News/Research

Tom McEnaney on the Problems of Removing Accents from Call Centers

13 Oct, 2022

Tom McEnaney on the Problems of Removing Accents from Call Centers

BCNM faculty Tom McEnany features on KQED radio to discuss how new technology filtering accented speech implies larger issues it means to remedy.

From Tom in the session:

It's covering up the whole process of global ratio capitalism, to use jargon as so. It's covering up the process as so companies in the United States are hiring underpaid workers in other countries, underpaid workers who tend to be people of color precisely so that they can make more money. I think it is cynical to say that, as Sanas said, the hopes and prayers that the world changes, but rather than developing tech that might change the world, developing tech to make a buck of reinforcing social norms. And once you make a certain voice normative like this and part of the technology, then people feel like they have to sue it and everybody feels like they have to change their voices so they sounds like that norm, so that's just reinforcing biases and maybe even reinforcing white supremacy and I don't think that's what an aim of tech should be.

Listen to the talk here!