Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home show accent bias, with Chinese and Spanish hardest to understand
Studies reveal the smart speakers work best with voices from the US regions where they are popular, and that non-Americans are the most often misunderstood
When Meghan Cruz says, “Hey, Alexa,” her Amazon smart speaker bursts to life, offering the kind of helpful response she now expects from her automated assistant.
With a few words in her breezy, North American West Coast accent, the Vancouver-based lab technician gets Alexa to tell her the temperature in Berlin (70 degrees Fahrenheit, or 21 degrees Celsius), the world’s most poisonous animal (a geography cone snail) and the square root of 128, which it offers to the ninth decimal place.
But when Andrea Moncada, a college student and fellow Vancouver resident who was raised in Colombia, in South America, says the same in her light Spanish accent, Alexa offers only a virtual shrug. Moncada also asks it to add a few numbers, and Alexa says sorry. She tells Alexa to turn the music off; instead, the volume turns up.
“People will tell me, ‘Your accent is good,’ but [Alexa] couldn’t understand anything,” Moncada says.
Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant are spearheading a voice-activated revolution, rapidly changing the way millions of people around the world learn new things and plan their lives.
But for people with accents, the artificially intelligent speakers can seem very different: inattentive, unresponsive, even isolating. For many people in the world, the wave of the future has a voice bias problem, and it’s leaving them behind.
These systems are going to work best for white, highly educated, upper-middle-class Americans, probably from the West Coast, because that’s the group that’s had access to the technology from the very beginning