A report by Uswitch has revealed which UK accents Alexa struggles to understand the most.
Uswitch researchers explored 30 different accents from across the UK. Participants were instructed to ask their smart speaker 10 questions and they recorded how many times the speaker failed to correctly transcribe the question.
They also looked at the number of searches for ‘Why doesn’t my smart speaker understand me?’. The full league table is at the bottom of this article.
Which accents were the easiest and hardest?
You won’t be surprised to hear that London was the easiest, only mishearing 2 questions incorrectly on average and with around 200 searches per month for ‘why doesn’t my smart speaker understand me?’. Lincoln, Chester, Derby and Cambridge made up the rest of the top 5, indicating a clear bias towards English accents over other parts of the UK.
Meanwhile, Cardiff takes the spot for hardest accent to understand, with an average of 7 incorrect transcriptions and a whopping 1550 searches per month for issues with their smart speaker not understanding their accent.
Glasgow, Liverpool and Birmingham were hot on the heels of Cardiff, both scoring highly on the index created by Uswitch.
Full table of results
Here is the full list of cities hardest to understand to easiest.
| # | UK City | Error Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cardiff | 82 |
| 2 | Glasgow | 77 |
| 3 | Liverpool | 70 |
| 4 | Birmingham | 65 |
| 5 | Belfast | 84 |
| 6 | Edinburgh | 80 |
| 7 | Leicester | 60 |
| 8 | Wolverhampton | 58 |
| 9 | Newcastle | 57 |
| 10 | Brighton | 56 |
| 11 | Dublin | 55 |
| 12 | York | 48 |
| 13 | Leeds | 46 |
| 14 | Bristol | 42 |
| 15 | Manchester | 41 |
| 16 | Norwich | 39 |
| 17 | Portsmouth | 33 |
| 18 | Sheffield | 32 |
| 19 | Glastonbury | 29 |
| 20 | Reading | 29 |
| 21 | Blackpool | 28 |
| 22 | Exeter | 27 |
| 23 | Bath | 27 |
| 24 | Nottingham | 25 |
| 25 | Bradford | 25 |
| 26 | Cambridge | 21 |
| 27 | Derby | 21 |
| 28 | Chester | 16 |
| 29 | Lincoln | 15 |
| 30 | London | 11 |
Featured image credit: Canva pro
