accents
Latest
The BBC is developing its own voice assistant called 'Beeb'
Smart speakers may be getting more and more popular, but there's an issue continuing to hold them back -- voice assistants still have problems understanding accents. This is particularly true in Britain, which despite its small geographic size has a broad range of accents.
Google Assistant can now speak with an Australian or English accent
Google Assistant hasn't been traveling, but it has picked up some new accents. The voice assistant now has the ability to speak in an Australian or English accent (though Google calls it British). The feature is available across all devices including Android phones and Google Home speakers, but only for English speakers in the US for the time being.
Gmail now recognizes email addresses from non-Latin alphabets
Since the beginning of time -- or at least since email was invented -- most email services have required the use of non-accented characters from the Latin alphabet for each individual's address. It's inconvenient for those who don't natively use that alphabet, which means that more than half of the world's population have been frustrated. Here comes Google to the rescue: Gmail (and soon to be Calendar, we're told) now recognizes email addresses that have accented characters or use non-Latin alphabets, so you'll be able to send and receive correspondence to these types of addresses as much as you want, and soon Gmail will let you create non-Latin accounts to call your own.
Mac Game of the Week: Galaxy on Fire 2 HD brings iOS' best space adventure to the Mac
While some developers have recently gone towards a philosophy of making a bunch of smaller releases and dropping them on the App Store quickly, German developer Fishlabs has done the opposite. It's focused on one huge game, Galaxy on Fire 2, and spent the last year expanding and perfecting it. The app is on iOS, and it's just a brilliant game for the iPad, if you haven't seen it yet. Galaxy on Fire 2 HD is also available on the Mac, and Fishlabs' hard work is evident from the beginning. As you can see above, the graphics are phenomenal. What you'll get is open-world space exploration, combat and trading game, with a huge galaxy to explore, a large story to play through, and plenty of things to do, from full combat missions to simply flying around the galaxy and trading or exploring. This game's been polished and re-polished and then some. As an original title on the Mac App Store, it doesn't get much better than this. The one issue I have is in the voice acting. Some of it can be a little wooden, and because the developer is European, the accents are a little strange. But that's just a small caveat. If you haven't played this one yet, and especially if you have a big bright MacBook or a new iMac to play it on, definitely pick up Galaxy on Fire 2 HD. It's on the Mac App Store for $9.99.
Google's Voice Search on Android adds support for 13 additional languages
Even though it's also on iOS now, Android is still the first love for Google's Voice Search and the company announced today it's adding support for an additional 13 languages on the platform, bringing the total to 42 languages and accents understood in 46 countries. The list includes Basque, Bulgarian. Catalan, European Portuguese, Finnish, Galician, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak and Swedish. Just like it has since at least 2010 when Voice Actions were introduced it will require Android 2.2 or higher, and is easily accessible either from the search box on your home screen or in the Voice Search app. We should note that it still only understands one language at a time and you may need to change some settings, also the new languages weren't showing up yet on every device we tried -- just some of them. Hit the source link for a few more details on how machine learning was used to extrapolate the pronunciation of all Swedish words based on thousands of samples from native speakers, or just grab a nearby phone or tablet and have Pau Gasol speak some Catalan to it -- although obviously Salvador Dali would be preferred, were he available.
Storyboard: Talk this way
One of the great problems presented to roleplayers is the challenge of presenting audio via text. We don't think about it all the time because most of the time it's easy to construct the sound of something from context. Sure, simply saying that your character sighs could mean any number of things, but contextually it's usually obvious whether it's meant as a gesture of exasperation or a sign of relaxed contentment. "Yes, I'm sure your new weapon will make a huge difference in the war" could be sarcastic or serious, but there are generally enough clues in the situation to make the difference obvious. But there's one obvious case in which that breaks down, and that's in the matter of accents. After all, people from two different regions shouldn't quite sound the same... but there's also no effective way to communicate how one voice or another sounds different. And the most common solution is essentially a matter of making your character's words borderline unreadable in the hopes that you convey a sliver of your intention.
Dwarves don' speak wi' Scottish accents, ya wee man!
There are some things in WoW that are blindingly obvious, and yet you never realize them until someone points them out. Apolos of Norgannon brings up one of these topics when he asks the WoW General Forums, "Why do dwarves have Scottish accents?" I had never actually noticed that before, although I'd realized that the trolls (Jamaican) and the draenei (Russian) both have accents that are analogous to nationalities on Earth. Drysc said that since there's no such place as Scotland in Azeroth, the dwarven accent is clearly Dwarven and not Scottish, which seems to be circular reasoning to me. Other people point out that the dwarves live in Loch Modan and have a Nessy swimming around, and postulate that since fantasy dwarves usually have Scottish trappings for some reason, this has carried over to WoW. Aside from trolls, dwarves and draenei, the rest of the races of Azeroth don't seem to have clear accents. The gnomes sound bright and enterprising, the blood elves sound like they would have laughed at you for playing video games in high school, and most of the Horde sounds like they smoked two packs a day ever since arriving in Kalimdor. Unfortunately, no one seems to have a New York accent, which seems like it would be an awesome thing for, say, the undead. Why do dwarves have Scottish accents? Can you place the voices of any of the other races of Azeroth, or are they just generic fantasy voices?
