Voice Assistants and Accents

At our Civic Holiday family gettogether, yesterday, Susan’s cousin, Ann, was sharing with us her frustration when trying to change her name on her Aeroplan account by telephone. In a nutshell, the automated voice prompts wouldn’t work properly, and she thinks it’s because she has an English accent.

Well, that reminded me of this video:

In response, Ann related the time a friend took her to see one of the ‘greatest comedians in the world’, Billy Connolly, and she said she couldn’t understand a single thing he said. Funny, I’ve never had a problem with his accent, ever. He himself has problems with others’ accents, as evidenced here:

Perhaps we should all be a little grateful for the series “Outlander” for helping us to understand a Scottish accent. But even then, some of Jamie’s words seem unintelligible, even to me. But that’s a story for another day.