“Hi, good morning. I’m calling in from Bangalore, India.” I’m talking on speakerphone to a man with an obvious Indian accent. He pauses. “Now I have enabled the accent translation,” he says. It’s the same person, but he sounds completely different: loud and slightly nasal, impossible to distinguish from the accents of my friends in Brooklyn.
Only after he had spoken a few more sentences did I notice a hint of the software changing his voice: it rendered the word “technology” with an unnatural cadence and stress on the wrong syllable. Still, it was hard not to be impressed – and disturbed.
The man calling me was a product manager from Sanas, a Silicon Valley startup that’s building real-time voice-altering technology that aims to help call center workers around the world sound like westerners. It’s an idea that calls to mind the 2018 dark comedy film Sorry to Bother You, in which Cassius, a Black man hired to be a telemarketer, is advised by an older colleague to “use your white voice”. The idea is that mimicking the accent will smooth interactions with customers, “like being pulled over by the police”, the older worker says. In the film, Cassius quickly acquires a “white voice”, and his sales numbers shoot up, leaving an uncomfortable feeling.
Accents are a constant hurdle for millions of call center workers, especially in countries like the Philippines and India, where an entire “accent neutralization” industry tries to train workers to sound more like the western customers they’re calling – often unsuccessfully.