Re:Upcoming changes to Cortana
by frereubu on Saturday August 01, 2020 @06:24AM
(#24019313)
I'm a British English speaker, and about 15 years ago I spent an afternoon experimenting with the basic voice recognition on OSX. I found that I had to mimic a US or Australian accent to get it to work, and I wondered what my next-door neighbours were thinking when they heard me cycle repeatedly through "Give me the phone number for Firstname Lastname" with British, US and Australian accents.
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Scot here, I have this problem with telephone voice menus. Actually, I've also had this problem in the US as well, particularly while on the telephone. Putting on a fake US accent seems to work, but it's so damn embarrassing and I guess could be construed as offensive by some people (if they thought I was taking the piss).
I had the same issue recently with a BMW voice activation system I was playing with. Mimicking an English accent worked for that one!
Re:Upcoming changes to Cortana
by danielbarla on Saturday August 01, 2020 @08:57AM
(#24020110)
It has gotten better, I think; as a joke, I recently asked it "what is weather tomorrow" in the most horribly broken fake accent I could muster, and to my surprise, it correctly annotated the question and responded.