Tech News and Commentary

Dave and the team discuss a proposed law to prevent drunk people from being able to turn on cars, Google removing a Hong Kong protest game, AMC theaters on-demand, Sling TV’s free content, Twitter and world leader’s tweets, Delta’s STEM flight, and more.

Carl in Mississippi listens on SuperTalk and asked: “I have a question about most electronics – I have a southern accent – don’t understand what I say. Is there a product out there that adapts itself to how you speak. It could be incorporated onto your phone or whatever.”

Carl, technically what you want is built into all the main smart assistants, it’s just a slow process. Statistically, smart assistants do better with people with west coast, midwest, and east coast accents than people with southern accents.

The AI does learn from the speakers, but the trick is that your assistant doesn’t learn from you, it learns from everyone and when enough people that sound kind of like you speak to it regularly, the whole system slowly learns to understand them better.

If you think back to a couple of years ago, text to speech and smart assistants have both gotten better, but you’re in the unfortunate group of people who are still not understood as reliably most others. In time that will change.

For now, we can tell you that studies show that Alexa is better than Google Home at dealing with accents (and it’s better at dealing with southern accents in particular too). We’d tell you how good Siri is, but what’s the point? She’s just going to tell you to read the Google results yourself anyway.

The same studies show that you’re better off than people with foreign accents or who speak foreign languages, so at least you won’t be the last one to be understood!

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