of humans and the attempt as a nation to reconcile this failed within a generation.
There are still members of this enslaved race that, when they were born, were deprived the right to vote because of their race.
In this historical context, America's relationship with race does not defy reasoning. It's the only reasonable outcome of a nation that began with humans of one skin color being 3/5 of humans of another skin color.
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Most Americans do the same actually.
Just quietly listen with a soft smile and then change the subject when your coworker goes off on a diatribe they’re sure everyone around them agrees with.
As an American, I happily talk about all those things with my friends.
Come to think of it, that might be why I get along with Western Europeans so well.
I'm a Dutch person living in Spain and my British accent can make it super difficult for some Spaniards to understand me. I tend to have a lot of trouble understanding Greek English.
This article lacks so much perspective, Europe is filled with white people having trouble understanding each others English.
It's not that weird that once you start jumping continents this effect simply gets stronger.
I was once told by an ethnically Japanese person who was born in Mexico (and when he spoke English he sounded like a Mexican national) that his hardware and software didn't match.
What Americans consider "white" is not fixed. Jews are white or not depending on the time and context. Cubans would be considered Latino or something today, and yet the most popular TV show of the 50's (I Love Lucy) featured an American woman married to a Cuban man at a time when interracial marriage would never have been shown on TV.
There are both white and black Cubans. No one would have considered that to be any more interracial than if a White Canadian married a White American.
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> I suppose that comes from the notion of WASP (White Anglo-saxon Protestant), and so they call non-white anyone who is not WASP?
"White" != "WASP": Catholics of Irish descent are definitely not "WASP": not Protestant; many would also say Celtic or Anglo-Celtic not Anglo-Saxon; yet they are considered "white".
Some people have this idea that "the Irish didn't use to be white", but that is historically very dubious: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
Really what much of this comes from, I think, is some people in the US today are so focused on race, they will reinterpret other forms of cultural/ethnic discrimination as being racial – even though that doesn't make a lot of sense. The "Irish didn't use to be white" claim is retconning religious hatreds – anti-Irish sentiment in the 19th century US was primarily driven by anti-Catholicism – into racial ones.
This reinterpretation also reveals a narrowly US-centric view of the world: Australia is another country which received significant Irish immigration (10-30% of Australians have at least partial Irish ancestry, depending on how you measure it), yet "Irish aren't white" or "Irish didn't used to be white" is a thought which would have never occurred in Australia: Australia's historical racially discriminatory immigration policy (the "White Australia Policy") always counted Irish as "white"
When people used to say that Irish weren't white, it has nothing to do with what you just said, it had to do with them being the outsider subjugated class, they're akin to the other minorities at the time who were in the same situation. This is how they became known as non-white. Jews got the same rap during this time.
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WASPS have long been happy to discriminate against Catholics.
They will discriminate on multiple axes. You can be white and not check off enough boxes to be just like them and you will then be discriminated against.
It depends on skin color. Rabiblancos like Raphael Cruz (Ted Cruz) and Marco Rubio come across as white in both appearance and accent. In the U.S. those who speak Spanish who are darker skinned would be referred to as “Mexican” even though millions of them have roots in Central and South America. In the past we pretty much referred to anyone who speaks Spanish as Spanish. This why it’s a bit complicated when a person who speaks Spanish is actually from Spain. Such a person who has a light skin tone should be considered white but might be called Mexican.
That's the first time I come across the term "rabiblancos", it seems it's something they say in Panama to refer to rich white people of European origin, sounds derogatory. I suppose a more common term would be "Criollos" or in french Creole.
Well calling "mexican" to everyone with a darker skin who speaks spanish it's plainly as racist as calling any asian person "chinese", etc.
AFAIK the term Latino in USA refers to anyone from South America (including Brazil), which would exclude Spain, Italy, France... while Hispanic technically includes people from Spain as much as from any other spanish speaking countries from South America (so it would exclude Brazil).
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Wikipedia tells me that Ted Cruz's father was born and raised in Cuba, but his father was Spanish (from Canary Islands), and his mother was born in Delaware, with irish-italian parents. Why would you say he comes across as white? He is white. That's why I mean with the use of "white" in USA, he's not WASP so he's not "white" but comes across as "white".
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I doubt you'd be called non-white but it's probably contextual. I have a hard time imagining a scenario where it would be likely to come up. You would not be confused with sounding like a "white American", though.
