This is really bonkers.
A Globe and Mail (Paywalled) story popped up in my news feed with this:
The voice you hear on the other side of a call-centre interaction might soon sound a little more familiar, thanks to an AI tool that adjusts speech in real time – but not everyone thinks it’s a good idea.
Telus Digital, the wholly owned division of Telus Corp. responsible for customer experience and call centres, has deployed artificial-intelligence technology that alters the accent of customer service agents.
In a post on the company’s website explaining the benefits of speech enhancement, Telus Digital says the technology, provided by a third-party company called Tomato.ai, uses speech-to-speech models to transform live audio.
It works by encoding the speaker’s voice, modifying pronunciation-related features, then decoding the speech back into audio, the company said.
“These models directly modify the acoustic features of speech, preserving the speaker’s voice while improving clarity and reducing accent-related friction,” the company wrote in its post. “This approach allows the solution to address mispronunciations without altering the speaker’s identity or emotional tone.”
Other companies that provide a similar feature say it helps speed up calls and help customers find solutions, while protecting service agents from harassment or discrimination.
Telus Digital provides the call-centre support for the company’s Canadian telecom subscribers, as well as other clients globally.
Where do I begin with this one?
So on one hand, I can see what TELUS is up to here. They know that certain accents from certain ethnic groups rub some people the wrong way. Which in my opinion says more about those people than TELUS or those who are contracted to work for TELUS. So using AI to fix that could be considered a viable path to make customer interactions easier for those people. But here’s the flip side in my opinion. This can easily be perceived as being inherently racist with TELUS being perceived as being the bad guy here as they are covering up the fact that they outsource their customer service. Related to that, a really cynical person could easily say that rather than use AI to do this, TELUS should hire “Canadians” instead. Which opens up a whole can of worms in terms of what defines a “Canadian” because a “Canadian” can have a non
Honestly, TELUS in my opinion created a PR problem that it didn’t need to create. They may want to rethink their life choices as this really doesn’t look good for them. And they need to do something quickly before this blows up more than it already has.
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This entry was posted on May 6, 2026 at 10:27 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Telus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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TELUS Is Using AI To Alter The Accents Of Their Customer Service Agents…. WTF?
This is really bonkers.
A Globe and Mail (Paywalled) story popped up in my news feed with this:
The voice you hear on the other side of a call-centre interaction might soon sound a little more familiar, thanks to an AI tool that adjusts speech in real time – but not everyone thinks it’s a good idea.
Telus Digital, the wholly owned division of Telus Corp. responsible for customer experience and call centres, has deployed artificial-intelligence technology that alters the accent of customer service agents.
In a post on the company’s website explaining the benefits of speech enhancement, Telus Digital says the technology, provided by a third-party company called Tomato.ai, uses speech-to-speech models to transform live audio.
It works by encoding the speaker’s voice, modifying pronunciation-related features, then decoding the speech back into audio, the company said.
“These models directly modify the acoustic features of speech, preserving the speaker’s voice while improving clarity and reducing accent-related friction,” the company wrote in its post. “This approach allows the solution to address mispronunciations without altering the speaker’s identity or emotional tone.”
Other companies that provide a similar feature say it helps speed up calls and help customers find solutions, while protecting service agents from harassment or discrimination.
Telus Digital provides the call-centre support for the company’s Canadian telecom subscribers, as well as other clients globally.
Where do I begin with this one?
So on one hand, I can see what TELUS is up to here. They know that certain accents from certain ethnic groups rub some people the wrong way. Which in my opinion says more about those people than TELUS or those who are contracted to work for TELUS. So using AI to fix that could be considered a viable path to make customer interactions easier for those people. But here’s the flip side in my opinion. This can easily be perceived as being inherently racist with TELUS being perceived as being the bad guy here as they are covering up the fact that they outsource their customer service. Related to that, a really cynical person could easily say that rather than use AI to do this, TELUS should hire “Canadians” instead. Which opens up a whole can of worms in terms of what defines a “Canadian” because a “Canadian” can have a non
Honestly, TELUS in my opinion created a PR problem that it didn’t need to create. They may want to rethink their life choices as this really doesn’t look good for them. And they need to do something quickly before this blows up more than it already has.
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This entry was posted on May 6, 2026 at 10:27 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Telus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.