ADWEEK: Tech Companies Need to Improve Their Voice Assistants to Make Them Inclusive

In 2017 I wrote a piece for Adweek arguing that voice assistants had an inclusion problem. The example I used was my own mother. She would say “Alexa, play music” and get back “Sorry, I don’t know the answer to your question.” The device was not confused by the request. It was confused by her accent.

The argument was that this is a data problem rather than a mystery, and that it was not one company’s fault. Siri, Google Home and Cortana all had it. As I put it then, the companies building these devices were “failing to use diverse enough data to train these systems to be inclusive for all users.” The models have improved a great deal since. The underlying point has not moved: whoever is missing from the training data ends up missing from the product.