Friday, November 18, 2011

Does "Siri" on your IPhone 4S understand your accent?


Some of my accent reduction clients have complained that the new voice recognition technology doesn't understand their heavy accent. I would like to hear your experiences with Siri and other similar applications.

Here is an excerpt from an article on Huffingtonpost:

"It can be frustrating because Siri forces me to pronounce my questions over and over again and sometimes the app won't understand me at all," said Latina Sandra Ortiz, new owner of the iPhone 4S, after recording the video, "but it always understands my husband!"

Here is a comment from Apple:

"The more you use Siri, the better it will understand you. It does this by learning about your accent and other characteristics of your voice. Siri uses voice recognition algorithms to categorize your voice into one of the dialects or accents it understands. As more people use Siri and it’s exposed to more variations of a language, its overall recognition of dialects and accents will continue to improve, and Siri will work even better."read whole article

What are your experiences?