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.

Tools

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Alleged: Microsoft , IBM , Google , Apple and Amazon developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Black people.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
102
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2020-03-23
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam
Personal voice assistants struggle with black voices, new study shows
theverge.com · 2020

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…

Racial disparities in automated speech recognition
pnas.org · 2020

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

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