India's call centres are using AI to make agents sound American
About this episode
The episode explores how AI is being used in Indian call centres to modify agents' accents to sound American, raising questions about authenticity and human connection.
When you call an Indian call centre these days, the person answering might sound American — even if they've never left India. A new kind of AI can change an agent's accent in real time, mid-call, to sound more familiar to the customer. It's meant to build trust and cut hiring costs. But the same software that smooths out an accent often smooths away everything else too — laughter, tone, the small things that make a voice sound human. Some customers have started wondering if they're even talking to a real person. We dig into how this technology works, and what it costs the people whose voices are being rewritten. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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