Hitting the Books: The bias behind AI assistants' failure to understand accents

The age of being able to speak to our computers just as we do with other humans is finally upon us but voice-activated assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Home haven't proven quite as revolutionary -- or inclusive -- as we'd hoped they'd be. While these systems make a commendable effort to accurately interpret commands regardless of whether you picked up your accent in Houston or Hamburg, for users with heavier or less common accents such as Caribbean or Cockney, requests to their digital assistants are roundly ignored. In her essay "Siri Disciplines" for Your Computer Is on Fire from the MIT Press, Towson University professor Dr. Halcyon M. Lawrence, examens some of the more glaring shortcomings of this nascent technology, how those preventable failures have effectively excluded a sizeable number of potential users and the western biases underpinning the issue. Used with permission of the publisher, MIT Press. Voice technologies are routinely described as revolutionary.