Irish Alexa made its commercial debut in November, after nine months of training in comprehending an Irish accent and then speaking it.
Harder still was trying to get the technology to learn a new accent largely on its own, from a different-sounding speech model. That’s what Cotescu’s team tried in building Irish Alexa. They relied heavily on an existing speech model of primarily British-English accents — with a far smaller range of American, Canadian and Australian accents — to train it to speak Irish English.
The speech models that power Alexa’s verbal skills have been growing more advanced in recent years. In 2020, Amazon researchers taught Alexa to speak fluent Spanish from an English language-speaking model. Letters and syllables occasionally dropped out of the response. S’s sometimes stuck together. A word or two, sometimes crucial ones, were inexplicably mumbled and incomprehensible. At least in one case, Alexa’s female voice dropped a few octaves, sounding more masculine. Worse, the masculine voice sounded distinctly British, the kind of goof that might raise eyebrows in some Irish homes.