Speech recognition technology is racist, study finds

New evidence of voice recognition's racial bias problem has emerged. Speech recognition technologies developed by Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and IBM make almost twice as many errors when transcribing African American voices as they do with white American voices, according to a new Stanford study. All five systems produced these error rates even when the speakers were of the same gender and age, and saying the exact same words. We can't know for sure if these technologies are used in virtual assistants, such as Siri and Alexa, as none of the companies disclose this information. If they are, the products will be offering a vastly inferior service to a huge chunk of their users -- which can have a major impact on their daily lives.