The Globe and Mail reports in its Wednesday, May 6, edition that Telus Digital, a division of Telus Corp. responsible for customer experience and call centres, has deployed artificial-intelligence technology that alters the accents of customer service agents. The Globe's Irene Galeo writes that Telus Digital employs speech enhancement technology from Tomato.ai, which uses speech-to-speech models to transform live audio. It encodes the speaker's voice, modifies pronunciation features and then decodes it back into audio. Telus Digital says these models modify the acoustic features of speech, preserving the speaker's voice while improving clarity and reducing accent-related friction. Telus Digital says, "This approach allows the solution to address mispronunciations without altering the speaker's identity or emotional tone." The feature is meant to help speed up calls and help customers find solutions, while protecting service agents from harassment or discrimination. Unifor's telecommunications director says the use of AI technology to deceive Canadians in any way should be prohibited. Rogers Communications and BCE's Bell Canada say they do not use accent-altering technology and do not plan to.