Speech Reco for S’uthern English

CNN.com – Southern drawls don’t compute – Nov. 17, 2003

Southern drawls have thwarted voice recognition equipment used by the Shreveport Police Department to route non-emergency calls.

“In Louisiana, we have a problem with Southern drawl and what I call lazy mouth. Because of that, the system often doesn’t recognize what [callers] say,” [Capt. John Dunn] said.

Having grown up in the deep South and remembering how people speak there, I’m certainly not surprised that a speech recognition that is not tuned specifically for Southern US English accents might not work too well.

The “lazy mouth” that I remember was a combination of slurred speech, extra syllables, and the occasional omission of nouns or verbs that could be implied from the context, assuming you were a local. However, the exact nature of the accent varies significantly from Texas to Louisiana to Mississippi and across the rest of the South.