When Voice Recognition Leads to Bias
Dec. 6 -- It was simple. James Johnson needed a place to live. In April, he saw a "for rent" sign outside a San Francisco apartment building. Although he left several messages, he never heard back.
He says he really needed the apartment. It was close to work. It had plenty of room for his two children. It was affordable.
So when he never got a call back, Johnson was greatly disappointed. As he explained, "I always thought that if you had good credit and stuff like that, you wouldn't have a problem."
But there apparently was a problem: his voice.
"I believe in my heart that they were definitely discriminating against me for sounding black," Johnson says. "Being black."
Johnson asked a friend to place a call. Mark Hernandez is Latino, but sounds "white" over the phone, Johnson says.
Hernandez says the landlord returned his call that same day. "They left me a message that says 'yes, you responded to our rental ad,'" says Hernandez. "'Here's our number, please call us back.'"
A frustrated and angry Johnson then took his story to a fair housing agency called the Eden Council for Hope and Opportunity. The nonprofit organization sent five investigators to the phones: three callers whose voices sounded "white," and two who sounded "black."
Messages left by the "black" callers were never returned. Those left by the "white" callers were returned within hours.
"It was pretty blatant," says Angie Watson, the fair housing counselor who ran the investigation. "They were definitely not returning calls if you sounded like you were a black person."
Discrimination Called Common Across Industries
Shanna Smith, executive director of the National Fair Housing Alliance, says it's a familiar practice, not only in housing, but also in banking and other industries. "Our testing in the insurance industry has shown that when blacks and whites leave messages on the answering machine, that whites get the return phone calls and the blacks don't," Smith says.
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