(Wired) – I sound Korean—because I am Korean. Can AI make me sound American?

There is a medium-is-the-message quality to accents. How you say something often reveals more—about your origin, class, education, interests—than what you say. In most societies, phonetic mastery becomes a form of social capital.

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

But that’d be too hasty. Modulating speech for social advantage is an old story. (Read More)