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jbg_ | 8 years ago

OT but what do you mean by "English speaker with no accent"? Clearly every person has an accent, and every system that understands language must be able to understand the various accents that people have.

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atonse|8 years ago

In the US, people say "no accent" to mean what the rest of the world calls an American Accent (even though American Accents change with region, just like any country). It's a very US-centric way of looking at things, but means no harm.

I've lived here in the US for 25 years and I notice the phrase every single time. :-)

jd20|8 years ago

Right, you caught me :) what I really meant to say is American English speaker with no strong regional markers (i.e. Southern, New York). Maybe slightly Midwest, but I haven't been back in decades so it's pretty weak.

More importantly, I was distinguishing because while Siri should be able to to understand various accents, it's struggled with that. When it launched, there were only two English variants (US and UK), so if you were a native Indian or Australian English speaker (for example) your experience would suffer. Now, Siri has support for 9 different English variants so they've clearly come a long way, but I remember it wasn't always the case.

SamBam|8 years ago

You know. They mean "an accent like everyone else had where I grew up."

Obviously that's "no accent."