Brummies baff le Alexa

Speaker not so smart if you have a distinctive accent

IT promises to answer any question and help with many a task.

But Alexa is not so useful, it seems, if you are from Birmingham or Glasgow. A study recorded volunteers from 30 British cities asking their smart speaker ten common questions.

Cardiff was the most misunderstood, with the devices failing to understand seven questions.

The Welsh capital scored an error rate – which takes into account how many questions were understood and the number of monthly internet searches for ‘Why doesn’t my smart speaker understand me?’ – of 82.

Glaswegians were understood in just half of the questions they put to the devices, and the city scored an error rate of 77.

Liverpool was the third most misunderstood with a score of 70 and Birmingham was in fourth place with 65.

Liverpool saw the most searches for understandability issues at 1,700 a month. The London accent, meanwhile, has the lowest error score of 11. The study, by comparison website Uswitch.com, found Alexa misunderstood just three questions asked by Londoners, while Lincoln came in second with a score of 15 – although it had the best voice clarity score with just one question misunderstood. Analysis revealed just 275 queries from Londoners each month about why their devices don’t understand them. More than one in five British households has a smart speaker, with Amazon and Google the most popular brands.

Broadband expert Nick Baker said: ‘It’s clear that more needs to be done to make voice recognition features smoother. The use of artificial intelligence in products is only going to increase, and as it grows in popularity it’s important that features are accessible to all.’

An Amazon spokesman said: ‘Alexa is always getting smarter and since launch Alexa’s understanding of the English language, and British accents, has continuously improved thanks to advances in speech technology.

‘ We’re continuing to improve how we accurately recognise variations of speech.’