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:
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!]
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