this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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honestly, this is brilliant. Not only is it going to make it easier to understand people with really thick accents -- I've worked with lots of Indian people before (hotel industry) and I still get tripped up from time to time, especially over a crappy phone line -- but it'll also probably cut down on a lot of the racist shit they may take from customers. I can imagine the average call center employee with a thick accent takes a fair bit more abuse than call center employees who speak without an accent.
on the other hand, this might also make it harder to identify a scam call immediately if this becomes commonplace. Not that perfect English speakers aren't also capable of scamming you, but, usually the scam callers aren't perfect English speakers.
I mean you're not wrong about any of this, but I think the not so subtle racism in this AI tool is reprehensible.
It's not racism to acknowledge that accents can have a major negative impact on effective communication and design a product to address the issue.
Definitely true. We had a German professor with an essentially incomprehensible accent teaching calculus at our college. Basically everyone had to learn it from the textbook.
Yeah... most complaints about accents in customer service agents have nothing to do with understanding them.
What are you basing that statement on?
Experience