Lucretia Williams , a researcher at Howard University, is regularly interviewed about her work, and she’s noticed that her quotes sometimes aren’t quite right (the “-ed” might get dropped from a word, for example). She attributes this issue to transcription technology, which—like all voice-recognition software—can struggle with Black speech. That’s a problem that she and her team are now trying to address. Williams has spent much of the past two years leading an effort to help voice-recognition technology better understand Black voices.

A partnership between Howard and Google, Project Elevate Black Voices , as it’s called, is an effort to broaden the data sets that teach software to recognize human speech. Black speech hasn’t traditionally been well represented, leading the systems to

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