India's call centres are using AI to make agents sound American

**Rachel Varghese** (0:02)
Crashing your car is bad enough. Now imagine if it happened on a Friday the 13th.
That's exactly what happened to an American customer whose call was picked up at an Indian call center for his insurance claim. The call didn't go the way these ones usually do, where you ask questions, the agent answers, and then you reach some kind of resolution together. Instead, something very strange happened. Here's my colleague, Debaanjali Biswas, sharing the story she heard from someone who works at one of these centers.

**Debaanjali Biswas** (0:34)
At some point, in the middle of this really stressful conversation of recounting everything, to lighten the mood, the client jokingly says, oh my God, this happened on a Friday that was also a 13th of the month. So surely this is Friday the 13th coded, like this surely couldn't be a worse luck thing.

**Rachel Varghese** (0:58)
The client waited for a laugh, a chuckle, anything. But there was nothing from the other end of the line.

**Debaanjali Biswas** (1:06)
The client could not just keep sitting in silence. So at some point, he just went, hello, am I, is someone there? What's happening? And the agent then replied back saying, oh yeah, of course, I'm here.

**Rachel Varghese** (1:18)
Of course, the client felt embarrassed. They were sure that they had just made an unfunny joke to a stranger who was probably already having a bad day.
Except that wasn't the case at all.

**Debaanjali Biswas** (1:30)
On the other end, someone who was auditing the call flagged it to the agent saying that, why were you silent? Why did you not say anything that was so awkward? And the agent was like, no, I did. I did laugh.

**Rachel Varghese** (1:42)
So the agent had laughed. It's just that the laugh itself had never made its way down the line. And that's because the agent wasn't really speaking to the customer directly. Their voice had been live translated through an AI accent translator, a software developed by Silicon Valley-based voice AI startups like Sanus. And to put it simply, it takes, say, an Indian accent and makes it sound like an American one. The idea is to make international callers trust the people they are talking to more. From insurance companies like UnitedHealth to payment companies like American Express and BPO's like TelePerformance and Alorica, they all use it. They often even outsource their work to Wipro, the IT services giant, which also ends up using these translators by extension. Now, on the surface, the tech itself presents some great advantages. It allows companies to hire cheaper talent from tier 2 and tier 3 towns and even helps them improve their customer satisfaction ratings. In fact, the BPO I mentioned earlier, TelePerformance, which uses these AI translators for about 42,000 of its Indian agents, claims that using Sonus helped increase its score by 26%.
But on the other hand, like in the story you heard earlier, the tech has real gaps. For example, it doesn't pick up on emotions very well. And a lot of times, it even makes humans sound almost robotic.
Which is exactly what the customer on the other end thinks as well. Many have even asked agents outright if they are in fact AI.
And these gaps have started to raise concerns. Devanchali, who spent days working on the story, is joining me today for a deeper look into what it means for the BPO sector's future when humans start sounding like AI at the same time as when AI starts sounding more human.
The voice translator fits under the larger category of voice AI products. Some products are entirely automated agents with no humans in the loop. Others fix the overall clarity and quality of a call, but the translation products can change accents and even languages live. They're obviously ideal tools for BPO's to adapt, because they get calls from all over the world. And some other products also help them analyze calls without interfering in them to create insights and other takeaways. Which is why Debanjali said that the scale at which AI translators themselves are used in Indian BPO's is hard to quantify because of the range of applications that these products come with. Plus, companies are also a little cagey about the details. She was, however, able to get a number from one of the companies leading in this space called Sanas AI.

**Debaanjali Biswas** (4:47)
This figure that we get from Sanas' end, which I got when I spoke to some of their employees, was that specific to accent translation, they have put out, they've leased out around 200,000 licenses.
Which means that basically 200,000 people, agents, are using accent translation. The overall number of licenses that they've given out is roughly 500,000 to 600,000 licenses.