I think this is a good idea.

Almost every time I get a call from TELUS about a new service or promotion, it’s someone from the Philippines or India. A lot of them speak English fluently, but the accent and phrasing can be pretty different from what I’m used to, and I don’t always catch everything they’re saying. Sometimes I feel like I’m guessing a big chunk of the conversation, which makes me not want to engage, especially on sales calls.

It matters more when I’m the one calling them for billing or technical support. In those cases, clarity really counts, and it can get frustrating when I have to keep asking for repeats or try to piece things together.

Honestly, I’d love something like this for my own speech too. I’m Japanese and have a fairly strong accent, and it would be nice if people could understand me more easily without having to guess.

While this is interesting and newsworthy, especially for those of us who live in Canada and have to deal with Canada’s Telco/Internet monopolies… this "article" itself appears to be a crappy LLM summary of some other piece of information.

Anyone have the original source?

Doesn't matter.

As soon as I hear the "Mr Firstname and how are you today?" I hang up.

Call spammers have not worked out that a formal polite greeting is a big giveaway.

I had a strange call with a support rep recently.

They sounded a tinge strange, like they’ve almost crossed the uncanny valley, only to succumb at the final 3% stretch.

I was suspicious, but their ability to understand my complex request and the relatively low latency make an LLM -> TTS or e2e voice model unlikely.

This post finally solved the mystery.

Original source (please submit): https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-telus-ai-ac...

Related last year:

AI Accent Conversion for call centers (48 points, 70 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43514141

Call centres using AI to 'whiten' Indian accents (8+6 points, 0+6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43246376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43292311

Startup is selling tech to make call center workers sound like white Americans (2022):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32591709

I would rather speak an actual AI rather than an offshore operator using AI to disguise their accent.

Oh! Dear Lord. I still want to hear my Indian friends speak Indian to me during Support Calls. These days, I’m hearing American accents trying to calm me down over my complaints on that excess masala in the idli-dosa-pav-bhaji butteerr-chicken combo in the El Camino Eatery in the outskirts of Jhalandar.

I had 'accent neutralization' training as part of my hire for a US company in 2004. Americans could not understand my Australian accent. It still affected my accent to this day.

Does anybody have a demo of this technology in use? I'm very curious to see how it sounds in practice. Uncanny or hyperrealistic?

Comcast (Xfinity) is doing this too. I was absolutely convinced I was talking to an artificial voice but the human-like capabilities of that voice to respond were far beyond what I'd expect out of LLMs. I think it must have just been done to hide the accent.

This is positive news, although my use-case is different. I've been looking for a tool that'll mask off the diarrhea of 'like', 'I mean', and 'you know' from some americans' speak. MEGA: Make English Great Again!

Usually the title goes: XXX uses AI to replace Call-Agents

1) stop picking up the phone

2) if that's not an option, have a pick-up-the-phone agent pick it up

Doesn't matter. Whenever Telus calls my standard answer is the call blocker.

This will also let the telco further train agents to handle calls without the humans once enough scenarios are in place.

Still, they could just give the employees training to learn additional accents.

The English accents around the world were left behind with the subsets of English people were taught to be able to aspire to entry level administrative jobs.

Someone recommended this to read, not sure if anyone else has read it: https://archive.org/details/educationascultu00carn

It feels like it bears some underpinning and contextual relevance.

Dagnabbit - I was so used to imagining Apu from Simpsons in callcenters. Now I have to deal with unknown language dialects of fake-AI-agents wasting my time ...

Oldschool callcenters often had a human! Now I "interact" with AI ...

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Like all things AI, this one's tricky.

Scam calls sounding "more legitimate" because it passes the (unfortunately racist) filters most people have.