“The Crisis of Credit Visualized.” The presentation was created by Jonathan Jarvis, a designer and graduate student from Los Angles which I saw on Garr Reynold’s blog, Presentation Zen
from on .
Can GOOG-411/US conquer foreign accents?
Imagine an Indian, Frenchman or Chinese looking to call a local US business number using GOOG-411. Needless to say, it can become a very frustrating.
If we think of a Chinese English speaker, who often doesn’t pronounce the consonants in the word or the endings, trying to get the number of, say, Whole Foods in Palo Alto, he/she would have a problem.
Palo Alto could sound like ‘Pao Au(t)o’ and Whole Foods would be ‘Ho Foo, Holl Fooooo’, or some variation and when I tried it this way, the voice on the phone told me to “go back” and basically try again, every time.
GOOG-411 is a service from Google that lets you get business phone numbers through any phone – for free. However, with a few exceptions, it is the information service (which is probably free because it is training the application in understanding many different voices), which is geared toward people who speak US English.
As we all know not all English speakers sound the same. I think that Google still has a long way to go until they can fit their model to the way our multi-cultural group of people in Silicon Valley and around the globe speak English. Or maybe Google will develop a variation of its service according to the country and accent of the people it is trying to reach?
It did launch a service in Canada where: “according to Google engineers, the service has been tweaked to offer “Canadian English.” “We incorporated some ‘Canadianisms’ such as ‘eh,’ ‘Traw-na,’ ‘Cal-gry,’ and, of course, ‘aboot,’” a blog post said.
Apparently Google and Microsoft are spending millions to attract users whose native language is other than English, so Indian English is probably one of their targets.
Mr. Ram Prakash said in the NY Times that “ Western technology companies have misunderstood the linguistic landscape of India, where English is spoken proficiently by only about a tenth of the population and even many college-educated Indians prefer the contours of their native tongues for everyday speech.”
GOOG-411 will either have to test its service for many years to come capture all the voice, language and dialect variations or limit GOOG-411 to the mainly English-speaking people who sound American. In the meantime, we can all have fun with business names it does offer us when we don’t have the right US intonation – even the British are not exempt (see web site for examples). Your own examples?
I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Soujanya Bhumkar, CEO and Co-founder of the coolest browser add-on around – CoolIris!
On February 25, 2009, at the law offices of Cooley Godward in Palo Alto, he and other inspiring entrepreneurs will tell us about their start ups and what it takes to make them successful. Stay tuned for more details.
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Image via Wikipedia
The recent election was remarkable and historic and one that will be remembered for many years to come; not only because of the incredible turn-out of young people, with 23 million young Americans under the age of 30 voting, a turn-out this country hasn’t seen since the 70s, but also because it was an election that was felt around the world.
On the night of the election results, people could be seen dancing, crying, and celebrating all over the world, from the homeland of Obama’s father, Kenya, to countries that had zero obvious connections whatsoever to the election.
No connection except for the fact that Obama in office means better foreign relations, better foreign diplomacy and more intelligent and informed decisions. At home, many Americans were proud to be called Americans again, Facebook status messages erupted with relief and jubilation, and newscasters predicted a surge in patriotism.
And it was an election to which the whole world reacted and rejoiced. French President Sarkozy wrote that the election outcome “resonates well beyond your borders.” Former German ambassador to the US, Wolfgang Ischinger, declared that, “a new face offers Europe a new chance to remarry America.” Peru’s prime minister, Yehude Simon, emphasized that the Obama win was a win for many, stating, “Peru wins with the change; it’s a change that we all expected. God help us.” “Even Iraqi President Jalal Talabani publicly congratulated Obama on his win and stated that he looked “forward to the relations between our two countries under your mandate, and further consolidation and development in all fields.”
Maybe this will mean that fewer American travelers will feel they have to have the Canadian flag sewn on to their backpacks for fear of being identified as American and therefore “under-appreciated”.
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