A Wipro call agent's laugh was silenced by an AI accent translator during a customer call. This tech, used by BPOs from Teleperformance to Unitedhealth, aims to cut costs by making Indian accents 'American' and boost NPS. This leaves agents unable to convey human emotives like laughter, creating awkward, dehumanized customer interactions.
How We Got Here
Facing client pressure to improve Net Promoter Scores, BPOs adopted voice-AI tools like Sanas to convert agents' regional accents to American ones. This allowed BPOs like Teleperformance and Wipro to hire cheaper talent from Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns without risking accent discrimination.
The Numbers
- Sanas and similar tools convert accents from Indian or Filipino to American.
- Unitedhealth Group, American Express, Wells Fargo, Teleperformance, and Alorica use these translators.
- Teleperformance claims a 26% improvement in NPS after using AI translators with 42,000 Indian employees.
- The technology struggles to translate human emotives: laughter, whispers, and vocal inflections.
- This is happening as AI agents are getting better and cheaper, threatening to replace human call center roles.
What Happens Next
🇮🇳 Why This Matters for India
For the 4 million call center employees across Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru, this tech exacerbates the threat of full AI automation to their jobs.
The Take
This tech is a short-term band-aid for BPOs to push down costs. Within 12-18 months, full AI agents will make human accent-translated roles redundant, gutting jobs for lakhs of agents across smaller cities like Nashik and Kochi.
Source:
The Ken ↗