Accent Check is a brand new online tool for assessing a candidate's English accent, clarity of speech and audio processing capability, the objective being to rate the candidate’s potential for employment in a domestic or international call centre, or in a retail or other frontline position.

The assessment is made up of two sections. In the first section the applicant/employee is required to do two recordings. The first step is to read a script that takes approximately 30 seconds to record. The script uses common English words, but contains a variety of difficult English sounds and sound sequences. The script contains practically all the vowel and consonant sounds of English. This enables our voice analysts to do a quick and efficient analysis of the speaker’s proficiency in English and the effect that their mother tongue has on their English pronunciation. The speaker will be rated on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being unintelligible.

The second step is for the applicant/employee to do a spontaneous recording for 30 seconds describing themselves and their aspirations. This spontaneous connected speech recording will allow our voice analysts to do a quick and efficient analysis of the speaker’s unscripted expressive capability in English. The speaker will be rated on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being unintelligible.

The second part of the assessment comprises of a series of exercises which are designed to test the applicant/employee’s ability to process the English words and sentences that they are hearing and to accurately interpret them either by typing or selecting the correct words and sentences. There are ten exercises plus an additional data capture exercise which simulates a customer giving personal contact information to an agent in a call centre environment. The results are expressed as a percentage of the points achieved, then reduced to a 1 to 10 rating.