The ridiculousness of what it means to "sound white" is the subject of lots of humor. I think Dave Chappelle did a pretty good mockery of it with his news reporter character. There's also a pretty funny scene in Sorry to Bother You where Danny Glover is explaining his call center success to LaKeith Stanfield.
I found Sorry to Bother You quite funny, a bit scary, fairly accurate (as someone who worked in several call centers) and unusual in many ways-- it's also extremely relevant to this thread.
Or maybe it comes from a hypercritical racial focus from people who are intent on dividing us.
Yep exactly. The average American is most certainly not obsessed with race.
> I see it's common in America to conflate race and nationality.
Please don't base your perceptions of America on a Vice article. Clearly non-white people are capable of speaking in an "American" accent too, but Vice is the sort of news outlet that must make things divisive on racial lines as often as possible.
I once got in an argument with a Puerto Rican coworker when I told him Spanish people are white. He genuinely could not fathom it, and was very pissed off about it. I guess he thought Latinos are direct descendants of Spaniards?
Are you saying Spanish people aren’t white?
> There's hundreds of millions, if not billions of white people who are not native english speakers, and also there's millions of americans who are not white.
reminds me of this time I joined up with a german fellow and we were walking around talking to girls in ukraine. They were enamored with him and asked him to teach him english. He meanwhile was growing more and more disturbed at how they would completely ignore me. At one point he points to me and goes, "I'm german, I have a very obvious german accent. He on the other hand is American!!"
Interesting. But why did you make a point of telling us you eye color? Quite an insight into your thought process actually.
For some side amusement, here’s an email I received about a technical course I published. For context, I have an Indian name:
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Are you able to share what text-to-speech or voice acting service you used to produce your videos? I'm working on producing some internal training videos for my workplace that may be released externally and since 'generic North American male voices' seem to poll best with viewers I was thinking I'd "re-dub" my content either using a voice actor or text-to-speech is real-sounding enough I'd use that to read my course content.
My biggest problem with dealing with call centers is actually the technology. For some reason every time I talk with Amazon or Google call centers, every 10th second or so drops out from the call which is often a crucial piece of info which i'll have to ask to be repeated. It's quite frustrating that in 2022 this is still such a consistent problem.
I've always wondered what's going on from a technical side. Is it some sort of "signal delay adjustment protocol" that instead of speeding up and distorting the speech of the speaker like happens on video calls, these call center tech companies have chosen to just drop an entire second from the conversation? Or is it some other glitch?
Similar: A growing chunk of my support calls have the audio SO LOW that I have to turn on speakerphone and shove the thing halfway down my ear canal to decipher what they're saying. Asking the agent to speak up gets a response like I'm the first person all day to complain about this.
I guess "due to COVID", companies "just can't control" the quality of the microphone their support staff are using. Surely this has nothing to do with the side effects: it's impossible to make a usable recording of the call (to hold them accountable), I'm frustrated with the experience (and less likely to consume their support resources in the future), and maybe I'll even give up now (saving them money on a product exchange, credit, or whatever I'm calling about).
See also: long holds with noisy corpaganda instead of music, keeping you on the phone while we "fill some things in", "oops the system is loading", and so on.
Its not like these are unsolvable problems. But, money. And regulatory capture.
I'd chalk some of it up to VOIP being inherently more complex & less stable than old analog phone systems, and the rest most likely due to the agent messing with their mute button.
When I worked in call centers, a lot of us would toggle that mute very frequently while conversing with co-workers. Sometimes to help each other out, but mostly to complain about or make fun of callers. Quite a bit of jaded cynicism in that scene.
Aren't they multiplexing the service people between a dozen different calls? Only half joking - a second might not be enough time to give the impression that you're being assisted.
Could be the monitoring that they always warn you about at the start. When a supervisor steps in or off the line it can create that sort of pause or click associated with "someone is listening in". I agree the tech should be better by now, but I don't know enough about what's going on to know exactly why.
Feels like phone latency is getting longer and longer as we move to VoIP for everything and I hate it.
Wouldn't be surprised if majority of the customers of this are call center scammers rather than actual call center companies. Amazing ingenuity from the standford grads though, they were able to raise 32 millions for some lines of code.
The main scam call internal detector that my 84 year old mother uses is if someone calls her with an accent she simply refuses to talk to them.
From my understanding, being hard to understand, bad grammar is helpful to the scammer. If you have a recipient who is unlikely to pick up on those red flags, then they are also unlikely to notice the scam.
