Think you know the ins and outs of Australian English? Amazon is hiring.
"Amazon is seeking a linguist with an Australian background to join our data team," reads a job description on its website. The job will involve transcribing, as well as annotating speech and language data, and it is one of several openings for linguists, including those familiar with Canadian French, American English and Canadian English. All the jobs are based in Boston.
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Bloomberg Technology's Mark Gurman asks if we really need another voice-activated device in our lives.
Though the job posting didn't get into such specifics, it's likely to involve research for Amazon's voice recognition device, the Amazon Echo, which helps users check the weather, stream music, shop and plan to-do lists through a personal assistant named Alexa.
The inability of American software to recognise other accents is a well-documented frustration, and the effort by the Seattle-based Amazon to hire more linguists with backgrounds outside American English may point to an acknowledgment that it needs to train its assistant before launching in other territories.
"If people like Google, Apple and Amazon are putting money into this stuff, localisation needs to be a part of it," said Simon Musgrave, a lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne.
Current voice recognition software, he explained, draws from a training database of sounds and uses statistical modelling to match audio with the understanding of vowels, consonants and words.
"They're going to need a body of recordings from Australians with good annotations" that connect audio to meaning, he said.
The Australian accent, for example, is distinct from American English in that it is non-rhotic — the "r" sound is not pronounced. Australian English also has a lot of diphones and triphones, "multiple vowels within the same space," said Howard Manns, a lecturer in linguistics at Monash.
"And that might be difficult for a computer or voice recognition to make sense of," Manns said.
The software is getting better. In May, Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google, announced that the company's voice recognition software had a word error rate of less than 5 per cent, an improvement on the 23 per cent error rate it had in 2013.
Google's own voice-activated home assistant, called home, launched in Australia last week with an Australian-English-speaking version of its Google Assistant, which uses and understands the local accent and slang.
Amazon's presence in Australia is still in its infancy, with the company running its Web Services and Kindle businesses down under, and employing almost 1000 people in the country. The company is currently working on bringing a retail offering to Australia.
"We are excited to bring thousands of new jobs to Australia, millions of dollars in additional investment, and to empower small Australian businesses through Amazon Marketplace", the company said in a recent statement to Fairfax Media.
"We are optimistic that by focusing on the things we believe customers value most – low prices, vast selection, and fast delivery – over time we'll earn the business of Australian customers".
There has so far been no official confirmation that the Amazon Echo is to be made available in Australia.
As for the job listing, it is an attractive prospect for any linguist wanting to work on a cutting-edge project.
"'I'm going to apply for that job right now," Manns joked.
New York Times, with Fairfax Media
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