Call centres using AI to ‘whiten' Indian accents
The world's biggest call centre company is using artificial intelligence to 'neutralise' Indian accents for Western customers.
Teleperformance said it was applying real-time AI software on phone calls in order to increase 'human empathy' between two people on the phone.
The French company's customers in the UK include parts of the Government, the NHS, Vodafone and eBay.
Teleperformance has about 90,000 employees in India and tens of thousands more in other countries.
It is using software from Sanas, an American company that says the system helps 'build a more understanding world' and reduces miscommunication.
The company's website says it makes call centre workers more productive and means customer service calls are resolved more quickly. The company also says it means call centre workers are less likely to be abused and customers are less likely to demand to speak to a supervisor.
It is already used by companies including Walmart and UPS.
'It's a technology that allows [us] to neutralise accents in real time without any data storage,' Teleperformance's Markus Schmitt told investors on Thursday.
'You have obviously the issue we talked about human connection, human empathy. We have first implemented Sanas with clients in India. And sometimes, there is a difficulty people in India talking and vice versa with clients from the US.'
He said it would mean 'closer and more intimate relationships' between workers and customers.
The company said it had introduced the technology in India and would expand to other countries.
Demos of Sanas' technology show Indian accents acquiring a distinctively American twang, as well as reducing background noise.
Sanas has been criticised in the past for making people's voices 'sound whiter'. The company says that call centre workers like the technology and it leads to more opportunities in countries such as India and The Philippines.
Teleperformance has taken a stake in the US company through a $13m (£10m) investment and a deal that will see Teleperformance's calls used to train the company's accent software.
Call centre companies have been under potential pressure from AI owing to the rise of chatbots that can handle many customer queries automatically.
Thomas Mackenbrock, Teleperformance's chief executive, said: 'In a world that is ubiquitous with AI, the element of the human ... will be also equally important because it's about building human connection and having this element of human empathy, connectivity will be something that will be equally valuable in the future.'
Mr Mackenbrock told Bloomberg that the company was not disclosing which customers were using the AI tool.
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