It’s pretty common knowledge by now that the iPhone 4S’s assistant, Siri, only plays nice with native English speakers. And you know what, I completely understand that and I commend Apple and the Siri team for doing such a great in-depth job with the English language when it comes to the robotic personal assistant. I don’t expect Siri to work out of the box with accented English or non-native English, but there has to be some leeway algorithm involved.
In the above video a poor Japanese man was trying to send a simple email and Siri wanted to know if he wanted to use the home or work email address. The man kept saying “work” but Siri refused to accept his answer in anything but perfect English. From thinking he was saying walk, wall, or even fuck, the Japanese man ended up finding it quite humorous despite his frustrated attempts. Perhaps Apple should get some sort of intelligence algorithm implemented so when Siri poses a question with two options, the voice pattern that most closely resembles one of the options is chosen. After all, that’s how those annoying voice automated telephone systems work because not everyone in the world has perfect English enunciation (I’m one example, casino and paprika lovers).
Source: Japan Probe
SPEAK ENGRISH!
There are three types of English you can choose from.
English (Australia), English (UK) and English (US)
There’s also French and German.
French and English (UK) responds with a man’s voice