Comment by guessmyname

I just tell them “I know this not your fault.”

I worked in a call center. You quickly develop an emotional rhino hide or you won’t make it.

I don't think you need to go that deep. This technology is literally dehumanizing: it's replacing individual human aspects of someone's voice with a computer-generated facsimile.

I am not impacted by this issue on either side, but I am in the "dehumanising" camp, so here are my opinions:

> Is it dehumanizing to Filipinos that Filipinos probably now do their job more efficiently without having to learn an accent that they are not exposed to?

It's already demeaning to expect them to "learn an accent", unless their job description is to literally pretend they are from a different culture (e.g. if they were actors). Introducing an "AI" middleman to change their voice is demeaning and dehumanising.

> Is it dehumanizing to Filipinos that they no longer enjoy having their accent heard as a externality of a counterfactual arrangement?

It is dehumanising to any person that their own human voice is no longer heard when performing a job involving human contact.

> Is it dehumanizing to the customers that the company does not expect their customers to be cosmopolitan enough to understand a foreign accent with ease?

Not quite dehumanising, but it is certainly patronising that the company has an opinion as to what voice their customers can or cannot understand. And if the company is hiring customer service agents whose accents are a serious hinderance to understanding, I would argue that their hires are not likely to accurately understand the very customers they are supposed to assist.

>Is it dehumanizing to the customers that the customers are now more sensorily shielded from a current-day reality regarding globalized providers of service?

Not dehumanising, but again patronising, and also disrespectful and borderline dishonest.

I won't get into the final two points, as those are prior to the accent-middleman "AI".

I went to Newfoundland and I went to a bar one night and met a guy from a small town along the coast and I literally couldn’t understand a single thing he said. He was apparently speaking English but it may have been Ancient Greek for all I was able to make out. The only way we could communicate was via the bartender, who would interpret what he said and tell me. He had no trouble understanding me. It kinda blew my mind.

> heavily accented, not unlike other English native speakers

One could just as well argue the opposite position.

Dunno, a ton of UK born and raised people have accents so thick that I struggle to make out what they're saying.

Or perhaps you treat the customer support workers as humans instead of worker drones and give them the agency to terminate the call when they are getting abused, with the contracts of repeat offenders getting terminated?

> On the other, too many customers are complete racist dicks to people who they perceive as not "belonging to their country"

nunez alluded to the reason why people will do that. And no, it's not racist in the way you're trying to frame it.

The callers are angry that they're being forced to talk with people which don't even speak their language well enough for it to be a non-issue. Despite being paying customers.

Because the company had a genius MBA which wanted a bigger bonus, so they outsourced/offshored it.

These workers may not deserve this treatment, but it's completely understandable - and the foreign workers ARE the representative of the company doing this shit. And thus... Framing this behavior as racism will not help your message whatsoever.

Not sure why you're being downvoted but this is the truth if you live in a western country (probably other countries too but I have never lived outside of a non-Western country).

Boots Riley is one of the most underrated American artists of our time. "I'm a Virgo" is also great if you haven't seen it.

What if I genuinely don’t understand what they’re saying, and neither does anyone in my team? This happened many times. Is this racism or a practical inconvenience?

I find the sensitivity on this topic regarding racism kind of overshadowing the practical aspect of not being able to understand what the other person is saying.

We offer people in our company English language training, because we’re a world wide remote company and everyone should be able to understand each other. Is this racism as well?

I had a Southern accent and had to train it out because my northern colleagues kept making fun of it. I noticed that I was perceived as "smarter" without it. My story is not exactly uncommon and there are a bunch of famous people (e.g. Stephen Colbert) who did the same thing.

> Filipinos will actively practice out any trace of their accent to sound as white as possible

Oh, so they have strong Swedish accents? Or South African?

On the topic of racism, skin colors don't have a particular sound.

>Contrariwise I consider this cultural genocide and the erasure of an entire people's way of speech.

Are they adjusting their tagalog accent too or so?

Either way. Consider how it feels elsewhere where the majority of such calls are not anywhere close to "native proficiency" English,...or Dutch or German or what have you and it's instead thick accents to the point you end up making your grandparents calls for them. It also doesn't help when they don't understand already suppressed and half erased local dialects/accents of the region they're servicing. Which indeed contributes to "erasure of an entire people's way of speech"

It also doesn't help that these people are often on the other side of the goddamn world and have usually a lot lot less tie-in to the company (if they even work directly for it) than when you get someone local on the line. I remember having to call one such company half a dozen times to get someone to understand that: no i was not the 1000th regular customer using one of their devices but wanted to make software that connects to it and had questions about their dev kit. It was the most infuriating experience figuring out again and again whether they couldn't understand the words i was using or just couldn't grasp that someone had a question that was unusual and didn't fit the scripts that they seemed to try to pull back to. In the end i had to weasel my way into the dm's of someone i once met working there who then immediately connected me to someone at the right department.

