Telus Digital, the global technology and digital services arm responsible for the telecommunication giant’s call centres, has recently deployed an “accent masking” artificial intelligence tool to change the way its offshore agents sound. The technology analyzes agents’ pronunciation in real time and reshapes their accents to more closely resemble generalized North American or British English speech patterns.

Linguistic profiling or accentism — stereotyping, treating someone unfairly or viewing them negatively based on their accent — can permeate aspects of our society in ways that have real-life consequences.

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

Telus appears to be taking advantage of incredible technological advances in signal processing and resynthesis to reproduce an ugly aspect of human behaviour.

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’s skin tone, for example, homogenizing our ethnic and racial identities.

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.

Some accents are........

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