Artificial intelligence is struggling to understand accented English and non-standard dialects, creating problems that can cascade into biased hiring, grading or clinical records.

Why it matters: AI is deciding who gets a job interview, how students are graded, and what doctors record in a patient's chart. But major speech-to-text systems make far more errors for Black speakers than for white speakers.

How it works: AI-powered speech recognition systems convert spoken words into text through automatic speech recognition (ASR), which uses acoustic models trained on millions of audio samples. • Some companies use AI to transcribe and analyze interview responses, scoring candidates for jobs on clarity, keywords or sentiment. • Schools use voice AI for oral reading tests, class captions

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