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Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

I think some people overestimate how good humans are at speech recognition. Unfamiliar accents and noisy environments cause havoc with many people. I had a friend who learned English in India when I was in High School, so I was used to that accent; many of my classmates in College could not understand anything our Indian T/A said freshmen year.

Similarly I had friends for whom English was a second language who had lived in the US for years and were definitely fluent, but had to enable subtitles for a movie in which the characters had a strong southern accent; in general non-rhotic accents were very troublesome for them having only spoken english with midwesterners.

The article mentions the Scottish accent, and I would call that the hardest accent of native English speakers for those in the US to understand.

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My grandfather was on the ferry from Norway to Denmark with my sister. We're all from Norway. He had quite reduced hearing and used a hearing aid.

They were having dinner at the ships restaurant, and the waiter asked my grandfather something. My grandfather just didn't understand the guy and asked the waiter to repeat several times. After the 4th time, my sister told my grandfather: "Grandpa, he's Swedish". My grandpa paused for a second and then immediately recognized what the waiter had said.

Turns out he had assumed the guy was Danish, and thus failed to interpret the limited sounds he could hear, given the hearing loss and background noise.

It's also cool that your sister was able to assess what the problem was with nothing more than observation, and then cause your grandpa to switch to a more effective processing model with a simple utterance.

I'm half-deaf with a cochlear implant; context switching is incredibly difficult! I've had similar problems where I assume someone is speaking either Japanese or English and "filter" accordingly.

Obligatory "voice recognition lift in Scotland" comedy sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAz_UvnUeuU

Personally I've had to "translate" between a South African and an Ulsterman before, both of whom were speaking English but with extremely different accents.

I find with accents if I try and imitate the sound then it can become clear the closest word form that produces that sound, if that makes sense.

This works well both in speech and sign with our 1 year old too (oh not "poo" but "boots"; {moves open hand forward and backwards away from body at chest height} oh right "lawnmower" ...).

I had a chance to live in the middle of the "hood" in a large American city for about 6 months. I was one of the few white guys around. I spoke English, they spoke English - but it was about a week before I could understand people, especially on a crowded city bus. The first few days felt like a foreign country and it was the same country I grew up in! I wonder how well Siri and friends work with Ebonics?

That's a double whammy because diction is so different as well; our brain fills in the gaps in phoneme recognition by pattern matching and the differing dialect makes that much harder as well.

If you think that's bad, check out the Geordie accent from Newcastle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY4TT3VtR8o

According to Wikipedia it's "a direct continuation and development of the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxon settlers" of the region. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geordie

Jimmy Nail! Nevertheless, Rab C. Nesbitt remains my high water mark for impenetrability in British television:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkC0jCoedHc

I defer to your obvious familiarity with British TV.

Agree with this. I’m currently traveling to a country where English is not the primary language, but is still spoken universally. I am having a hell of a time understanding people - the unfsmikiar accent is wrecking havoc with my brain’s speech recognition centers.

I’m currently where speech recognition software was in the 90s.

The thing is, even if you can't do much better than a computer on pure recognition of words, you have far superior error detection and correction abilities. If a computer mishears a word, it likely just assumes it was whatever was closest, resulting in nonsense sentences. A human will be usually able to "fill in the blanks" on something they didn't hear, or failing that, be able to ask for someone to repeat it.

I agree with your point. It can be hard for a US native English speaker to recognize a Scottish accent.

But, other Scottish people certainly don't have trouble with understanding a Scottish accent. So I view that as a certificate that we should be able to build a speech recognizer which can recognize Scottish accents.

> But, other Scottish people certainly don't have trouble with understanding a Scottish accent. So I view that as a certificate that we should be able to build a speech recognizer which can recognize Scottish accents.

As a Scottish person, I'll say there's a huge amount of variation between Scots dialects. As someone who grew up in Fife, it took me well over a year of living in Glasgow to be able to reliably understand people there—and both of them are typically classed as Central Scots.

Parliamo Glasgow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfCk_yNuTGk

I also grew up in Fife, although my parents paid good money so I would have an Edinburgh accent. Glasgow was like a foreign country to us...

> I also grew up in Fife, although my parents paid good money so I would have an Edinburgh accent.

I grew up in St Andrews, both of my parents having grown up in England, and went through speech therapy as a young child (due to dyspraxia); unsurprisingly, with that, you can imagine my accent is much closer to RP than any broad Fife accent, though most of my speech is definitely Standard Scottish English.

Well...St Andrews really isn't Fife ;)

A speech recognizer that has been trained with General American (which is likely the largest corpus we have), is analagous for a US native English speaker, so I wouldn't expect it to work on Scottish accents.

Whether or not gathering a sufficiently large corpus of other dialects will solve the problem would be interesting; also it might be uneconomical to gather a large enough corpus of some dialects, leaving minorities out.

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