You really don't think Google doesn't test in other huge markets? A study a couple years ago found that Google did awfully well with English speakers from the US, India, and China. [1]

From a quick search, it looks like national accents are less of a problem, and the real difficulties like in dialects and foreign accents (e.g. a Spanish person speaking English).

But the idea that the training corpus used for speech recognition models is all "20-30 year old white male techbro bay area" guys is ludicrous. Where are you even getting this? Speech corpuses used for testing are put together by people who take demographic diversity seriously. On the other hand, they are sometimes biased towards a single mainstream national dialect. (E.g. "standard" American English, as opposed to a thick Boston accent.)

[1] https://voicebot.ai/2018/09/13/google-assistant-takes-lead-i...

> You really don't think Google doesn't test in other huge markets?

I'm not entirely convinced Google test _anything_.

Certainly not convinced enough to not play it up in the context of a snarky dis on Google and Googler culture.

If you're going to diss something, you should at least get it right... ;)

Don't you recall the infamous fifty-shades-of-blue thing with Google? Google's whole thing is that they quantitatively test everything.

Maybe you've been living under a rock the past 20 years? :P

I feel like the true spirit of Google is that they test fifty shades of blue, then apply the "quantitatively best" shade of blue in an unrelated product where it makes the text unreadable. Either that or I have no idea what the heck they're testing for.

I strongly suspect that was an example of malicious compliance.

Googler #1: "Marissa want to change the link colors _again!_ What can we do to make her stop micromanaging shit like this?"

Googler #2: "All we need to do is convince her we are obviously wrong about 'graphic design-y things' because we're developers, and that she can prove we are wrong by making a 'data driven' decision. Then we'll say 'The only way to prove we are wrong would be an insane global 0 way multivariate test of all possible colours!!!' and she'll _insist_ on it. Then we build a tool and run the test and point at the results every time she tries to make us change it again. And we can offer to run the tool for _everything else_ she micromanages us about in future too!"

Googler #1: "Brilliant! So, do we build the tool and run the test? Or just make up the results and present them to her?"

For any company Google's size (including Google), it's rarely ever accurate to say "$COMPANY does $X". Maybe some parts of Google quantitatively tests everything, but it is safe to assume that there's huge variation across the company in testing rigor.

Explain Google Groups then.

> From a quick search, it looks like national accents are less of a problem, and the real difficulties like in dialects and foreign accents (e.g. a Spanish person speaking English).

Can confirm, in high school I had to occasionally go AFK after being beckoned talk to the amazon echo because it wouldn't understand my parents' accents.

A lot of immigrant children get used to translating for their parents, but repeating commands but with a native accent is a newer phenomenon.

Me too. As a Brit in USA, especially as a scouser, I have to do a comedy American accent to work Siri et al.

Used to be the same in the store, tuna sandwich pls. Huh? What? Oh, toona!

Does:

  Settings > Siri > Language > English (United Kingdom)

not fix it for you? And possibly setting

  Settings > Siri > Siri Voice > British

as well?

Apple advertises:

> Since Siri is designed to recognize accents and dialects of the supported countries or regions, Siri’s accuracy rate will be highest for native speakers.

Or is this problem just with American friends' devices?

It does but then you can’t use local maps and points of interest etc.

Wait what do you mean?

My Siri's set to American but when I travel to London local maps and stuff all works fine there?

If that were true then maps will stop working for anyone traveling to another country. I know that's certainly not the case on Android, and I suspect it's not on iOS either.

My son has learnt to pronounce "Nate" as "Neat" when convincing Alexa to play DJ Nate songs from a game soundtrack.