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- Hacker News
- I had a strange call with a support rep recently.
They sounded a tinge strange, like they’ve almost crossed the uncanny valley, only to succumb at the final 3% stretch.
I was suspicious, but their ability to understand my complex request and the relatively low latency make an LLM -> TTS or e2e voice model unlikely.
This post finally solved the mystery.
by cyanf - I had a particularly frustrating experience recently with a heavily accented customer service rep.
I had to give them various pieces of information that had to be accurately transcribed, e.g. a Hide My Email - generated email address.
Normally for this like this, I tell rep that I'm going to read the full email, then spell it out using the NATO phonetic alphabet, then read it out again, and this usually works great.
This particular rep was entirely unfamiliar with the NATO phonetic alphabet and couldn't reliably make out make bog-standard North American accent, so I spent probably five minutes on the phone to just read off my email address with various iterations of "T AS IN TANGO"... "did you say M as in mango?". By the end I still was not confident that they'd accurately taken down my email.
I don't think AI accent-altering would have fixed this exchange.
by Marsymars - Does anybody have a demo of this technology in use? I'm very curious to see how it sounds in practice. Uncanny or hyperrealistic?by kelseydh
- I wonder about latency especially. Does the AI wait for sentences to finish?by jorisw
- Found a video from a couple years back using this tech. Wasn't Telus in the video but they demonstrated it and the change was subtle but definitely noticable. See how it was 2 years old I am certain the technology has greatly improved since that time.by 14
- I ran into this (or a similar service) when cancelling comcast a few weeks ago. It worked _really_ well. It was slightly uncanny, but I think most people wouldn’t notice anything. It was only some awkward phrasing that made it obvious to me.by maxrmk
- https://www.sanas.ai/#playground check the Accent Translation sectionby ing33k
- I had 'accent neutralization' training as part of my hire for a US company in 2004. Americans could not understand my Australian accent. It still affected my accent to this day.
- This is normal, and I don’t think it’s racist.
- I’m Australian, I’ve had many yanks ask me to my face what language I speak, be shocked we use different money, shocked summer is winter in the southern hemisphere, shocked we drive on the other side of the road, shocked we have atms, etc etc.
Can’t help poor education.
by testing22321 - Accent training for call centres is a thing as well:
* https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20160317-inside-the-sec...
by throw0101c - I would rather speak an actual AI rather than an offshore operator using AI to disguise their accent.by sjtgraham
- I prefer neitherby allthetime
- The problem with almost all call centers is that their "agents" aren't given any agency. They can attempt to convince you that your bill is actually correct, or escalade our issue to technical support, which may or may not get back to you. I don't see how any amount of AI will fix the complete lack of trust that many companies seems to have in their agents, regardless of them being software or humans.
Most modern call centers / support is completely pointless and almost nothing would be lost by not having them. This is assuming that you'd provide just a half decent self service and have actual information available, written in a clear, easy to read, language.
by mrweasel - Comcast (Xfinity) is doing this too. I was absolutely convinced I was talking to an artificial voice but the human-like capabilities of that voice to respond were far beyond what I'd expect out of LLMs. I think it must have just been done to hide the accent.by superkuh
- I had the same experience. Im glad I’m not crazyby stacktraceyo
- I've been having issues with Xfinity and have spent hours calling their support numbers, and a few of the conversations I had gave me an eerie feeling. At first I thought the agents were being trained to inflect their accented English to something akin to received pronunciation but their voices had a robotic quality to them that I found odd and couldn't make sense of.by stuxnet79
- My agent actually said just so you know sir, I am not ai, they are just using ai to change my voice. I think that this is an ugly reflection on American's attitudes about people with accents.
- Doesn't matter.
As soon as I hear the "Mr Firstname and how are you today?" I hang up.
Call spammers have not worked out that a formal polite greeting is a big giveaway.
by wewewedxfgdf - Don't tell the call spammers this or they'll train all their "agents" to start phone calls with "what's up, bro" or something they think is the stereotypical opposite of formal.by walrus01
- Spammers are probably not targeting you. Like the obvious comma and spelling mistakes in spam emails that are there to weed out the smart people that are much harder to scam, this also serves as a filter to get only the most vulnerable people.by patall
- Telus is completely out of touch. The issue hasn't been the accents of most agents, at least not for years at this point, it's the horrendous quality microphones the agents are given and the noisy conditions they're forced to work in.
It's hard to decipher anyone when you can hear 30 other people in the background and the audio is choppy.
by SkyeCA - Not Telus, but I was getting an insurance quote last week and actually gave up after five minutes and told the agent they were just too difficult to understand with their poor microphone and background noise.by Marsymars
- While this is interesting and newsworthy, especially for those of us who live in Canada and have to deal with Canada’s Telco/Internet monopolies… this "article" itself appears to be a crappy LLM summary of some other piece of information.
Anyone have the original source?
by dlenski - It also has a lot of annoying vibecoded UX smells.by duskdozer
- Source publications cited in first sentence but not linked. https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/2026/05/05/telus-uses-ai-to-ch... , https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-telus-ai-ac...by cormorant
- Original source (please submit): https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-telus-ai-ac...
Related last year:
AI Accent Conversion for call centers (48 points, 70 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43514141
Call centres using AI to 'whiten' Indian accents (8+6 points, 0+6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43246376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43292311
by gnabgib - Email the mods and they can change the linkby altairprime
- by kingstnap
- Refreshed gift link: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/ac7e9825b17af566d8cdb52...by gomoboo