Speech recognition systems from five tech companies are bias towards people of color, study reveals

Speech recognition systems are deep-rooted with bias toward people of color, a new study reveals. Stanford researchers found these technologies from Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM and Microsoft make twice as many errors when interpreting language from black people than words spoken by whites. The team fed systems with nearly 2,000 speech samples from 115 individuals, 42 whites and 73 blacks, and found the average error rate for whites was 19 percent and 35 percent for blacks. Apple was found to perform the worst out of the group with a 45 percent error rate for black speakers and 23 percent for white speakers. Those involved with the study believed the inaccuracies are due to data sets used to train the systems are designed predominately by white people.