Want a Job, Mate? Amazon Is Hiring Aussie Speakers<br />Simon Musgrave said that If people like Google, Apple and Amazon are putting money into this stuff, localization needs to be a part of it,<br />Though the job posting didn’t get into such specifics, it’s very likely to involve research for Amazon’s voice-recognition device, the Amazon Echo, which helps users check the weather, stream music<br />and plan to-do lists through a personal assistant named Alexa.<br />Australian English also has a lot of diphones and triphones — "multiple vowels within<br />the same space," said Howard Manns, a lecturer in linguistics at Monash University.<br />Linguists annotate recordings of people speaking, down to the pauses in their voices, which are then fed into an algorithm<br />that connects the audio with the meaning, said Phil Hall, the senior vice president of Appen’s language resources.<br />In May, Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google, announced<br />that the company’s voice-recognition software had a word error rate of less than 5 percent, an improvement on the 23 percent error rate it had in 2013.
