> A better question is "coconut, milk" versus "coconut milk".

Sure, but if you were dictating to a human that would still be an easy one for them to get wrong, depending on how long you paused.

I find this interesting with phone numbers. In some countries you hear people say "thirty three sixty two" and they mean 303602

"Coconut" is still an anomalous grocery item. You'd want one of

- a coconut

- [number] coconuts

- shredded coconut

"Coconut" is best matched to that last option, but it's not a natural word choice. (Although it is a natural list entry... do people think of themselves as dictating to Alexa, or as writing the list themselves while happening to use their voice?)

If i'm making a list as a reminder to actually pick up items.. coconut will suffice.

Yes, I agree. If you're writing a list for yourself, a bare "coconut" is a typical entry. But if you're dictating a shopping list to someone else, you're quite unlikely to say "coconut" because that isn't grammatical.

So it turns into a question of how people think about dictating to Alexa.

This is a good point - in reality Alexa doesn't really have to do a great job transcribing at all if it's just constructing a list as a reminder for you later.

If this is a precursor to being able to quickly voice order stuff off amazon to be delivered though it's a different story.

The one I thought of was "peanut butter M&Ms"

This is a very interesting observation. The whole point of speech to text models being biased towards the US in terms of training data and innovation is valid not only across the larger things (gender/race/religion) but just small things like this. And these are likely to cause daily problems.

And that's what makes it interesting. Peanut butter versus peanuts, butter is easy. No one gets a single peanut.

As for the phone number, that's why anyone in a serious occupation (aviation, military, etc) treat each digit as is stand-alone.

Three-zero-three-six-zero-two.

>No one gets a single peanut

You'd be surprised: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoPFQm9PQ_M