Dialect Coach

A dialect coach trains actors to speak convincingly in an accent that is not their own, working with them one-on-one before and during filming. It is a small freelance field with no government job code or labour data, so this score rests on the best-documented real case of AI entering the work.

That case is the film The Brutalist. In post-production, the film's editor and sound team used voice software from the AI company Respeecher to adjust some vowels and letters in Adrien Brody's and Felicity Jones's Hungarian-language lines. It set off a public backlash. The director told The Hollywood Reporter in January 2025 that the two actors "worked for months with dialect coach Tanera Marshall to perfect their accents", that AI was used in Hungarian dialogue editing only, and that no English was changed. A University of Reading film researcher, writing in The Conversation, noted that Respeecher's chief executive pitches the tool as a way to lay one person's accent over another actor's performance.

So far, then, AI has shown up as a clean-up tool after filming, alongside the coach, not instead of one, and it drew criticism when used on a performance. That fits the rubric's "2 Low": AI can help, but the core work of shaping how an actor speaks and keeping it consistent on set still needs a person. The risk is real, though. If accent-changing software gets good and cheap enough, a low-budget production could decide to skip the coach and fix accents afterwards.

What would change this score: productions openly replacing dialect coaches with post-production accent software, and audiences and awards bodies accepting it, would move this to 3 or higher.