The staff contended with numerous linguistic challenges of Irish English. The Irish are inclined to drop the “h” in “th,” for instance, saying the letters as a tough “t” or a “d,” making “bath” sound like “bat,” and even “bad.” Irish English can be rhotic, which means the “r” is overpronounced. That means the “r” in “party” will likely be extra distinct than what you may hear out of a Londoner’s mouth. Alexa needed to study these speech options and grasp them.

Irish English, mentioned Mr. Cotescu, who’s Romanian and was the lead researcher on the Irish Alexa staff, “is a hard one.”

The speech fashions that energy Alexa’s verbal expertise have been rising extra superior lately. In 2020, Amazon researchers taught Alexa to speak fluent Spanish from an English language-speaking mannequin.

Mr. Cotescu and the staff noticed accents as the following frontier of Alexa’s speech capabilities. They designed Irish Alexa to rely extra on A.I. than on actors to construct up its speech mannequin. As a outcome, Irish Alexa was skilled on a comparatively small corpus — about 24 hours of recordings by voice actors who recited 2,000 utterances in Irish-accented English.

At the outset, when Amazon’s researchers fed the Irish recordings to the still-learning Irish Alexa, some bizarre issues occurred.

Letters and syllables sometimes dropped out of the response. “S’s” generally caught collectively. A phrase or two, generally essential ones, have been inexplicably mumbled and incomprehensible. At least in a single case, Alexa’s feminine voice dropped a couple of octaves, sounding extra masculine. Worse, the masculine voice sounded distinctly British, the sort of goof that may increase eyebrows in some Irish houses.

“They are big black boxes,” Mr. Tinchev, a Bulgarian nationwide who’s Amazon’s lead scientist on the challenge, mentioned of the speech fashions. “You have to have a lot of experimentation to tune them.”