Currently a simple heuristic (don't mean to sound racist here) would be 'don't trust anyone with an Indian accent who calls you'. It's obvious from watching all the scam baiting YT channels like Jim Browning, Scammer Payback and so on.
But yeah, a better one is probably 'don't trust anyone who calls you', which people will need to adapt eventually.
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Funny observation:
I have an Indian name but I am born and raised in Midwest America. Whenever a random call center would call me - I could easily detect whether this was originating from South Asia or not merely by their opening salutation and choice of invoking the "correct/traditional" pronunciation of my name. This data leakage alone, betrayed all of their further attempts at sounding like a "white American" with a fake flattened accent. The illusion was broken.
I'm curious about the salutation. Is there a cultural difference where 'hello' or 'how are you' is less common amongst anglophone South Asians?
Getting called sir usually makes me realize they're not from the US.
The company lists its reason for being on their website (https://www.sanas.ai/about):
> Say 'Hi' to Raul > > A friend and fellow Stanford engineering student, we started Sanas for him. > > During school, he was forced to take a leave of absence and return home to Nicaragua. He started looking for jobs with high English proficiency. But, as he hadn't matriculated yet, he only had his high school diploma. With those credentials, the highest paying job he could find was in a call center. > > Working there he was faced with daily bias associated with his accent. He was verbally abused and discriminated against over the phone. And found himself underperforming at a job for which he was vastly overqualified. Unsurprisingly, he decided to leave the job after a few months. > > Knowing he wasn't alone, we started Sanas to ensure people around the world could take back the power of their own voice.
I don't know if this is real or just something they made up but I get where they're coming from. Call centres have to deal with tons of abuse and accents are easy pickings for the racists and other horrible people.
This solution doesn't try to do anything racist; it's a simple, practical solution to avoid a very specific type of hate and toxicity some people encounter during their day job. It's not saying "start speaking anglo-saxon, white, protestant, male English", it's "let's try not to give racists any fuel".
Honestly, I think the solution doesn't solve anything. The end result sounds computerized and fake. Even if it didn't, it's just a step back. People who abuse call centre workers shouldn't be treated with satin gloves to avoid triggering their sensibilities, they should be dealt with professionally. With products like these, companies can avoid having to fire customers or employees by preventing incidents.
Now if you could make a startup that makes call center workers not dumb, that would be groundbreaking.
Call center workers aren't dumb, they're by design not to deviate from the script and allowed procedures. For want of a better phrase they're human admin panels. Look at any Reddit post on customer service giving incorrect advice (because they misunderstood or because they had the wrong information) and see the responses - the blame goes straight to "the company" for not being wrong. Minimising the deviation from the norm helps massively in avoiding these situations.
Frankly 95+% of my complaints have been resolved by these front line workers (I want to cancel an X, my Y hasn't arrived),so it clearly works.
They’re not just not dumb, they are intentionally disempowered, you’re not talking to a person, you’re talking to the willfull ignorance of an MBA intentionally limiting contact to reduce interaction time, drop the 5% or so tail of expensive interactions and save money. It’s not a defect, it’s by design.
The workers are not dumb. They are not allowed to give you instructions beyond what is on their screen.
Shouldn’t call people dumb. The system is dumb. Corporations are dumb. The people are still people.
You get the bare minimum service because company don't want to spend money on that and outsource everything to the lowest bidder.
If you want good service you'd have to pay for it, but you don't want to
They are not dumb, they just didn’t receive any training.
I think most Americans just want the person on the phone to speak English as their first language. We don’t care what your skin color or country of origin just that we speak the same language.
There is a great youtube video I was once linked (that I sadly lost the link to since) that was a recording of an international phone call between the American, Australian, British, and Indian office, and a few non-native English speaker's offices. Each of them spoke English but the native speakers had a hard time understanding at least one or two other people on the call.
"English" is just too broad a term. Indian English is different from American English in pronunciation, preferred synonyms and even grammar. In fact, the way small grammatical features can tell the difference between "white" American English and African American Vernacular English causes some Americans to code switch to "white". Even "American English" isn't a single kind of English. Of course, you won't hear anyone but the most racist people openly complain about someone speaking AAVE but the unintentional bias towards preferring people speaking in their own accents is real and in some cases very problematic.
