From Google’s Assistant to Apple’s Siri, smart assistants are now a staple feature in many people’s daily lives.
But several Amazon Alexa users have found themselves changing their accent in an effort to get the smart assistant to understand them.
The issue appears to affect people with regional British accents, many of who have taken to Twitter in recent weeks to vent their frustrations about the issue.
One user wrote: “Sometimes I have to speak in a slight American accent to Alexa because she doesn’t understand my accent.”
Another added: “I HATE that I sometimes have to speak in an American accent for Alexa to understand me.”
And one wrote: “I always have to channel my most american accent when i talk to alexa for her to understand anything.”
Meanwhile, other users only reported problems with certain words.
One user tweeted: “Alexa doesn’t understand my accent when I say ‘rare’ so I have to say ‘play rare by selena gomez’ in an american accent.”
And another joked: “I have to use an American accent to ask alexa to play Cher. Otherwise she plays this weird af song by someone called Chef, the nail art is a sausage with a face sat on a chair… At Christmas time..”
Alexa is trained to understand a range of accents, nda learns by processing data from different voices.
Speaking to the Washington Post , an Amazon spokesperson explained: “The more we hear voices that follow certain speech patterns or have certain accents, the easier we find it to understand them. For Alexa, this is no different.
“As more people speak to Alexa, and with various accents, Alexa’s understanding will improve.”
The news comes shortly after a survey by Spike Digital revealed that Alexa struggles the most to understand Welsh accents.
Unsurprisingly, just behind the Welsh accent was the Scottish accent, with 45.2 per cent of Scots saying they are frustrated when speaking to their smart assistant.
And while you might think that posh accents would be the most understood, the results indicated that this isn’t the case.
Instead, North Easterners claimed to have the least trouble with voice assistants, with just 26.1 per cent saying they weren’t understood.
source: mirror
