English- a truly international language, understood by millions across the world, and now by your mobile phone. Google recently launched a voice recognition application for the Apple iPhone which allows users to access the huge might of the its search engine by speaking into their phones.
A fantastic development, you might think, except for the fact that it doesn't recognize British accents. An article in the Daily Telegraph explores this problem. They asked people with a variety of regional accents to say the word "iphone"and the voice recognition returned a variety of results, none however, were to do with the iphone!
A user with a Scottish accent found his phone opted to search for the term "sex" instead, and suggested a link to an adult web site. On a second attempt, the search engine looked for "sledding".Asked in a Kentish accent to search for "iPhone", it came up with "my sister" and "Einstein", while a Surrey user was offered "myspace" as well as "Einstein".A Yorkshireman was offered "bonfire" before managing to get "iPhone" - the only time the voice-recognition worked.The most unusual responses were to a Welsh accent, when the device interpreted "iPhone" as "gorillas" and "kitchen sink".
You can watch the video here
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1 comment:
I wonder whether this system would work better with Esperanto, a language which has exactly the same pronunciation throughout the world?
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