Users of smart speakers feel frustrated

For many people, trying to get devices like Alexa to understand their requests is a losing battle

It is not impossible to wonder if language divide could present a huge and hidden barrier to operating smart devices that may one day form the bedrock of modern life. Now runof-the-mill in kitchens and living rooms, smart speakers are increasingly being used for relaying information, controlling devices and completing tasks in workplaces, schools, banks, hotels and hospitals.

The Washington Post findings also back up a more anecdotal frustration among people who say they’ve been embarrassed by having to constantly repeat themselves to the speakers — or have chosen to abandon them altogether.

“When you’re in a social situation, you’re more reticent to use it because you think, ‘This thing isn’t going to understand me and people are going to make fun of me, or they’ll think I don’t speak that well,’ “said Yago Doson, a 33-year-old marine biologist in California who grew up in Barcelona and has spoken English for 13 years.

Doson said some of his friends do everything with their speakers, but he has resisted buying one because he’s had too many bad experiences. He added, “You feel like, ‘I’m never going to be able to do the same thing as this other person is doing, and it’s only because I have an accent.’”

The companies offer ways for people to calibrate the systems to their voices. But many speaker owners have still taken to YouTube to share their battles in conversation. In one viral video, an older Alexa user pining for a Scottish folk song was instead played the Black Eyed Peas.

Matt Mitchell, a comedy writer in Birmingham, Alabama, whose sketch about a drawling “southern Alexa” has been viewed more than 1 million times, said he was inspired by his own daily tussles with the futuristic device.

Undetectable accent

When he asked about the Peaks of Otter, a famed stretch of the Blue Ridge Mountains (in the US), Alexa told him, instead, the water content in a pack of marshmallow Peeps. “It was surprisingly more than I thought,” he said with a laugh. “I learnt two things instead of just one.”

In another study, one tester with an almost undetectable Midwestern accent asked how to get from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument. Alexa told her, in a resoundingly chipper tone, that $1 is worth 71 pence.

A second study, by the voicetesting US start-up Pulse Labs, asked people to read three different newspaper headlines — about President Donald Trump, China and the Winter Olympics — and then examined the raw data of what Alexa thought the people said.

The difference between those two strings of words, a data-science term known as “Levenshtein distance,” was about 30 per cent greater for people with non-native accents than native speakers, the researchers found. People with nearly imperceptible accents, in the computerised mind of Alexa, often sounded like gobbledegook, with words like “bulldozed” coming across as “boulders” or “burritos.”

When a speaker with a British accent read one headline — “Trump bulldozed Fox News host, showing again why he likes phone interviews” — Alexa dreamed up a more imaginative story: “Trump bull diced a Fox News heist showing again why he likes pain and beads.”