Silicon Valley Startup Wants To Help Call Center Workers Sound ‘Whiter’

Turning its back on inclusivity and moving towards homogenization instead, new startup Sanas wants you to “hear the magic” as it presents a faux conversation between a customer and a call center worker with an Indian accent that’s instantly modified to sound more American and unmistakably “whiter.”

Founded by three students from Stanford University, the company’s bizarre service was first brought to light by Joshua Bote for SFGate, who noted that the firm had successfully accumulated US$32 million in funding this June, which its executives claim is the largest-ever seed round for a speech technology business. 

While the firm’s investors called the accent-changing technology “magical,” Motherboard, which was treated to a demonstration by President Massih Sarimand and COO Sharath Keysheva Narayana, said that it heard “a passable white and American-sounding voice, albeit [one that was] a bit robotic.” 

Despite telling SFGate that he didn’t want to brand accents “as a problem,” Sarim did admit he felt the differences in intonation could result in “bias” and “misunderstandings,” with the company saying its service can “improve understanding by 31% and customer satisfaction by 21%.” 

Seeing it as a way to empower workers, the voice-changing model can work on a variety of accents at a touch of a button, which its founders feel will help make customers more polite to workers. 

This isn’t a new phenomenon, with The Economic Times previously reporting on how foreign call center workers often chose to adopt more common names to appeal to English-speaking customers. 

Of course, as SFGate noted, there’s an inherent problem with Sanas’ technology—that accents aren’t the cause of bias, but trigger pre-existing conceptions people already have of certain ethnicities. 

Experts who spoke to the publication said it was troubling that the company placed a demand on the workers to make themselves better understood by Americans, rather than allowing people in the United States to accept and communicate with other accents. 

As Winifred Poster, Professor of Sociology at Washington University, put it, while at first glance, the service tries to address the issue of not being able to understand someone’s speech, it inherently hides how accents bring out “racism and ethnocentrism.” 

Literature Professor Tom McEnaney concurred, explaining that the public in the US has been conditioned through the media to accept a particular “white voice” as the standard, neutral American sound. 

Will this technology really help call center workers present a more “comfortable” image to callers that will free them from harassment and discrimination on a daily basis? If we’re going by previous reports, it doesn’t sound all too promising. 

[via SFGate and Motherboard, cover image via Flynt | Dreamstime.com]