Start-up Silicon Valley has developed technology call centre that can change the accents of the Center for Real Time Workers.
call centre reduce racist harassment faced by staff.
The company, Sanas, has told the BBC call centre that its technology can overcome accent -based prejudice and reduce racist harassment faced by staff.But some critics call it moving in the wrong direction and saying the diversity of languages must be celebrated.The SFGate news site accused Sanas of making agents, many of them came from Global South, “Sound White”.
Sanas, which was reported to have received a funding of $ 32 million since June 2022, described its technology as an accent translation tool.The part on its website called “Demo” invites visitors to “listen to the miracle” by playing a person with a South Asian accent that seems to read the central script of the call and then click the slider button that changes the speech into an American who sounds a few robots that sound the American robot accent .
four founders were immigrants with call centre.
SFGate accused the start-up of trying to make “Center Call Workers Sound White and America, no matter their country originating”.But Sharath Keshava Narayana, one of the founders of Sanas, refused the claim, told the BBC technology program that the four founders were immigrants and so were 90% of company employees.He said the tool had been inspired by part in part by the experience of a close friend of one of the other founders.
postgraduate student who studied computer system.
The friend, the third year postgraduate student who studied computer system techniques at Stanford University in the US, had to return to Nicaragua to support their parents.The student found the role of technical support at the call center, but was fired after three months because, said Narayana, about the discrimination he faced because of his accent.A former call center agent himself, Narayana said in his experience the agent would be harassed or discriminated against because of how they were heard – the misuse of the company believed that his technology could prevent.
But Ashleigh Ainsley, one of the founders of the Color In Tech organization, argues: “Should we change people’s skin color because some people might not like it because they are racist?”We cannot move in this direction. We need to build tolerance.