In a recent interview with WBIR, English assistant professor Jessi Grieser finds that your accent may be the reason your phone doesn’t understand you. Grieser, who focuses on sociolinguistics, says that we speak in fluid sounds that all kind of run together.
“Feel and fill sometimes sound the same in this area. Some people will pronounce oil and uhl. And the last thing that this is testing is it’s trying to remove a lot of the context that the computer might rely on,” she said.
Grieser also conducted a practical test with randomly selected students at UT. Read more about her findings and the rest of the interview online.