AI and the End of Accents

It all started, as these things often do, with an Instagram ad. “No one tells you this if you’re an immigrant, but accent discrimination is a reality,” one woman said in the video. His own accent is slightly Eastern European – so subtle that it took me a few listens to notice it.

The ad was for BoldVoice, an AI-based “accent training” app. A few clicks took me to its “Accent Oracle,” which promised to guess my native language. After reading a long sentence, the algorithm said, “Your accent is Korean, my friend. ” Sufficient. But impressive. Actually, I’m Korean.

I have lived in the United States for over a decade and my English is more than fluent. We could say that it is hyperfluently – my diction, for one, is probably two standard deviations above the national average. But that still doesn’t mean “native.” I learned English just late enough to miss the critical window for acquiring a native accent. This is a distinction which, depending on the times, could lead to certain complications. In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites are said to have used the word “shibboleth” to identify and massacre fleeing Ephraimites, who could not pronounce the word. shit ring and says “sibboleth” instead. In 1937, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the death of any Haitian unable to pronounce the word Spanish. perejil (parsley) in what became known as the Parsley Massacre.

So the stakes seemed high as the Accent Oracle continued to listen to me speak, at one point scoring me 89 percent (“Mildly accented”), another time 92 percent (“Native or near-native”). The spread was disturbing. On a bad day, I could have been massacred. To improve my chances of survival, I signed up for a free one-week trial.

There is a the quality of the message is average with accents. How you say that something often reveals more – about your origin, your social class, your education, your interests – than What you say. In most societies, phonetic fluency becomes a form of social capital.

As with everything else, AI has now come into focus. Companies like Krisp and Sanas sell real-time accent “neutralization” for call center workers, softening a Filipino agent’s voice to something more acceptable to a customer in Ohio. The immediate reaction from the anti-AI camp is that this is “digital whitewashing”, a capitulation to an imperial and monolithic English. This is often framed as a racial issue, perhaps because advertisements for these services feature people of color and the call centers are in countries like India and the Philippines.

But that would be too hasty. The modulation of speech to obtain a social advantage is an old story. Remember that George Bernard Shaw Pygmalion-and its musical adaptation, My beautiful lady– relies on Henry Higgins reshaping Eliza Doolittle’s cockney accent. Even the prominent German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte abandoned his Saxon accent when he moved to Jena, fearing that people would not take him seriously if he sounded rural.

It is not a relic of the past. A 2022 British study found that a “hierarchy of accent prestige” persists and has changed little since 1969, with a quarter of working adults reporting some form of accent-related discrimination at work, and almost half of those surveyed reporting being made fun of or singled out in social settings.

In a Hacker News thread announcing the launch of BoldVoice, one commenter wrote, “I’d rather strive for a world where accents matter less than correct accents.” ” Well, tell that to the countless Koreans in this country who are navigating the treacherous phonetic chasm between beach And female dog Or coke And rooster. This online comment was characteristic of the usual sanctimonious pablum, the kind of casual moral elevation afforded only to a native English speaker or someone who willfully ignores the daily indignities faced by non-native speakers.