A top Google boss yesterday revealed he had “no update” on his company’s initiative to get speech recognition technologies to understand Scottish accents.
UK vice president of communications Peter Barron, who comes from Northern Ireland, said that he used to struggle with getting voice recognition technology to understand his accent.
And when asked whether he knew if Google was making any progress in developing technology to understand Scots, he said: “We don’t have an update.
“Regional accents are difficult. I used to find it difficult to be understood, but the technology has come on so much.
“We have made leaps and bounds with greater recognition advances.”
Last month, Google announced that they were recruiting people to record phrases such as “Indy now” or “Google, what’s the time”.
Children were to be paid £30 and adults £27 for the three-hour commitment, according to the advert.
When asked, Mr Barron said that he didn’t know about any further updates to the initiative.
Scottish minister for Economy, Jobs and Keith Brown also said that he struggled with getting voice recognition technologies to understand his accent.
He said: “I think it’s not just Google but it is good that they are trying to sort the problem.
“It’s never the customer that’s wrong, the problem’s at the source.
“It happens to me all the time. I was on the phone to another big company recently and they didn’t understand what I was saying.
“It was one of those ones that you had to say which department you wanted.”
The pair were attending the launch of a ‘digital garage’ in Glasgow’s Mitchell Library.
The scheme will provide drop-in sessions for small businesses who are hoping to improve their online presence.
The pop-up space will stay in the historic library until early 2017.
Similar garages have opened in other UK cities such as Leeds, Newcastle and Birmingham.
They aim to train 250,000 people by the end of 2016.