And everyone is abjectly aware that all this is just local companies outsourcing and suppressing wages.

It's also hard to describe the feeling of watching the entire world infiltrate your culture.

[dead]

> The other issue is that this further incentivizes companies to off-shore their support

Why is this a problem? Why are we so attached to the notion that a role must be completed from a specific jurisdiction (outside of regulatory). If you believe in remote work, then why should it matter from where that work is delivered?

Plenty of small companies offshore early support, to reduce costs. In many cases this provides jobs in economies that otherwise doesn't have them, and can lead to a tech industry that in turn hires globally. There are several economies that received a boost this way, and now benefit.

I don't see the problem. Yes, there may be uncomfortable shuffling of roles, layoffs,etc. But, as a believer in globalization, this will just happen. Yes, it will impact me as well.

I’ve spent time in India, and while they have many of the same things, they sometimes operate very differently. I assume call centers don’t pay that much, so it’s very possible that while India has certain things, the people I’m talking to have limited access.

If I’m trying to convey an issue about a flight, per your example, it may very well be to someone who’s never flown or has very different expectations for what it looks like to fly. At one of the airports I was at in India, I was trying to find my gate and was pointed to a guy at a card table with a 3-ring binder, where he flipped through to find the flight. This was maybe 10 years ago; I had never experienced anything like that in the US, even going back several decades. This is a cultural and experiential difference. If someone from that airport in India called me for help (prior to that experience), I would have had an really hard time parsing their problem, as I wouldn’t have any context for seeing a man with a binder about finding gate information. Someone saying that wouldn’t have made any sense to me. Other airports there were more akin to what I’m used to in the US, but still had their local quirks.

This same type of issue could play out regardless of the country. India was the example brought up, but I’ve run into confusion due to cultural differences everywhere I’ve been to some degree. How impactful this is to support will vary based on how common the issue is, but I’m usually not calling support for common issues now that most of those can be handled via a website.

it all depends on their training. And with the churn i imagine they are getting, or the cost measures, it's usually not quite the same.

And yes, cultural difference matters. Americans often have more agency to take initiative, on average. Knowing there's an American on the other side puts me at ease, mentally.

I suspect the main culprit here is company policy/choice resulting in angry callers. Not to say there aren't other factors, but people generally don't call companies because they're having a good time. If Telus is anything like American TV/phone/internet companies, then I'm even more convinced of this.

edit: And if people are able to detect this and suspect they're not even talking to a human at all, it might even make verbal abuse more common.

Something seems very wrong with observing that people are shitty and terrible to each other and proposing interposing a machine between them to make communication bearable.

>Singaporeans hate Australian accents more than anyone over here hates indian accents.

No way, I've never heard of this before.

Does anyone know why this is? Do they have a bad experience with Australian colleagues? Do we harrass them in public the way that the British backpackers do here?

Hey, J, I sent you an email.

I did not use AI for the comment. AI usually does that at the start of a paragraph, not the end. I tacked it on the end to better clarify my actual point, as it required reading between the lines too much, which can be problematic on a forum.

> It's not X, it's Y = AI pattern.

Yeah, a human has never used this pattern before! Good thing AI always leaves this digital signature which is never wrong, so you always know if the person on the other end has used AI.

FFS enough with these goddamn witch-hunt anti-shibboleths. It is neither reliable nor clever nor funny.

—Some human that actually uses em-dashes

The problem with cold calls is that you expect random people to stop what they are doing and listen to an advertisement; often for something they don't want or need.

Whatever you interrupted is far more important to them than whatever you're selling; especially if you haven't introduced enough filters in your process to ensure you're calling the right people.

We should either ban cold calling completely or introduce enough friction to the process that cold callers are incentivized to more closely filter who they call. (IE, I get cold calls trying to sell solar panels. The caller knows my address, and can see the solar panels on my roof on satellite photos. They just shouldn't bother calling me.)

It's because there's an imbalance of cost: It's cheaper to just nag me than to actually research if I've already bought the product or are interested in the product.

Personally I'm just not open to cold calls, period, ever. Not ever

I don't actually understand why anyone would be. Please don't waste my time trying to sell to me. If I'm in the market for your service, I'll let you know