Incident 102: Personal voice assistants struggle with black voices, new study shows
Description: A study found that voice recognition tools from Apple, Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft disproportionately made errors when transcribing black speakers.
Entities
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Incident ID
102
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2020-03-23
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam
Incident Reports
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Speech recognition systems have more trouble understanding black users’ voices than those of white users, according to a new Stanford study.
The researchers used voice recognition tools from Apple, Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft to tran…
Automated speech recognition (ASR) systems are now used in a variety of applications to convert spoken language to text, from virtual assistants, to closed captioning, to hands-free computing. By analyzing a large corpus of sociolinguistic …
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.
