IPhone sex: Google application baffled by British accents | Hacker News Reader

IPhone sex: Google application baffled by British accents

physorg.com

11 pointsdhimes9 comments

When Google opened the 800-GOOG-411 in the States it was discussed that they were using it to train voice recognition software. And as the number only works in the US, that would explain why the system doesn't handle English accents.

>"It actually works pretty well, but I have to disguise my (North London) accent with a terrible folksy Texan tourist voice to get results. I can see this is going to be the source of much amusement and confusion."

I love it!

This doesn't surprise me one bit, almost every city in the UK has a unique accents and then there's people who have a mix. My parents are from South Yorkshire, but I grew up in East Yorkshire, but then I spent a lot of time in Hull which has a long naval and fishing history. So my accent is relatively mild.

However, I'm living in Canada and everybody says I have such a strong accent. Although I've been mistaken for Australian, which I find as rather strange. I know my one worst pronunciation is of 'three' as it invariably comes out as 'free', which in context rarely causes problems. Sadly my 'two' apparently sounds similar to 'three' as I've been repeatedly given one extra of things, I'm not sure if this is a strange form of politeness like the Italian's always trying to serve more food than you can eat, or if simply I constantly have to deal with retarded people when I order food. Although I shouldn't complain, getting a free cheeseburger isn't something I've got a problem with.

I am from Northern Ireland and everytime I phone a call centre/hotel/whatever that is answered by someone doesn't live in the UK, I find it almost impossible to get them to hear 'two' - they always think I am saying three. In my mind I am not even saying anything like three and other 'locals' have no problem understanding me. Many others I have spoken to have the same problem here too!

Probably a decade ago, when voice recognition was still in its infancy. I had a cousin who was in a crash and broke her neck. In the hospital she got a state of the art machine which was a very simplistic assistant, she could verbally dial numbers, and request the nurse's station, etc.

Well she soon discovered that her accent made the machine hear five as nine, no matter how she tried to change her accent, so she realized that the machine understood basic spanish and so she would use cinco for five.

Given time, Google will begin to expand the search to other sections of the world. The challenge is gaining a large enough basis of data from these dialects to run the statistics and analysis.

"five" and "nine" are tough to distinguish; that's why in radio comm we say, "niner."

Regarding the prevalence of 'sex' and 'myspace' etc and the fact that it was trained on Google 411, it wouldn't surprise me if it was just the influence of USian Bayesian priors.

Amusing piece, but Google acknowledges on its website that it's only for N. American English.

I have to affect a terrible American accent on a fairly regular basis to get through IVRs here.

Sadly I wrote about the need of voice recognition users to adopt a mild accent to get the best use out of their systems in my thesis, 4 years ago. It's unlikely to change in the short term...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com