Don’t worry, Alexa and Google Home won’t take away your regional accent

Hey, Google. Can you understand my accent? Of course. You have an incredibly pleasing dialect. So began my Saturday morning discussion with my Google Home Mini. And while I was happy to receive a compliment about my speech, that wasn’t my motivation for asking the question. Our human-to-robot chat was triggered by recent news reports claiming that voice assistants are likely to “stamp out”, “kill off” and make us “lose” our regional accents, described by some as “under threat”. Another apocalyptic story about language and another call for linguists to do some myth-busting, then. These scaremongering headlines relate to the…

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https://ift.tt/2wupdJb The Conversation August 29, 2018 at 05:59AM