[Ragirl]

This is kind of funny....but Why can't they develop a system to recognize accents of all kinds? I'm sure that in New York city, there are plenty of accents that wouldn't be recognized either.

[Skywalk]

As a temp, I worked at this company that had just landed a contract with HUD. Our job was to listen to voice mails left by people who were requesting brochures advertised in a national campaign by HUD.

Besides people who were obviously non-native English speakers, the most INCOMPREHENSIBLE messages(and keep in mind, they only left addresses and names) were left by Southerners(of various kinds.) I never heard anyone with a Midwestern accent that I couldn't understand, provided their voice was audible.

[Non-Sequitur]

Why can't they develop a system to recognize accents of all kinds?

Because there could be dozens of different pronunciations for the same word, and the amount of storage necessary for the voice recognition systems to store all those permutations would be massive. Voice recognition systems work by converting the spoken word into patterns and then comparing those patterns with records stored in the database. They generally return as many as three possible hits and the probability of each hit being the correct one. The IVR software then proceeds based on these probabilities.

[Blood of Tyrants]

That remids me. I was 8 before I ever met anyone not from the south (Yankees from Chicago) and I literally could not understand what they were saying. You can imagine what kind of problems I had with trying to understand someone from Maine. (Did someone forget to teach them about he letter "r"?)