Member-only story
AI, Alexa Voice, and The End of American Accents
I love regional accents. It doesn’t matter where the accent is from; I am always interested in listening to people who speak in a way that differs from how I was raised. Even the sound of voices that speak other languages intrigue me, and I have always been quite adept at recognizing the speaker’s origins based on a few phrases or local tones. Despite being able to recognize all types of regional accents, I always assumed that I didn’t have one.
That was until I moved to Georgia.
In the Peach State, I learned that how I talked and behaved was just as much a reflection of my statehood as my childhood. As a kid growing up in New York, I took for granted the brusque manner of speaking and behaving with others — the silence and solitude in a sea of individuals. In New York, the only people you talked to were friends and family, the people you knew and trusted. In Georgia, everyone spoke to you as if you were family. They asked for your opinion and about your day, not just to be polite. They wanted to know how you were and to bring you closer to the warmth of southern living.
As a native New Yorker unfamiliar with this particular brand of hospitality, my mother was sure that it was all a scam. In addition, the thick southern accents were too much for her to comprehend, so every time we went to the grocery store, my…
