AI Startup Wants to Make Foreign Call Center Employees Sound White

Is it helpful or dystopian? A Silicon Valley startup is using AI-powered algorithms to make foreign call center employees sound white and American during phone conversations. 

The technology comes from Palo Alto-based Sanas, which was founded by three former Stanford University students. The team created a real-time accent-translation service to make it easier for call center employees to be understood during a phone call.   

“We don’t want to say that accents are a problem because you have one,” Sanas President Marty Sarim told(Opens in a new window) SFGate. “They’re only a problem because they cause bias and they cause misunderstandings.”

The accent translation can kick in with a click of a switch. However, the company’s system doesn’t just remove an accent from the call center employee; it alters the entire conversation to make the employee sound like a voice-to-text software reader. Still, Sanas says its technology offers access to a “multitude of accents” beyond a white American male.    

The startup is marketing the technology as “empowering” for call center employees, many of whom work from India, the Philippines, and elsewhere in Asia. “Accent matching can improve understanding by 31% and customer satisfaction by 21%,” the company’s website adds. 

In addition, Sanas says it created the technology for a fellow Stanford engineering student who had to work at a call center in Nicaragua. “Working there he was faced with daily bias associated with his accent. He was verbally abused and discriminated against over the phone. And found himself underperforming at a job for which he was vastly overqualified,” the startup said.  

Still, the same technology is also receiving criticism for how it removes accents, rather than letting people appreciate them. “One of the long-range effects is the erasure of people as individuals,” privacy researcher Chris Gilliard told(Opens in a new window) The Guardian. “It seems like an attempt to boil everybody down to some homogenized, mechanical voice that ignores all the beauty that comes from people’s languages and dialects and cultures. It’s a really sad thing.”

According to SFGate, Sanas is currently focused on bringing its technology to call center employees, but it could expand the system to consumer video and audio calls. The startup also has interest in bringing it to films and TV.

Check out the technology on Sanas’ website(Opens in a new window) and in the video above.