Comments on: Call centers put accent on speech recognition

Talking machines, especially those with the sound of home, may be gaining an edge over offshore operators.

[abfalter]

This is news?

Er, I worked on software for speech recognition for call centers about 15 years ago. How is this news?

[Urza9814]

It's who they talk to

It's not the fact that it's an offshore call center that's the problem. I don't care WHERE the place is. The problem is accents you can't understand and people who don't know what they're talking about.
I was upgrading the RAM in a friend's Toshiba laptop the other day, and I knew it was under the keyboard, but there was no really obvious way to get to it, so I called tech support to be sure I didn't break anything. The guy told me, in a very difficult to understand accent, to put the RAM module in the PCMCIA slot.
I hung up and figured it out myself after that.

[vhase]

Speech recognition? Give me a break!

Ever been sitting in a crowded restaurant and try to check your Visa balance with one of those things? Might as well try smoke signals.

The assumption that the voice prompts are preferred with only a pool of 500 people is ludicrous. I would assume a web vote of many thousands would show just how annoying and imperfect those systems are.

Frankly, this article is a bit like choosing between two political candidates - which is the lesser of two evils? Neither is the preferred method, in my opinion, over just typing (1) for yes, and (2) for no.

[praveen s]

unfortunate

The article seems to suggest that somehow Indian or Asian accents are inadequate or not good enough. The statement "Australian customers would prefer to speak to a good Australian-accent speech recognition system than an offshore agent" seems to implicitly confer some superiority to Australian accents and belittle those of the agents. As a matter of fact, most agents in Indian call centers tend to speak English the way it should be spoken - that is, clearly and without any contortions. Perhaps the person who made the comment should rephrase and say that Australians would prefer "Australian accents" without the accompanying adjectives. Or maybe the story was not worth reporting after all.

[TV James]

I don't believe this.

Praveen -

I'm not sure I agree with the statement "most agents in Indian call centers tend to speak English the way it should be spoken - that is, clearly and without any contortions."

Unless the companies I deal with all use the same minority pool of difficult-to-understand agents of Indian descent, I would argue that a majority of agents in Indian call centers tend to speak with difficult to understand broken English in a monotone that indicates a lack of understanding of the problem and simply regurgitation of scripted dialogue, easily disrupted by background noise on my end or saying something unexpected.