Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

  • TheOtherBen

    I have similar issues when trying to use American-accented English.

    • dnebdal

      I’ve mostly given up on google voice search (for now), and my Norwegian accent isn’t that horrid.

  • Kenmrph

    The inverse of this happened to me when I was playing Brain Age on the Nintendo DS (a few years back).  In one of the games, the name of a color is flashed on the screen, and you need to quickly say the color of the lettering (not what the word says).  It was frustrating because I kept getting false negatives on certain words, until my friend advised me to use Japanese-accented English on words like “yellow.”  Suddenly, I was scoring much higher, and much borderline politically incorrect mirth ensued.

    • http://www.facebook.com/arnaud.clermonte Arnaud Clermonte

      I confirm that saying “bulu” gave much better results than “blue” !

  • phlavor

    My high school typing teacher told me I should be taking the class more seriously. I laughed and said to her, “We’ll all be talking to our computers in two years.” That was 1988.

    • http://daruiburns.tumblr.com/ Dlo Burns

      I had a CompSci teacher in college preach to us about how keyboards were going to be useless in 10 years because all software will be voice commanded. So I asked “what if you’re in a noisy subway or don’t want everybody to know what you’re doing?” He got so mad his face turned red and I kept getting bad marks on my assignments, but it was totally worth it.

  • Paul Renault

    Two words: “Scottish Elevator”.

    • Antinous / Moderator

      Eleven!

  • anansi133

    The really awful part of this is that siri is asking a multiple choice question- all she needs is to distinguish walk/fuck/wall from home. I hope in future versions they won’t make the speech recognition fuck any harder than it has to.

  • Julian Wasson

    You’d think with a binary choice like this it could best-fit to one of the two choices. For the most part it correctly identifies the /w/ and /k/, that’s more than enough to distinguish between “work” and “home.”

  • Joshua Ochs

    Given the massive pronunciation differences between Japanese speech and English, I’m not surprised in the slightest that a speech system designed for English vocal patterns and phonemes is going to fail with such an accent. Meanwhile, this video is from about a year ago – while I don’t expect Siri to fare any better today, it’s also not showing the current state of things.

    • Stooge

      Siri probably would fare better today: Japanese language input was added in March.

      • http://twitter.com/NelC NelC

        Now I want to know if Siri will understand my English-accented Japanese.

        • Antinous / Moderator

          Japanese is pretty much the easiest accent in the world to fake.

          • jhoosier

             You’d be surprised.  I teach a variety of non-native Japanese speakers, and their accents in Japanese are pretty atrocious.

          • Antinous / Moderator

            I had several Japanese roommates in the US.  Once you’ve spent five years listening to English in a thick Japanese accent, it makes it quite easy to replicate it.

          • SumAnon

            Almost 10 years studying Japanese, 3 of which were spend living and working in Japan, and I still have difficulty pronouncing ‘myo’ (as in the town, Myodani) vs ‘miyo.’ I can hear how I’m wrong, but I just can’t produce the right sounds when I’m talking quickly.

          • wreckrob8

            ? Syllabic n’s and voiceless vowels are pretty tricky for English speakers.

    • http://hgomersall.wordpress.com/ heng
  • Kenmrph

    Yes I’m sure between the 8 of us we could whip up some better voice recognition software ourselves.

    • TheOtherBen

      I’m sure that, if I was to whip-up a half-broken piece of beta software, I wouldn’t market it as the most important new feature of my new phone. Especially if I was a company that tried to sell myself as making things that “just work”.

      • http://twitter.com/NelC NelC

        “Just walk”?

        • http://daruiburns.tumblr.com/ Dlo Burns

          *PING*PING* “I’m sorry, but there is no other route except for the one under the ocean”

    • LinkMan

      Microsoft didn’t call it their “wreck a nice beach” project for nothing.

  • Daemonworks

    I still find it odd that Apple has put so much focus on a feature that is ultimately a just a gimmick for most people, especially at it’s current level of functionality, while so badly failing at something so heavily relied-upon as mapping.

    • Halloween_Jack

       Because they’re new to the cartography business. Doesn’t anyone remember tumblrs and such that were devoted to Google Maps errors, not so long ago?

      • tw1515tw

        If you use Siri to search for information, you’re less likely to need to go to Google to search for things. Over time Siri could become your Search Engine of choice, and Apple could start to charge for sponsored results and usurp Google Ads. Even if Apple doesn’t charge, they’ve still dealt a huge blow to Google by reducing Google’s traffic. The prize for getting voice activated search right is huge for both Apple and Google.

  • itsgene

    I know this was designed as an object lesson, but a “real” user would have just tapped “work” on the screen and gotten on with his life.
    Worth noting that it had no problem recognizing that he wanted to send an email, and I could barely understand that query myself.

  • Lemondrop23

    I find it interesting that anyone would see the problem as being more about Siri’s poor speech recognition rather than the guy’s poor English pronunciation. I totally agree that Siri should be sophisticated enough to pick the closest-sounding word between the two given choices… but I also can’t help thinking that the guy thoroughly squandered the six years of compulsory English lessons he (presumably) had in junior-high and high school… As an English teacher in Japan I try my darnedest to get my students out of thinking, “Oh well, katakana English is close enough”… because as this video demonstrates, sometimes it just isn’t… ;-)