I think most Americans want the person on the phone to speak American English (or their preferred flavour of North American Spanish, depending on their native tongue), preferably in an accent close to theirs. That's the language, culture, and subset of dialects that they understand. It's not just Americans, of course, it's people in general; we humans like it when things are easy for us, and the less we need to pay attention to decipher what the others are saying, the better.
You have an optimistic view of the amount of bigotry of the average American or avg person of any country. People likely wont care that much because they want their issue solved, but many people do care in a negative way.
I'd prefer Mid-Atlantic accent - clearer.
I don't think its purely about accent though. Like I can't picture someone from texas saying they'll do the needful
Y'all do the needful now, ya hear?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent
I LoLed
My favorite is prepone. As in, I'm going to prepone the meeting to tomorrow (the meeting was originally next week)
The person who first convinced someone to start using call centers with people answering the phone who not only speak terrible English but also have undecipherable accents was a hell of a salesman.
Salesman: Current cost $x, Future cost $x/20
Client: Sold. Can you do accounting? HR? IT? Actually, I just want everything you sell. I know there's a language barrier but we can sort out the details later, let's roll this out now.
Why do they say “sound like white Americans” when there is a large variation in accent among Americans of any skin colour? Compare a New York accent to Tennessee or Texas or California or Minnesota and all the other places.
Sure some idiots in the Northeast can't end words with R and southerners do some weird stuff but for the most part English accents within North America are pretty much a non issue. It's diction that causes most communication problems and even then these are generally not a big deal in business settings. When you start talking about English speakers from other continents where English pronunciation is being influenced by some other primary language that's where the accent problems arise.
Ok but what does that have to do with white Americans?
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They are not making them sound white, what does white sound like? A Caucasian from Germany, Russia and Alabama all sound very different even when speaking English fluently. They are giving them a generic American accent. Its not a race thing, a large number of call centers are based out of India and for a good number of Americans the Indian accent is hard to understand. I personally have a very hard time with it and because I work in tech that is a disadvantage for me. There are also many Indian accents. Now to be clear, I mean 'India' as the country, there is no standard accent for people of Indian descent that grew up in Britain or Florida for example. With that said, that's my problem, the speakers are my co-workers and just as good or better than me at their jobs which is building software. After a couple of conversations, I adjust and I am able to communicate freely with them but its very much an adjustment on a per person bases. Again, though that's my problem, not theirs.
Now when dealing with call centers, many of them are sales focused and losing sales because your customer base can't understand your salesmen is a very real problem. Editing their accents to encourage more sales is not a race thing, because again, what does 'White' sound like? Its just smart business. Same with customer service, if an American calls in to get help from your company and they cant understand the person speaking with them they are going to get frustrated and the business is going to lose clients.
tldr: I wish everyone would stop making everything a race thing.
Interesting tech, though I can't help imagining it's solving an auxiliary issue and not the core problem with many call centers, which is that these workers are usually unable to solve the customer's problem but are there only to serve as a punching bag.
From the article, "It’s not hard to imagine scenarios where the introduction of Sanas results in companies demanding more of their workers because they now have “accent matching" that is supposed to increase their performance with customers—-a typical outcome when workplaces with minimal autonomy implement performance-boosting software."
They don't seem to translate prosody at all!
The Indian accent comes through bright and clear in a few places, especially in:
* "How are you today?"
* "Please give me a minute to check on that."
* "Let's see what I can do about correcting your order."
Reminds me of: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/01/16/areva-...
As a non-native english speaker, i have no problem to understand plain american/canadian english, but i got lost fast when the speaker have some strong accent. So i can see that such product may improve usability of call centers for non-native speakears. The author should check their english-native-speaker privilege.
Pretty ingenious. If the difficulty of understanding is accent related (although I think it's mostly grammar and a difficulty of finding the precise words) it could possibly make call center operations more effective.
I don't totally like it, but it seems like it could be a successful idea.
If people have never seen you, they make a mental image of you based solely of your voice. If you are working the phones there are certain things you can do to make their mental image of you very positive and in this familiar and authoritative tone gets you high scores and in return positive responses.
If your target audience is a median American, having an American accent will help you, if that is the only parameter that you can improve on.
The Wolf of Wallstreet guy has an entire book on this about his method of phone salesmanship. It's a good read.
https://www.sanas.ai/demo
(The page has a somewhat broken layout for me - use the toggle switch.)
