Voice AI struggles with regional accents and shapes user speech
"It Would Make a Geordie Feel at Home": Regional Accent Perceptions and Speech Accommodation in Voice AI
Human-Computer InteractionArtificial IntelligenceComputation and Language
Summary
Voice recognition systems often have trouble understanding people who speak with regional accents like Geordie. The authors studied how users react when a voice assistant speaks in a regional or standard accent. They found people liked the regional voice for feeling friendly and familiar but saw it as less professional. Users also changed how they spoke—like talking slower or using a more standard accent—when the system didn't understand them. This shows voice AI can reinforce biases and influence how people speak.
What this means in practice
- •For voice assistant developers: Improve voice assistants by designing regional accent voices that balance friendliness with clear communication to reduce bias and improve user trust.
- •For call center technology teams: Adapt speech recognition systems to better handle users’ regional accents and support automatic adjustments to improve understanding and service quality.
Authors
Dana Serditova, Kevin Tang, Jochen Steffens
Abstract
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems often perform less accurately for speakers of regional dialects, but less is known about how users respond to these limitations and how regional voices produced by voice assistants (VAs) are evaluated through a sociolinguistic lens. This study investigates these issues among speakers of Newcastle English (Geordies), examining both linguistic accommodation to voice technologies and perceptions of regional versus mainstream-accented VA voices. Participants interacted with a simulated VA that spoke either Newcastle English or Standard Southern British English (SSBE). They subsequently completed semi-structured interviews about their experiences with the experimental VA and voice technologies, language use, accent attitudes, and place orientation. The findings reveal a two-way process of sociolinguistic bias. The Geordie VA was associated with familiarity, warmth, personality, and local belonging, but also with concerns about professionalism and authority, whereas the SSBE voice was perceived as more neutral, clear, and credible. Participants also reported adapting their speech when voice technologies failed to recognise them, most commonly by shifting to a more mainstream accent, enunciating more clearly, and speaking more slowly. These strategies are similar to accommodation in human-human interaction and reflect users' perceptions of what technologies can recognise, also known as perceived intelligibility pressures. Overall, the findings demonstrate that voice technologies can reproduce existing accent biases both by encouraging users to suppress regional features and by activating established social stereotypes through synthetic voices. The study positions sociolinguistics as a bridge between understanding human-AI interaction and designing inclusive technologies around users' own linguistic priorities.