Y'all have a Texas accent? Siri (and the world) might be slowly killing it
Y'all have a Texas accent? Siri (and the world) might be
slowly killing it
Voice recognition tools such as Apple’s Siri still
struggle to understand regional quirks and accents, and users are adapting the
way they speak to compensate
By Tom Dart in Houston Wednesday 10 February
2016 10.30 EST
It was a simple enough question, at least in this part of
the world.
“How can we mosey on down to the rodeo?” my friend Ben
Crook drawled, sat in a rocking chair on his front porch, a can of Lone Star
beer in his left hand on a humid night in Houston.
Only one thing jarred with this otherwise stereotypical
Texas scene: Crook was asking Siri, the voice-activated digital personal
assistant on his iPhone, rather than, say, a passing sheriff on horseback with
a cowboy hat wider than the Buffalo Bayou.
Siri understood the individual words but didn’t know how
to respond. But Crook had other questions. He was hungry; heck, so hungry he
coulda eaten the north end of a southbound billy goat.
“We’re fixin’ to eat brisket, where should we go?” he
asked Siri. She offered a list of 15 restaurants – though not all appeared to
serve Texas barbecue. Siri was also helpful when asked where to find crawfish,
but baffled about kolaches, the pastries of central European origin that are
hugely popular in Texas, calling them “Colotchies”.
Meanwhile, though the free Dragon dictation app performed
admirably when fed lines from the 2004 movie The Alamo, it did turn “Davy
Crockett feller” into “David Rockefeller”, and evoking a family of Yankee
industrialists is no way to describe a hero of the battle for Texas
independence.
The upshot of this brief and decidedly unscientific
experiment is that Siri is at her best when addressed in standard English, with
accents toned down and slang avoided where possible.
The writer Julia Reed came to a similar conclusion in an
essay for the latest issue of the southern lifestyle magazine Garden & Gun,
when she turned to dictation apps after breaking her left elbow in New Orleans.
She wrote:
Like the iPhone’s highly temperamental Siri, Dragon and
the rest of the dictation apps I tried steadfastly refused to understand pretty
much everything I had to say. Apparently none of [Dragon’s] coders have spent a
natural minute below the Mason-Dixon Line. A smart person could make a lot of
money by inventing a Siri for Southerners.
(An Apple spokesperson directed the Guardian to a Siri
user guide and a list of the countries and languages where it is available).
“I’ve had a bunch of people from Australia and India say
they only really get along with Siri if they fake an American accent,” said
Lars Hinrichs, a sociolinguist at the University of Texas at Austin.
Most people have what we would call a telephone voice …
they also have a machine voice
Alan Black
Apple has refined and developed Siri since the tech giant
bought it from a small startup in 2010. It is improving fast. But while
voice-recognition programs will continue to evolve when hearing non-standard
speech such as regional accents, a question that neither human nor machine can
answer for certain is whether they will need to. People are adapting to virtual
assistants, as well as the other way round.
“Most people have what we would call a telephone voice,
so they actually change away from their local family accent when they’re
speaking on the telephone to somebody they don’t know,” said Alan Black, a
Scottish computer scientist who is a professor at the Language Technologies
Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
They also have a “machine voice”, he said. “People speak
to machines differently than how they speak to people. They move into a
different register. If you’re standing next to somebody in an airport or at a
bus stop or something, you can typically tell when they’re talking to a machine
rather than talking to a person.”
Black speculated that “one of the reasons they designed
Siri to be fundamentally a polite, helpful agent who isn’t your friend but
works for you, is to encourage people to be somewhat polite and explicit to
her, rather than being very colloquial. Because speech recognition is always
hard when you drop into colloquialisms.”
With speech recognition ever more widespread and
efficient, our younger generation will grow believing chats with Siri and the
new Amazon Echo are routine and genuinely useful; a far cry from when calls to
utility companies became stilted shouting matches with machines that had
trouble understanding “yes” and “no”, never mind “put me through to a real
person, for God’s sake”.
But aside from Siri, proud Texans should worry about
something else.
Long before machines who could understand you, cultural
and demographic shifts were already moving people towards standardized English.
In fact, mass media and migration are slowly killing the Texas twang.
“The way young people in Dallas or Houston speak nowadays
is a lot closer to a regional common denominator accent than to what it was 50
years ago,” said Hinrichs, who is originally from Germany and directs the Texas
English Project. “I never hear any of my students sound ‘Texan’ in class
anymore; but they can when they go home. The accent modularizes because people
are more mobile and connected with the world.”
In effect, Texans are using the “telephone voice” in
everyday life, partly thanks to the effects of TV and social media and partly
because the influx of arrivals from around the country and overseas, so that
everyone can understand each other. It is called “accent levelling”.
Quirky expressions such as 'doggone it', 'shucks' and
'drat it' are dying out, replaced with more mainstream dialect
“Vocabulary is the first thing to go. Then syntax and
pronunciation,” he said. Double modals such as “might could” and “oughta
should”, and quirky regional expressions such as “doggone it”, “shucks” and
“drat it” are dying out, replaced with more mainstream dialect and an accent
often described as “midwestern”.
Hinrichs and some colleagues conducted an experiment to
see if Texans could tell west Texans and east Texans apart.
“Basically the answer’s no,” he said – even though in
such a vast state, landscapes and lifestyles differ widely depending on
location. “People from Texas cannot hear the difference, but most will tell you
they can.”
Still, he suggested, while globalization might make life
easier for voice-recognition programmers, flexibility also poses challenges. “A
frontier for speech processing is to deal with multilingualism – switching
between English and Spanish,” he said. About 40% of Texas’ population is
Hispanic.
Black thinks that in coming years, programs such as Siri
will go from being aloof in style to more familiar, understanding your language
patterns as if they were a close friend rather than a casual acquaintance.
“Dialogue systems at the moment work pretty well, speech
recognition has got substantially better,” he said. “I think what’s probably
going to happen is a much more long-term rapport. It will know more about you.
It will be able to answer the question sort of before you ask it – this is one
of the things that Google Now’s aim is, answer the question before you actually
ask. You’ll find that you can be less specific when you’re talking because it
will know the sort of things that will be relevant. If you ask the time, the
machine might say something like, ‘it’s OK you’ve still got three minutes
before your meeting’, because it knows that you ask the time when you’re
worried about the meeting, that’s what you always do.”
In other words, the future holds less southern charm, but
fewer problems getting to the rodeo.
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