Alexa and Google Assistant are 30% less likely to understand non-American accents

Can't get your Amazon Echo or Google Home smart speaker to understand you? It might be your accent. Two teams of researchers recruited by The Washington Post found that Amazon's Alexa assistant and the Google Assistant exhibit a pattern of poor performance with certain dialects. They tested thousands of voice commands dictated by more than 100 people across 20 cities, and the results were conclusive: Google's and Amazon's speakers were 30 percent less likely to understand non-American accents than those of native-born users, and the overall accuracy rate for Chinese, Indian, and Spanish accents was about 80 percent. It points to clear evidence of bias in the data used to train the two voice recognition systems, Rachael Tatman, a Kaggle data scientist with expertise in speech recognition, told The Washington Post.