Want a Job, Mate? Amazon Is Hiring Aussie Speakers
Simon Musgrave said that If people like Google, Apple and Amazon are putting money into this stuff, localization needs to be a part of it,
Though the job posting didn’t get into such specifics, it’s very likely to involve research for Amazon’s voice-recognition device, the Amazon Echo, which helps users check the weather, stream music
and plan to-do lists through a personal assistant named Alexa.
Australian English also has a lot of diphones and triphones — "multiple vowels within
the same space," said Howard Manns, a lecturer in linguistics at Monash University.
Linguists annotate recordings of people speaking, down to the pauses in their voices, which are then fed into an algorithm
that connects the audio with the meaning, said Phil Hall, the senior vice president of Appen’s language resources.
In May, Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google, announced
that the company’s voice-recognition software had a word error rate of less than 5 percent, an improvement on the 23 percent error rate it had in 2013.