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Google wants to understand the Scots

Lauren Kate Rawlins
By Lauren Kate Rawlins, ITWeb digital and innovation contributor.
Johannesburg, 19 Aug 2016
Google is working on improving its voice-activated personal assistant to better understand different accents.
Google is working on improving its voice-activated personal assistant to better understand different accents.

While voice-activated personal assistants are commonplace on smartphones, the technology still struggles to understand certain dialects.

In an effort to rectify this, Google has reportedly hired Appen, a company that specialises in linguistics and data, to collect sets of voice data to improve its OK Google speech recognition software.

This week, Appen started posting on Reddit looking for people with Scottish and other UK accents to sample their voices.

Business Insider reported on a Reddit post that described the job: "I'm currently recruiting to collect ... data for Google... The task is recording voice prompts like 'Indy now,' [and] 'Google what's the time.' Each phrase takes around 3-5 seconds."

The post description has since been deleted.

The title of the posts, still up, says the company is looking for both males and females, who will be paid £9 (R159) to £40 (R708) an hour. They will be required to use Android or Chrome to complete the work.

Other major tech companies Apple, Microsoft and Amazon are working on digital assistants powered by artificial intelligence: Siri, Cortana and Alexa.

When Siri was launched on the iPhone 4S in late 2011, it was widely reported the application did not understand Scottish people with their distinct pronunciation and expressions.

In January, Google announced it had improved its voice search features on desktop and smartphone applications to help it understand Australian accents and slang terms.

Poor voice recognition was a persistent complaint about Google from people with Australian accents.

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