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Re:How Alexa knows “peanut butter” is one shopping-list item... by jeena on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @10:00AM (#18706800)
The German language is superior in this regard because there it would we either "peanut, butter" or "peanutbutter".
Re:How Alexa knows “peanut butter” is one shopping-list item... by burkaman on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @10:04AM (#18706847)
It's the same in English in this case. There's no pause when you talk about "peanut butter", but there's a significant one when listing the two.
Re:How Alexa knows “peanut butter” is one shopping-list item... by gnulinux on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @10:18AM (#18707017)
How is this relevant? Peanut butter isn't spoken like "peanut, butter" it's spoken like "peanutbutter".
Re:How Alexa knows “peanut butter” is one shopping-list item... by ghaff on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @12:27PM (#18708450)
It depends. If I'm enunciating clearly as I tend to do when I dictate to voice assistants, I'm going to tend to tend to distinctly pronounce the "t" at the end of peanut and the "b" at the beginning of butter which tends to produce something of a pause between the two words.
Re:How Alexa knows “peanut butter” is one shopping-list item... by boomlinde on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @10:04AM (#18706854)
It wouldn't help much with tokenization of spoken words since it's hard to tell from its pronunciation whether an English phrase is compounded, hyphenated or separate words.
Re:How Alexa knows “peanut butter” is one shopping-list item... by SmellyGeekBoy on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @10:27AM (#18707113)
I'd say it was probably worse in this respect, doesn't German have a lot more of these "compound" words that would need to be parsed in this way?
Re:How Alexa knows “peanut butter” is one shopping-list item... by wil421 on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @10:47AM (#18707344)
Exactly, car insurance is much better than Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung.
Re:How Alexa knows “peanut butter” is one shopping-list item... by Quai on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @12:02PM (#18708171)
If you want to make German look bad, sure, but a "better" translation of car insurance would be Autoversicherung.

I mean, "car insurance" is much better than "motor vehicle liability insurance" too.. ;-)

Re:How Alexa knows “peanut butter” is one shopping-list item... by _emacsomancer_ on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @12:27PM (#18708453)
I know there's still a difference in length, but don't let English orthography fool you, English likes big compounds too: "high voltage electricity grid systems engineer team supervisor" is structurally the same as the unspaced German monstrous compounds. (I.e. the real difference between English and German in this area is just a matter of orthography and not actual linguistic structure.)
Re:How Alexa knows “peanut butter” is one shopping-list item... by mathie25 on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @02:23PM (#18709678)
French would be easier to understand as peanut butter is "beurre d'arachides" (butter from peanuts). The "de" (or d' in that example) is given you the "context"/what the butter is made of. Same for apple juice, it's "jus de pommes" and etc.
Re:How Alexa knows “peanut butter” is one shopping-list item... by snaky on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @11:04AM (#18707544)
It would be easier in languages that make use of a high degree of inflection, especially in Slavic languages, where - that's unusual in other language families - declension also depends on whether the word is a noun or an adjective.