A start-up company in Silicon Valley, California, is developing software that can change the voices of phone speakers, to be closer to the “white” American accent, according to the newspaper.The Guardian“.
Sanas aims to customize the software for call centers operating from Asia that can change the tone of speakers in India and the Philippines, to be closer to their target audience in Western countries.
The newspaper report reviewed a scene from the movie “Sorry to Bother You”, in which he asked a worker in a black marketing center to use his “white tone” when talking to customers on the phone, to increase his sales significantly, and this made him feel uncomfortable.
Call centers in India and the Philippines seek to change the tone of their workers, but their attempts usually fail, according to the newspaper.
According to what was reported by the newspaper,SFGateUsing data from multiple dialects and comparing them, Sanas hopes to provide a shortcut to the AI software’s transformation of a speaker’s voice as speaking in different dialects, and “the focus is now on making non-American voices sound as white.”
Speaking to The Guardian, Sharath Keshava Narayana, co-founder of Sanas, says he has been rushing to develop the software since 2003, when he started working in a call center in Bangalore, where he was discriminated once morest due to his Indian accent and forced to change his name to Nathan. .
For his part, the director of “Sanas”, Marti Masseh Sarim, believes that call centers should be viewed as “representative” that his company is working on improving, and says that the option of using centers outside America is much cheaper than hiring call workers inside the United States, indicating that this applies On top companies around the world.
He explains the reason for using the software, saying: “If the customer is upset regarding the high value of his bill… or if his phone is not working well or whatever the reason, they usually feel frustrated when they hear someone speaking in another accent, and they will say: I would like to talk to someone in America, and therefore The worker receives that anger in full.
He adds that call center workers “do not get the respect they deserve right away, so the conversation starts with difficulty, but we can erase the fact that there is that bigotry, so it becomes a normal conversation, and both sides end the call well.”
Narayana stresses that the software is used across more than 1,000 call centers in India and the Philippines, and that employees feel confident solving their clients’ problems.
Challenges and problems
But the sociologist and future director of the School of International Studies and Languages at the University of Oregon, E. Anish, spent years in call centers, studying the impact of changing local dialects, and wrote a book in 2015 called Neutral Accent: How Language, Labor and Life Become Global.
Anish explains his experience working in a call center where employees receive training on “accent neutralization”, so that they can get rid of the British accent in some words, as well as delete frequently used words in the Hindi dialect such as “sir”.
In addition to their low salaries, call center employees live difficult working times, as they have to work all night to keep up with the hours of the day in the United States, which biology researchers have confirmed has a detrimental effect on health, in the form of raising the chances of cancer and premature birth and isolating workers from their community. , according to Anish.
Despite his conflicting feelings regarding the potential benefit for these workers from the voice-changing software, the sociologist sees the software as a “problem”.
He notes that such innovations can lead to “ignoring differences” and obliterating the employee’s humanity, and “allowing to avoid a social reality, that the call involves two people on the same planet, both having obligations to the other, indicating a more isolated and lonely future.”
Anish also indicated, upon hearing a version of the modified voice and comparing it with the original, that the modified version lacks human feelings, to appear “robot, without feelings.”
For his part, Chris Gillard, a researcher in privacy, censorship, and the negative effects of technology on marginalized communities, asserts that changing the tone will not change the “anger” received by telecoms employees, whose job is one of the most difficult jobs that can be done, but will “only” support racist beliefs, According to his interview with “The Guardian”.
He said, “Like a lot of things that have been posed as a solution, it doesn’t take into account people’s dignity or their humanity…One of the far-reaching effects is the erasure of people as individuals. It seems to be an attempt to sum everyone up in a homogeneous mechanical voice that ignores all the beauty that comes from people’s languages.” And their dialects and their cultures. It’s really sad.”
Narayana confirms that he has heard criticism of the “Sanas” software, but he sees that it deals with the world as it is, and says: “Yes, this is wrong, and we were not supposed to exist at all. But a lot of things exist in the world, why is there makeup?” “Why can’t people accept who they are? Is that wrong, like in the world? Absolutely. But do we let customers suffer followingward? I made this technology for employees, because I don’t want him or her to go through what I went through.”
