Voice assistants suck, but they suck worse if you have an "accent"

boing
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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/07/27/eat-up-martha.html

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hey @doctorow did you just time warp your own post?!

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This is nothing new. I knew an Ohio radio announcer in the 1950s who had a normal midwest accent when on the air, but as soon as the mic was off he reverted to a Southern drawl.

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You can also look up “(voice assistance of your choice) can’t understand accent” and you get loads and loads of examples on YT.

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Counterargument:

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Accent should also be in quotes because everyone has an accent. (I understand that the post is about people with accents that differ from some kind of “standard” accent.) But if you talk, you talk with an accent. We’re conditioned to think of some forms of language as plain or “neutral,” but that’s an illusion.

It’s like saying that people of average tallness don’t have a height.

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I think he is venting his own personal frustrations with a certain voice assistant

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Nah. He’s frustrated that people who aren’t him use voice assistants.

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More like saying “white” people son’t have a race.

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I have no issue with my accent, but the bloody thing can’t understand anything but the simplest grammar.

Or sentences with botched grammar.

Also, the bloody thing activates itself on random noise sometimes, but as soon as the tab is running you can’t start it on its cue.

Additionally, multi-languange support was promised months ago, but still doesn’t work in my case. Meh.

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We all know where this is heading:

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What about

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It has trouble if the mic has any attenuation or other materials around it.

I was also going to make a joke here that they have installed the ‘drunken scotsman’ module, but I can’t seem to remember the relevant BOFH episode (or if it was a pre-history tale). So I’ll just link to the entire archive here in celebration of System Admin’s day.
http://www.bofharchive.com/BOFH.html

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Amusingly, my wife cannot get Siri to understand her for literally anything unless she switches her Siri language setting to “English (Australia)” and actually puts on an accent.

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I like the Star Trek picture, because I thought it was hilarious that the Enterprise, a faster-than-light spaceship partially crewed by aliens hundreds of years in the future, couldn’t parse Anton Yelchin Chekov’s Earth accent.

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I just wish there was an option to turn off all voice commands on the iphone. It never understands me and if I accidentally press the home button too long it stops the music and tries to talk to me. The ‘Talking Moose’ on the original Macs was better than Siri! At least it was amusing rather than frustrating.

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I just tested it and there’s an option under Siri in the settings to turn off “Press Home for Siri.”

I have the iOS 12 Beta but Google shows the option exists in prior iOS versions too, just maybe with different wording.

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Does Siri work well in languages other than English? I wonder how effective Japanese Siri is.

I feel bad for the Scots, since they fall under the umbrella of the UK for Siri… at least there’s an English (Irish) option, although I wonder whether people in Belfast fare better or worse than people in, say, Cork.

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@ cheem
Actually, I find it works better for me in Japanese than in English.

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@TimmoWarner
Thanks for that. Last time I looked there had not been that option and I had just given up bothering to check when a new os came out.

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