Whole Wheat Monsters: Cultural Biases in Dictation Software
While using my Android phone to dictate a comment to a Facebook post about Passover, I said “whole wheat matza.” The phone rendered it as “whole wheat monsters.”
I thought that was hilarious until I tried it a second time and got “whole wheat matcha.” Then I was reminded of the many times that I have tried to use an expression rooted in the Jewish tradition and gotten extreme weirdness. Challah, the bread eaten on the Sabbath, became Holla or Color when I tried just now. I’ve gotten others in the past. Todah rabah (thank you in Hebrew) showed up today as tada rava and sometimes as something even stranger, while mazel tov (literally, good luck, but usually translated as congratulations) usually turns into muscle tough.
But I also note that the same problem exists using phrases from other languages. If I say something in Spanish, for example, I usually have to retype it. Given how much Google knows about AI, I would expect that after more than a decade of Android use, it would anticipate some of my words correctly.
I wonder if any Jews or Latines work on the programming team—and how Google might correct for cultural bias in its dictation software..
