Eee by gum! Aye up, Microsoft, what's tha y' got? Cloud for accents?

Microsoft has build a cloud service for applications so that software can attempt to understand specialist vocabularies and cope with dialects and accents. Speech recognition works better if the algorithms can pick from a limited range of possible words and phrases, rather than attempting to recognise everything. Microsoft's …

[Alister]

Regional AI

"I'm sorry Dave, but one on't cross beams gone owt askew on t'treadle"

[DJV]

Excellent!

Mash up of the week!

[Pascal Monett]

"the technology is improving"

Undoubtedly, but it still fails with way too much regularity on anything that is not the simplest of soundbytes.

One day, we will undoubtedly have speech recognition capability that can actually recognize what a person is saying with a 95% or better success factor, but expert systems have to be fine-tuned and it has already taken years to get them where they are. I'm not holding my breath for this.

[Cuddles]

Re: "the technology is improving"

"I'm not holding my breath for this."

Well, that would make it a bit more difficult for them to recognise your speech.

[FredBloggs61]

I call Babel fish!

[Anonymous Coward]

Accents

The one I always found the hardest to understand was from Belfast. I worked with a guy from there and had to buffer what he said, replace all the vowels and then I could get the gist of his meaning

[phuzz]

Re: Accents

Newcastle is the one I have trouble with, and I can (usually) understand Glaswegians. Mind you, the word "cunt" is easy enough to understand I suppose.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Accents

"Mind you, the word "cunt" is easy enough to understand I suppose."

As in "They cunt understan' a word on it."?

[Neil Barnes]

Please tell me

that the swearing and porn module is called 'Emily Post'.

[yellowlawn]

Grandma, grandma. Mi grandad's gone and collopsed on ter t'allotment. Well don't just stand there oppen a tin'o peys

[Yugguy]

Good luck with this one Microsoft.

SING on, there's nobbut thee an' me;

We'll mack th' heawse ring, or else we'll see.

Thee sing thoose little songs o' thine,

As weel as t' con, an' aw'll sing mine.

We'll have a concert here to-neet,

Soa pipe thi notes eawt clear an' sweet:

Thee sing a stave or two for me,

An' then aw'll sing a bit for thee.

That's reet, goa on, mi little guest,

Theaw tries to do thi very best,

An' aw'll do th' same, then thee an' me

May get eawr names up yet tha'll see.

Why, th' childer's listenin' neaw at th' door;

There's creawds abeawt! there is, forshure.

Heaw pleosed they seem—dear little things!

Aw'd sooner sing for them than kings.

[Alistair]

I'll see

your UK regional dialects, and raise y'all newfs.

But we luvs our newfs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I'll see

The only newfs I ever heard bark.

[Roland6]

What?

"Some customer support lines now use speech recognition to automate routing your call to the right person; it is often no better and sometimes worse than the old method of "press 1" for this and "press 2" for that."

It is 2017, believe it or not IVR and speech recognition to automate routing has been in use since the late 1990's and certainly products from the majors such as Nuance in the early 2000's were up to the task.

The R&D was in continuous voice/natural language processing, semantic analysis and inference ie.what does "Hello Alexa" mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong picture

I think you've used the wrong picture for an article whose headline starts with "Eee". I believe there is a standard to conform to.