Voice recognition comedy

[nancylebov]

The classic Scottish elevator routine....

I don't know if this is horrifying, but I can't hear some of the distinctions in the despairing efforts to get the elevator to recognize "eleven". Oh well, it took me years of listening to the BBC for me to be able to hear an American accent. Actually, I don't know how weird an experience that was, so.... Do you ever hear your own accent (whether it's you speaking or someone else) as a distinct thing?

It took me a considerable effort to hear the way I say "water". I have a Delaware/Philadelphia accent, and I pronounce it "warter". That first r isn't subtle, it's about the same as the second, but I'd blanked it out because I was pronouncing the word like a normal person and it's only got one r, and that r is at the end. Not only that, but I still believe that "warter" is more like the real stuff-- possibly wetter-- than "wahter" is.

Has there been work done how literacy affects what people hear?

Back to elevators-- if you have a more subtle sense of humor, here's a discussion which resulted when someone claimed that voice recognition had gotten so good that the comedy routine was an unfair insult to a well-developed field.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

I'm reminded of Scotty's response to a voice-operated elevator in one of the Star Trek movies: "Up yer shaft."

People are always claiming I have an accent, though they're very vague about what accent. (Yes, I know everyone has some "accent"; what I mean is a non-native accent.)

Nobody's ever told me what kind of German accent I have. As long as the answer isn't "American," I'm happy.

[terriwells.livejournal.com]

I took a multiple choice online test once that asked what the correct pronounciations were for about a score of words. I haven't lived in New York since I was 13, yet it placed me as being squarely from New York City -- not the suburbs, not the neighboring states, not New Jersey, but the city itself. It surprised me...especially since it placed Tony as being from the South, and I can't hear any difference in accent between us.

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

That makes sense, as such accent test like that like for caught-cot merger, pin-pen merger, how differentiated, if at all, mary, marry, and merry are, and several similar things which do not neatly break down along regional as much as they used to, i think in large part due to the ubiquity of TV and radio, especially the former.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

>>Has there been work done how literacy affects what people hear?

I don't know about formal research but there's plenty of anecdotal stuff. An example would be the increasing use of the three syllable version of "medicine" vs. the older two syllable "med'sun". Similarly "soldier" was once pronounced sow-juh but now more closely resembles the orthography in every dialect I know.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

It took me about 10 years of living in the States, but English accents now sound very strange to me. I still don't hear my accent, but I at least have some idea of what Americans might be hearing when English people speak. Before that moment whenever I heard an American put on a funny English voice I just thought "how bizarre. What are they trying to do?"

Also, it's not really data, but one French teacher we've been dealing with has advocated voice-only language learning for all of us, especially the kids, on the grounds that without written cues you're more likely to actually listen and capture the sounds properly. My sense is that this is true: my wife reliably mispronounces some words when she sees them written but gets them right (to my ear) in conversation. Our 4 year old daughter is learning French again by babbling French phonemes in songs, and she sounds (to me, again) like the French kids in her year. Our 8 year old son is reading and speaking together, and so far retaining an American accent in French. So weird.

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

Yes, i often hear my accent when i'm being more Southern in my speech.

[andrewducker]

When the voice control for Kinect was being worked on, I was told by someone sitting close to the dev team for one of the coding houses working with it that they were all speaking in carefully enunciated American accents, because it hadn't yet been taught how to recognise and English one...