AI ‘accent masking’ at overseas call centres sparks union backlash in Canada

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They can do this but not block out the background noise of 3 other agents chatting coming through or hold music that feels like a knife to the eardrums.

Fuck off. Also, name the company. Name them.

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They intentionally add the background noise in.

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Do they? That makes me incredibly angry.

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Here’s something more to annoy you:

The call system we have at work has an option for a “minimum queue time” So you can make sure that people always have to wait at least a certain amount of time, even with free agents.

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Are you aware of the reason(s) for this? To discourage would be callers from following through?

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I can think of a couple

  • expectation management: sometimes call volume is genuinely high, and if you set a floor at say 10 minutes it only feels like a 5 minute difference if the caller’s actual wait time is 15
  • engineering downtime to allow agents time to complete paperwork or catch up on emails
  • make us all so annoyed with the process of waiting in line we welcome AI agents as liberators
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(My guess, best case scenario) Make queue times during non-busy hours more similar to the queue times during busy hours, so that there doesn’t seem to be a “better” time of day to call, hopefully spreading the call volume throughout the day and creating a more consistent wait time when calling (even if that means the experience is worse than actually necessary at times).

At least that’s probably how someone in management sold the idea.

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I’m sure it’s to give you a sense of “pride and accomplishment” when you give up and fix it yourself “adopt digital self‑solve”.

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If you can look it up yourself quickly, or just ask a person on the phone quickly, lots of people will call.

But if the phonecall is at least 15 minutes of listening to annoying my music first, looking it up yourself might seem like a better idea.

People who really need to talk to a person might be annoyed, but it won’t make them consider a competitor.

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Can we make arson legally allowable for these cases?

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It’s Telus.

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Krisp also has software for this. It certainly does not “capture their natural tone and speaking voice”. It’s very uncanny and doesn’t capture verbal cues like a “heh”.

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“You have to ask yourself, would we be doing this if it was for an accent from Australia or the U.K.?” Grossman questioned.

Welsh and Scottish accents have joined the voice call
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Research has actually shown that people respond better to people with Scottish accents. Apparently at least one big company (might have been British Gas?) factored this into their decision about where to base their upper tier customer service call centres

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If I can hear the person I couldn’t care less. Some of those accents are thick as fuck.

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Double win for right wing thinking: fill the pockets of techbros while white washing the underclass labor force.

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This would be awesome if it also adjusted Canadian accents and made them match the native support tech accent for the support tech.

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Monkey’s paw: everyone is now from Newfoundland

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