AI voice-assistants have long had difficulty understanding foreign accents, but now Amazon may be taking steps to address this frequent issue. In Australia, the brand is hiring “a linguist with Australian background” to join their team. The same may be happening in other places around the world as these linguists can listen to the language and annotate everything from word pronunciation to pauses between words to help artificial intelligence understand all kinds of accents. Perhaps even including some (like Scottish) that routinely baffle English language speakers as well.
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