Siri, Alexa, and Other Voice Assistants Struggle With Bilinguals
Why don’t they understand me correctly?
Ok, Let me be honest with you guys. I never use Siri on my iPhone. When I’m not home, it's easier for me to grab my phone than to deal with Siri and the possibility for her to misunderstand me.
Even if I want to ask Siri to call someone for me, there is a high chance she will not understand me — Let me explain.
I speak three languages, and I somehow use all three languages at once. Even though my iPhone is set to English, many of my phone contacts are either German or Arabic name. So even if I want to tell Siri to call someone for me, she will probably be too focused on the English pronunciation, and she will understand me wrong — she isn’t that smart. Even google on my iPhone isn't performing correctly when it comes to names, street names, and other easy functions.
Keep in mind that 60% of the world’s population speak more than one language, and we feel left behind.
I set Siri in my phone to Arabic for a previous story that I wrote about voice assistants and Arabic, ever since Siri on my iPhone speaks Arabic. Again I never use Siri, so there was no need to turn Siri back to English.