Haha. For me (EU) the first voice has a slight indian accent, while the second one a slight east asian accent. But i'm sure they are working to achieve perfection ( i.e. British royal family accent).
I've had less of a problem recently with call center accents, and actually a surprising problem with call center employees who stutter. I don't hold stuttering against them, but it has literally taken twice to three times as long to solve the problem that it should have. It's just not a good job fit for their skills.
That won't be enough to fool anyone. Anyone who has dealt with foreign csr and local (American) csr knows the difference is night and day. Foreign csr basically just read a script and never deviate. If you ask a question that isn't on their script, they're lost.
Honestly, my issue with calling a call center is never the accent or nationality of the other person. It's that they're usually either incompetent or forced to behave as if they're incompetent by corporate policy. Every HN user has likely had the same experience described in XKCD 806 [1] and wished there really was a code word to get to talk to someone who actually knows something.
One of the more annoying ones for me is contacting tech support with extensive debugging information/logs and only being able to talk to people who can't understand what I'm talking about and insist on power cycling the device (which of course may momentarily resolve an intermittent issue, and is enough for them to "close" the case).
[1]: https://xkcd.com/806/
I'm guessing this will introduce a (further) delay on the line and just mean you are confused as to why the white American can't understand you.
I want the opposite so I sound like Indian when I pick up the daily spam calls received.
Not "white Americans"--Americans.
Over the phone, people cannot necessarily tell my race.
Quote from one of the founders: “We want to build a very inclusive work culture and we think this could be an extremely great product and technology to actually bring people closer.”
Yeah… this is dystopian, offensive, racist, utterly thoughtless, completely lacking in any sort of understanding of human cultures… this is wrong on so many levels.
Not only is the Indian to “White American” demo offensive in the obvious racism way but it also represents the removal of cross cultural exposure, the parallels to “news bubble” and the problems they can lead to are obvious and it’s extremely irritating as a potential customer to be lied to like this (its a great example of the sort of thing that leads to customers boycotting a company once its discovered)... and my ultimate example of why this is an bad company (not a bad technology, as technology is simply a tool, the ethics of which depend on the humans putting it to use) imagine it backwards, a “White American” using this to sound “Indian” … hopefully the offensive nature of selling this as a product was obvious before that example but yeah. This is toxic ethical swamp territory that I hope their investors end up watching their money slowly sink into before it eventually disappears.
This startup should not have happened.
"Imagine it backwards, a “White American” using this to sound “Indian”" I'm white, I don't find this offensive at all, why would I? The only way I would is if I was looking for offense. If my job was calling people to make sales and they couldn't understand me I would leap at the chance to change my accent so they could. Sales is a commission based job, more sales by leveraging an available software tool means a better life for my family, especially if I am based in a third world economy.
If my options as a call center business owner are to 1) use foreign workers and lose customers due to the communication gap, 2) use foreign workers and leverage software to negate the communication gap or 3) use more expensive US based workers; how is it racist to acknowledge the facts on the ground and choose the second option? Your argument is that the call center operators should be forced to lose customers and business because not to do so is racist?
India is also a country, a guy of Indian descent from Britain sounds just like a white guy from Britain, same with people from Florida or NY. To conflate race and nationality is a flawed argument. What does 'White American' sound like? Do people from Alabama and NYC sound the same? If a black kid and a white kid are adopted as babies and raised in the same family they will sound the same. Accent is a regional thing, not a racial one.
Not everything is racist, stop trying to find things to be outraged about.
Stop being outraged about other people finding things to be outraged about. They’re not going to stop and you’ll just end up miserable in the end.
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If your solution to racism is to disguise as a white man it's not a solution to racism. The tool is almost the complete opposite of what their selling pitch is
And let's not play dumb here, the end goal is too milk workers from third world countries
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> it also represents the removal of cross cultural exposure
I don't call a call center to be exposed to new cultures. I call them to fix a problem.
Waiting 20 minutes then ending with someone who has a terrible mic that seems like it's 10 feet from their face then throw on an accent of any type (heck, I've had agents with US Southern accents that I can't understand) and I end up hanging up to pull the lever on another agent.
Like yeah, is it racist? Probably. But would it fix a problem without hurting anyone? Yes.
Accents can be genuine communication barriers. It isn’t racist to acknowledge that or to desire to find ways to resolve those issues. That is, ways that don’t involve asking a person to repeat what they’ve said over and over or to have your issue completely misunderstood because the worker also has trouble understanding your accent.