Indian call centres use Al to sound American

SALES PITCH

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FOR three years, Kartikeya Kumar hesitated before picking up the phone, anticipating another difficult conversation with another frustrated customer.

The call centre agent, now 29, had tried everything to eliminate what a colleague called the “Indian-ism” in his accent. He mimicked the dialogue from Marvel movies and belted out songs by Metallica and Pink Floyd. Relief finally arrived in the form of artificial intelligence.

In 2023, Kumar's employer, the Paris-based outsourcing giant Teleperformance, rolled out an accent-altering software at his office in Gurgaon, on the outskirts of New Delhi. In real time, the Al smooths out Kumar’s accent — and those of at least 42000 other Indian call centre agents — making their speech more understandable to American clients on the other end of the line. “Now the customer doesn’t know where I am located,” Kumar said. “If it makes the caller happy, it makes me happy, too.”

Those who use the software are engaging in “digital whitewashing,” critics say, which helps explain why the industry prefers the term “accent translation” over “accent neutralisation.”