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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!

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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."

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