Startup is selling tech to make call center workers sound like white Americans
Some thoughts as a guy who worked help desk&#x2F;call center for many years.<p>1) It&#x27;s sad that we need this. However, I&#x27;ve talked to many, many customers that are not at all shy about being openly racist, and as long as we continue to entertain that &quot;The customer is always right&quot; mentality, it won&#x27;t go away. I had customers who would get very hostile with my coworker adjacent to my desk who was from Pakistan but lived in the US, and often the customer would not <i>believe</i> that he was in the US until I audibly walked over to his desk and said in my loudest white-guy mid-Atlantic accent, &quot;Hey, Mohammad! What seems to be the problem?&quot;<p>2) I don&#x27;t think this approach will work, if for no other reason than that Indian-British English has a distinctive style to it that extends beyond the accent. I once took a Udemy course (might&#x27;ve been on Elasticsearch?) and it was very clearly written by someone in India who then <i>paid</i> a white guy to read all of the slides in his American English accent. The results were hilarious, because the guy was clearly trying to do his best to make &quot;do the needful&quot; sound  like something a Bay Area dude would naturally say, but, it simply wasn&#x27;t.<p>3) For what it&#x27;s worth, while I can immediately tell when I&#x27;ve called into a tech call-center based in India, I&#x27;ve been genuinely surprised at the relative <i>lack</i> of &quot;foreign accent&quot; when I&#x27;ve called into a call-center based out of Singapore or the Philippines. To my ears it sounded like non-distinct English (e.g. not quite American but not quite British either, and certainly not Indian).