Startup develops AI that makes call center employees sound like white, American robots

The goal of Silicon Valley startup is to come up with the most dystopian uses of Artificial Intelligence. Earlier this month we had Meta's racist chatbot and the artificial intelligence-generated rapper that uses the n-word, before that, back in June, we learned about the Google Artificial Intelligence that was so good it convinced an engineer it was sentient. Palo Alto-based startup Sanas has introduced to the world an artificial intelligence with the goal of making foreign call center employees sound white and accent neutral.

According to SFGATE, a startup called Sanas offers "accent translation" for call center employees, a job that tends to be done in cheaper foreign markets. A real-time accent translation service is offered by Sanas, which was founded by three college graduates. Over 30 million dollars in venture capital funding has been received by it.

"We don't want to say that accents are a problem because you have one," the president of the organization said. They cause bias and they cause misunderstandings.

You can try out the demo on the website where you can hear the magic. The software removes the accent and replaces it with a robotic voice. Call center employees will be able to take back the power of their own voice according to the website.

In the film Sorry to Bother You, the main character, a black man, adopts a white voice in order to get more sales at his call center job. Critics say that "accent translation" is another way to dehumanize a job.

"On the surface it shows communication difficulty, people not being able to understand someone else's speech," said a professor of sociology. It's code for a lot of other issues about how accent causes racism and ethnocentrism.

It doesn't help that the artificial intelligence doesn't sound like a human. People who are already prone to dishing out racist abuse to call center employees also won't take kindly to a robotic voice on the phone according to a University of Toronto researcher.

She told SFGATE that customer racism is likely to increase if workers are further dehumanized when an app is placed between worker and customer.

Workers will have a choice about whether or not to use the Artificial Intelligence's accent translation, according to the president of the company. If the tech proves to be a success, the workers won't have much of a choice, according to those familiar with the exploitation of foreign call center workers.

The labor process of call centers doesn't involve choice by the workers in terms of technology, according to poster. It's almost impossible to have an authentic conversation with people on the other end because workers are subject to deeply intrusive monitoring.