Well, that’s dystopian.
As Bloomberg reports, the Paris-based outsourcing company Teleperformance — which works with clients including Apple, Samsung, and TikTok — invested $13 million earlier this year in Sanas AI, a “real-time speech understanding platform” that boasts a so-called “accent translation” feature that uses machine learning to scrub the accents of overseas customer service workers.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Teleperformance deputy chief executive officer Thomas Mackenbrock said that Sanas’ technology, which his employer has gained exclusive rights to through its partnership, can “neutralize the accent of the Indian speaker with zero latency.”
“When you have an Indian agent on the line, sometimes it’s hard to hear, to understand,” Mackebrock said. Translating agents’ accents to make them easier for native English speakers on the other end of the line “creates more intimacy, increases the customer satisfaction, and reduces the average handling time,” he added.
“It is a win-win for both parties,” the deputy CEO enthused.
Despite those sentiments, however, the markets seem to disagree.
As Investing.com reports, Teleconference stock fell 11 percent after the company announced in an investor call earlier in the week that it was investing up to $104 million in AI technologies.
Though Teleperformance reported a consolidated revenue of $11 billion in 2024, per that call, investors seem to think the outsourcing company “missed expectations despite higher-than anticipated synergies,” JPMorgan analyst Sylvia Barker wrote in a note viewed by Bloomberg.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like investors aren’t impressed with that big spend on AI technology — or, perhaps, are displeased by the optics of “neutralizing” call center workers’ accents.
In classic C-suite-speak, the deputy CEO spun Teleperformance’s accent translation investments as a boon for human labor in the age of AI.
