Title: Inside Amazon’s Painstaking Pursuit to Teach Alexa French
Context: If localization were easy, everyone would be doing it.
Synopsis: As shocking as it may sound to us Americans, not everyone in the world speaks English. It’s true. There are loads of other languages out there in the world that people use every day to communicate with each other, and — apparently — they might like to be able to use their native tongue to interact with voice-activated agents such as Amazon’s Alexa. OK, should be a pretty straightforward problem to solve. All you have to do is upload a bunch of English to French dictionaries, feed the data into some super complex AWS machine learning thingamabob, and voilà, Alexa can now speak and understand French. Except, no. Apparently localizing speech is a lot harder than that. There’s idiomatic expressions, non-transferrable colloquialisms, regional dialects, unique cultural cues, and grammatical idiosyncrasies, all of which have to be parsed, programmed, and appraised. Oh well, as we say in America: c’est la vie.
Best Bit: “In France, Alexa always uses formal address; it’s there to help people, not befriend them, and better not to risk offending customers.”
via wired.com
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