Brand & Ross
Maybe we should get Jonathan Ross to call Larry Page and tell him that Brand f**ked his daughter. Ross could then say that he was actually telling Larry that he was interested in becoming an investor.
Google's voice search is, it turns out, optimised for North American accents and has distinct problems understanding proper English as the BBC defines it - forcing English users to adopt the kind of dodgy accents not usually seen outside a karaoke night. Google's iPhone application warns users that "Voice Search only works in …
watching British television shows is that, the more educated and/or aristocratic a character is, the less my American ears can hear their "accent". So.... if the search is having trouble understanding some residents of the scepter'd isle.... it could be an indication of a certain lack of... hmm.... I'll just leave it at that ;)
Voice recognition tech has come a long way, but it's still only useful, imo, in areas where you can target a small subset of words - like support line IVRs... I'm also left wondering how well this thing copes with the various North American accents. I've known Yankees (i.e., those above the Mason-Dixie line, not "yanks") that have trouble understanding a thick southern accent. I've had trouble myself understanding creole accents.
No surprises then. Anyone who has installed Windows XP will know how hard it tries to hide UK English in favour (sorry, favor...) of American English. You would have thought the country name of England would give a huge clue to the origin of the language.
Hold on a minute ... I think I prefer a North American accent to the chavvy-speak made so popular by our home-grown vacuous C-list celebs.
Paris, as there isn't an icon for one of own C-list failures.
Except your measurements are not "Standard" as you claim. Where things count, us Brits are using Metric. The only things that are still Imperial (supposedly) are distances (miles), measures (pints primarily) and possibly weights (pounds).
Your insistence on the American ounce, the American fluid ounce, the American gallon, the American mile, etc may require you to call your measurements "American", not "Standard".
Kthxbye.
what a Pygmalion of a fair dilemma, we 'ave 'er.
You know, we need a proper open source project on speech recognition, sure the things have to be trained initially, but if we can merge the data at some point there should be correlation to have recognition installed by default.
Well I am off to chase a ragged rascal round the ragged rocks, and then check out the rain in Span that falls mainly on the plains.
Can someone please enlighten me by describing what this "North American" accent is? Only a moronic retard would even claim that such a thing existed. For deity's sake, we have at least three distinct accents in my little state of Massachusetts (Western Mass [no accent], Worcester, and Boston). Then you have New York (specifically, NYC), New Jersey, the south, the midwest, and let's not forget Canada, eh? Or Mexico. That doesn't even begin to cover the islands such as the Bahamas, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Jamaica, etc.
So which of those (or one of the many not listed) is "the" North American accent?
I was born in suburban Boston, whilst my granddad was born Down East (central Nova Scotia), and I once found myself, at the age of 8 being chased round his house by him, holding a stick of firewood, which he was going to use on my ass, because I did such a great job of imitating his accent. He was being followed in our little chase by my mom, who was telling him that she'd kill him if he applied said stick to my ass. Just in Eastern Canada, I can think of four accents- Newfie, Novie, PEI, Brunswick, and everybody west of Ontario is almost undistinguished from the US Midwestern 'generic' accent made famous by news anchors and Johnny Carson, (but I'm sure they can tell each other apart). Listening to broadcasts of 'Hockey Night in Canada' will treat you to some of these lovely dialects. Granddad would recognized most of them, I'm sure.
There was a TV series on the English Language a few years ago that said you could trace back most US accents to the areas of England the original settlers had tumbled out of, and I'm sure that's still true. Virginians sound different then western North Carolina, and Arkansas doesn't sound anything at all like Georgia. I was surprised that Sarah Palin sounded like a character in the movie FARGO, which was odd, given that she was born in Idaho and raised in Alaska. I've been told that Palin's faux accent was born in the Finnish influences in northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Upper Michigan to the language, for it's worth.