Study finds that even the best speech recognition systems exhibit bias

Even state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) algorithms struggle to recognize the accents of people from certain regions of the world. That's the top-line finding of a new study published by researchers at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands Cancer Institute, and the Delft University of Technology, which found that an ASR system for the Dutch language recognized speakers of specific age groups, genders, and countries of origin better than others. Speech recognition has come a long way since IBM's Shoebox machine and Worlds of Wonder's Julie doll. But despite progress made possible by AI, voice recognition systems today are at best imperfect -- and at worst discriminatory. In a study commissioned by the Washington Post, popular smart speakers made by Google and Amazon were 30% less likely to understand non-American accents than those of native-born users.