It’s graduation season, where beaming students stride across the stage to accept their academic laurels. Hearing their name announced is a moment that fills them and their loved ones with pride.
That’s why school officials try to take great care to say the names loud and clearly, learning how to pronounce them. It’s the least they can do.
Pace University in New York managed to do less.
In advance of their recent commencement, Pace had students submit phonetic spellings of their names online. In return, they received a QR code.
At the graduation ceremony, the students lined up on stage to hold their phone up to a scanner wielded by a school official. The scanner read the QR, and a voice created by AI then read their name over the sound system. Cap and gown, meet copy and paste. After that, the students marched forward to receive their papers.
The university – which wasn’t alone in this practice this year – said this was all about efficiency and accuracy. Yet the process had all the warmth of a grocery store checkout.
Don’t shirk authentic moments
A name isn’t just a random sound to be generated. It’s personal, cultural and tied to identity.
At moments that mark achievement, the act of saying a name out loud – by a person – becomes symbolic. Here, the use of AI undermined the ritual and the importance of an authentic acknowledgement.
Calling someone by their name, correctly, is one of the foundations of interpersonal communications. Doing so is just basic manners. And the effort matters, not just the outcome.
For a University of Alberta psychology study, a group of international students were surveyed about pronunciations of their names. They felt closer to people who made the attempt to get it right, and said it added to their sense of belonging.
A BBC article about getting names right referenced Xian Zhao, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, whose research focuses on ethnic name pronunciation. He said that pronouncing an unfamiliar name incorrectly can be seen as a form of implicit discrimination. The message that conveys? “You are minimal. You are not important in this environment, so why should I take time and effort to learn it?”
Many people have first or last names that, to some, are tough to pronounce. In social or professional settings, there are ways to handle it – and things to avoid.
Writing for a Western University publication, a pair of linguistic anthropologists said that when in doubt about a pronunciation, ask the person. But don’t turn your efforts or discomfort “into a spectacle”, they state. Don’t make assumptions based on the name (like the person’s background or language abilities). And don’t erase their identity “by giving them unsolicited nicknames that you find ‘easier’ to pronounce or remember”.
It shouldn’t be necessary to add another rule: learn the name yourself, don’t outsource the task to a robot.
Say my name, not my QR code
Universities have high volumes of names to churn through at a graduation ceremony. But they’re not alone in that sort of challenge. Others deal with it differently.
At the NFL draft in April, when 257 players were selected. Unlike at Pace, a human managed to pronounce all of those names. In preparation, one of the league’s broadcasting and media officials, Lucy Popko, acted as a pronunciation coach. A few months prior, she recorded players’ names at the scouting combine, where players likely to be selected were invited.
Popko provided an audio guide for the NFL commissioner. Names were written phonetically on cards. So when the commissioner read each name aloud at a podium, with great ceremony as the teams’ picks came in, he was bang on. As Popko said, pronouncing players’ names correctly is a sign of respect, and reflects the integrity of the league too.
Pace could have learned from that process. If you really want to use AI to assist, there are tools that provide the most likely pronunciation for any name. But the idea is to use that to practice, not to offload the job to a robotic voice.
Perhaps Pace officials could have, you know, studies a bit, like all the students who worked hard for their degrees, diplomas and certifications. At a place of higher learning, taking the time to learn a student’s name for their time in the spotlight feels like the bare minimum.
Name pronunciation is about treating someone with dignity and showing effort. It says that a person matters. AI isn’t a substitute for any of that, especially not for this milestone event.
Pre-recordings, no matter how they sound, miss the moment. At other schools where this happened, many graduates objected. One, who attended Northeastern University in Boston, called the AI-generated name announcements “alien and weird”.
In Pennsylvania, West Chester University also opted for AI recordings of graduates’ names from a service called Tassel. More than 1,000 students signed a petition calling for the service’s human voice option instead (at six times the cost). The school agreed to do so. Call it a minor victory; the voice was still recorded, so no one said it live on stage.
Back at Pace, where the recorded voice was all AI-generated, one graduate posted this reaction: “It gave me the ick.” Another, writing on Instagram, said that the AI still managed to say his name wrong.
A sign of how jobs are at risk
Many students weren’t thrilled to see AI in action this way at their graduations given that they’re already on edge about their employment prospects.
“A whole lifetime of studies and 100k in debt just to have your name announced by the very entity that’s going to make your studies useless,” one graduate said on Reddit.
In May, a New York Times article described the “AI job apocalypse” facing recent graduates. In technical fields like finance and computer science, the unemployment rate is up as AI displaces entry-level positions. One tech executive shared that his start-up employed a single data scientist to do the work that, at his previous company, required a team of 75.
At Pace, the AI certainly displaced the roles of the members of the faculty or administration who’d usually announce the names of graduates in person.
Out of curiosity, I checked what a Pace University education costs. For this coming year, tuition will be $52,924 per year. To that, tack on general institution fees of $1,908 per semester, plus $18,900 per year for housing and $4,900 per year for a meal plan. That’s quite a bill at the end of four years.
Maybe as a farewell, getting an actual human to read the graduates’ names would have been a nice throw-in.
Stuart Foxman is a Toronto-based freelance writer, who helps clients’ products, services, ideas and organizations to come alive. Connect with me here on LinkedIn, check me out at foxmancommunications.com or follow me on X (formerly Twitter) @StuartFoxman where I share these blogs too. More original posts coming regularly about communications, information, motivation, writing, branding, creativity, media, marketing, persuasion, messages, learning, etc.
June 4, 2025