I think back-to-school season will always feel a little bit like back-to-school season even if you have no school to get back to. I find myself furiously searching for loafers and wool hats – as if dressing collegiate will transport me back to being 20 years old and in university again. (I obviously wore sweatpants and hoodies and disintegrating Blundstone’s on the daily – anything to make my figure look like a lumpy blob – but let me romanticize my past life).
To honour the end of August and commencement of months that end in R, I floated in a lake last weekend. I always forget until I am ensconced in one that I am a lake girl through and through. I grew up doggy paddling in the fresh waters of British Columbia every summer and getting whipped around on tubes tethered to the back of speed boats until I was confident my friend’s “fun” father had actually given me whiplash. (An elite summer experience that I insist everyone add to their warm weather bucket list).
But I’ve started to notice as I get older that my brain is increasingly trying to play tricks on me and manufacture crises of confidence where none previously existed. Like at no point in my swimming career have I ever been scared by a lake or thought too extensively about where the bottom is or what’s lurking underneath. And yet, now, after roughly 25 years of being submerged in these bodies of water, I find myself meditating on those types of questions more and more, filling with a sort of vague existential dread.
I wonder if this is what getting older is. Becoming more acutely aware of your own mortality in a way that makes you feel like that one kid who won’t hang upside down on the monkey bars at recess; in other words – a total and complete bore. I just want to bob around in untold depths in peace.
And this desire to bob peacefully in the middle of a lake increased tenfold when I first read about the tech start-up Sanas. If you haven’t heard the controversy about Sanas buzzing around your social circles, I’m sure you soon will. And I’m sure it will sound unnervingly “white”.
What is Sanas?
A tech product that makes call center workers’ voices sound white. What a treat for all those employers who were desperately seeking real-time accent removal for their business!
On Sanas’s website visitors can “hear the magic”: A simulated conversation between a call center worker with an Indian accent that can be modified with a slider that applies Sanas’s accent translation. After Sanas is applied, the voice sounds more like a text-to-voice reader than another human being, but it does sound typically American and white.
Sanas describes its approach as “accent matching,” and advertises on its website that it can “improve understanding by 31% and customer satisfaction by 21%.”
Apparently, the software can offer multiple accents at the touch of a button—although it’s demo only features an Indian accent being turned into a voice that is typically white and American. The company frames its technology as “empowering” workers.
Tell me more about this “empowering” narrative
People’s voices aren’t being heard as much as their accents.
As the story goes, a dear friend of the Sanas founders had to quit his job at a call center. Despite being fluent in English and Spanish his Central American accent made it hard for many customers to understand him; some hurled insults due to the way he spoke.
The trio who founded Sanas realized this “issue” (of racism) was bigger than their friend’s experience (because it’s racism) and founded their start-up to “solve” it. It is worth noting that they all met at Stanford University but come from different countries originally – Russia, Venezuela, China.
Sanas was launched last year – a name that can be easily pronounced in various languages “to highlight our global mission and wish to bring people closer together,” CFO Pérez says.
Feels a lot like “Digital Whiteface” to me
Dylan Baker, a research engineer at the Distributed AI Research Institute (i.e., he knows stuff), argues that “there’s a long history of technology reinforcing racism.”
Hiding accents with AI presents a dilemma. Dylan (the same man who knows stuff), continues “It does sound like it would reinforce the idea that call center workers are second-class citizens who are only deserving of a harassment-free environment if they sound appropriately white.”
But like, don’t worry, the founders addressed that… sort of…
Sanas’s product doesn’t address the structural issues with call center work nor racism from callers, which its product implicitly sidesteps. Sanas acknowledges the potential for misuse of its software and says nobody will be “forced” to use it because workers themselves activate it with a button. However, this doesn’t acknowledge the possibility of being forced to use it by default due to performance quotas.
Sanas also says it has a “code of ethics” with three values: individual choice (it’s activated by the worker), personal control (effectively the same point), and flexibility (Sanas offers multiple accents).
Art imitates life
Ironically, given its focus on empowerment, Sanas’ software to turn call center workers’ voices into white American voices mirrors the plot of Boots Riley’s 2018 dystopian satire Sorry to Bother You.
In the film, the ability to put on a “white” voice on the phone allows the film’s Black protagonist to rise up in the company but introduces tension in the workplace that undercuts a union drive and eventually pits him against his former co-workers.
Too often, technology is deployed to address—and profit from—an issue far removed from the core problem. Is the real problem to be solved that call center workers are misunderstood because of their accents? Or is it that we are content with growing an industry rife with surveillance, racism, and intolerable working conditions? Feels like the latter but I’m pretending to be unbiased and open minded.
Though AI is heralded as the tech of the future, right now it’s raising questions about exploitation and racism in the present. Who gets cut out for the sake of profitability? And who gets to make a profit? – Andrew Barber, Owner of media company Fake Shore Drive.
According to materials offered by the company to SFGate, the company claims to have garnered about $132 million worth of funding thus far…
Until next week.