I think it's dehumanizing. Yes, they have accents. English isn't their first language. TELUS decided to move jobs they could have given to Canadians offshore to save a buck or two. We're already conditioned to treat service reps like punching bags; now we're literally taking away their voices and further devaluing them. Not okay.

I don't like it. It's inevitable, but no reason to cheer it on. I find it similar to Google Mail or YouTube autotranslating content without opt-in (and sometimes opt-out). It's continuing a trend of you can't really trust the content you see is the content someone else sees or what they sent. It says it only changes accents, soon it'll filter swear words and what else? The end game for the legal use of such tech is always injecting ads. And with this particular tech, we know that the legal uses will be a negligible fraction of the real uses.

Changing an accent doesn’t change the content the person on the other end receives it with. Most of my issues with overseas support is that they have no real context for my problem. It’s not just a language barrier, it’s a culture barrier.

When calling support in my own country it is much faster and easier, because they intuitively understand the type of issue I’m having and can better relate. I question if changing the voice would make it more frustrating, as I’d have similar issues without the obvious explanation as to why it’s happening.

I don't love this - in a forum I frequent, there has been a surge of posts theat have a distinct LLM flavor to them. Some people have argued this is a good thing as it allows non-english speakers to participate in the discussion.

However, thanks to this AI 'assistance' its becoming what was actually intended to be said by the people and what was made up the LLM, with some people creating wordy pages long LLM babble.

This also prevents non-native speakers from actively getting better, which is a core issue with AI general.

Also I think people who are not native speakers are often overly concerned with how much other people are bothered by broken English and accents (as long as accents are clear enough that the point can be understood)

The first person that mentions anything about "the needful" with no accent is getting hung up on.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

This is more likely about sales than customer service.

Canadians get a lot of scam calls from Indian call centres. Whether it's furnace cleaners or somebody calling about a fraudulent amazon package you supposedly ordered, it's usually somebody with an Indian accent. It's reached the point where many people simply hang up if they hear an Indian accent on the line. If you're trying to do telemarketing, possibly using the very same call centres that run these scams, that's a huge barrier.

Telus, for its part, is absolutely shameless in its use of aggressive telemarketing. I'm not surprised that they're one of the first companies to employ this sort of innovation. Unfortunately, this tech will likely spread to the scammers almost immediately, assuming it didn't originate with them.

As an aside, here's one of my favourite games to play with telescammers: Pick one word to say over and over again, but attempt to give it a variety of natural inflections, ambiguities, etc. so that it sounds like you're not just saying one word. Then see how long you can keep the scammer on the line. Start your stopwatch the moment you start talking to a human. I once managed over three minutes with the word, "Fuzzy-cuffs". Every minute of their time you waste could be a minute somebody's Grandma isn't being scammed.

You get calls about a new service or promotion, and it's the diction of the caller that makes you not wish to engage...?!

Japanese politicians and CEOs like talk about how AI and robotics will offset labor shortages. The xenophobe party goes so far as to say that this means there is no need to dilute the pure blood of japan, by offering any path to stable residency for foreign workers. But I think just as easily AI could serve to solve the real problems of integration and understanding from just accepting foreign workers. Of course this doesn't solve the imaginary race purity problems of the xenophobes.. But now I can see a path, where maybe they could just opt into some filter, where all foreign humanity and culture is just altered by AI to look like Japanese things, so they dont ever have to feel uncomfortable.

Regardless of tech you can always improve your speech. I had a Japanese girlfriend who went through the process and 80% of the results where accomplished by learning the ~20 vowel sounds found in American english (vs her native 5 vowel sounds).

I used to work in call centres for telcos in Canada.

A) this will be used to hire non Canadian with minimal language skills and will be bad for the local labour market without objection from customers

B) accents are troublesome but the biggest issues were people that don’t have the same cultural standards for things like, not lying, not dumping calls that were hard, or doing a good job with complicated systems and accurately logging cases truthfully.

So many problems are created by poor workers (opps we deleted the customers account, oops I transferred them too you).

These were problems that were so bad they had to have specific cultural training for specific nations to get people to the Canadian standard, and many failed. But hey, cheaper labour!

Now I clean houses, and there is so much competition from people from abroad who are flooding the market and undercutting prices and I don’t get government subsidies to live in a hotel…

I hate to break it to you but like 60%+ of the time when someone is calling you claiming that they're from Telus/Rogers/Bell they actually aren't.

God forbid they hire canadians