Britain contains a huge range of accents. Move just a few tens of miles in any direction and you'll encounter more diverse speech patterns than you'll find in the whole of the US. So, for a Brit like me it's no surprise that Google's new voice activated search for the iPhone is having a hard time. Heck, even my mother has trouble with the Geordie accent.
The Telegraph encountered the following hilarious mistakes while testing out the Google application. Subjects said one word: "iPhone". Surrey and Kent accents both came up with "Einstein", and on a second try they were offered "MySpace" and "my sister" respectively. A Yorkshireman (for my money, this is the best accent on the planet) got "bonfire".
A Scottish accent turned up "sledding" and "sex", and the sing-song Welsh accent was offered the stunningly bizarre "gorillas" and "kitchen sink".
The newspaper spoke to a Kentish man, Roger Ellinson, who had been trying to get the search to work:
I asked it to find my nearest pizza take away and it came back with something about volcanoes [...] I'll have to try to put on my best American accent to get it to work.
This last is particularly funny. Said with the right accent, the word "Kent" comes out with a subtle, but obscene, difference.
Google iPhone voice-recognition tool baffled by British accents [Telegraph. Thanks, Dylan!]
