{"id":250490,"date":"2026-05-20T11:32:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T15:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/20\/accentism-for-profit-what-telus-is-getting-wrong-about-accents\/"},"modified":"2026-05-20T11:45:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T15:45:10","slug":"accentism-for-profit-what-telus-is-getting-wrong-about-accents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/20\/accentism-for-profit-what-telus-is-getting-wrong-about-accents\/","title":{"rendered":"Accentism for profit? What Telus is getting wrong about accents"},"content":{"rendered":"

Accentism for profit? What Telus is getting wrong about accents<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/theconversation.com\/accentism-for-profit-what-telus-is-getting-wrong-about-accents-282560<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-05-20 11:32:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: theconversation.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Telus Digital, the global technology and digital services arm responsible for the telecommunication giant\u2019s call centres, has recently deployed an \u201caccent masking\u201d artificial intelligence tool to change the way its offshore agents sound. The technology analyzes agents\u2019 pronunciation in real time and reshapes their accents to more closely resemble generalized North American or British English speech patterns.<\/p>\n

Linguistic profiling or accentism \u2014 stereotyping, treating someone unfairly or viewing them negatively based on their accent \u2014 can permeate aspects of our society in ways that have real-life consequences. <\/p>\n

They can affect hiring decisions, outcomes of legal proceedings, assumptions about the crimes one might commit, assessments in education and access to housing.<\/p>\n

Telus appears to be taking advantage of incredible technological advances in signal processing and resynthesis to reproduce an ugly aspect of human behaviour. <\/p>\n

As language scholars we believe it is demeaning, manipulative and wrong. And, if we swap in nearly any other social characteristic, it would be discrimination. In order to see racism, we need to see race. So imagine a filter on glasses that changes people\u2019s skin tone, for example, homogenizing our ethnic and racial identities.<\/p>\n

There are several strands of evidence that indicate the accentism Telus is practising is not in the best interest of the call centre agents or Canadian consumers.<\/p>\n

Some accents are harder<\/h2>\n

Our discriminatory tastes in speech start early. Children prefer playmates who share their accent, even in linguistically rich cities like Toronto. The credibility and trustworthiness adults attribute to individuals and voice-AI assistants vary with the accent. <\/p>\n

Telus says it\u2019s implementing an accent manipulation AI tool because some Telus customers have expressed difficulty in understanding \u201cheavy foreign accents.\u201d This is a leap in logic.<\/p>\n

Researchers have known for decades that the perception of…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Accentism for profit? What Telus is getting wrong about accents https:\/\/theconversation.com\/accentism-for-profit-what-telus-is-getting-wrong-about-accents-282560 Publish Date: 2026-05-20 11:32:00…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":250491,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/736853\/original\/file-20260519-57-7hfktr.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.0&rect=0%2C364%2C4368%2C2184&q=45&auto=format&w=1356&h=668&fit=crop","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[20],"class_list":["post-250490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250490"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250490"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250490\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":250492,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250490\/revisions\/250492"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/250491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}