I will remove the incorrect statement about TV and radio pronunciation, [NOW DONE} but if anyone knows of any respectable study of the choice of accent built into digital assistants I would be very glad to hear of it. I imagine the choice of voices for car SatNav systems would be a similar case.
In Wikipedia's article on Received Pronunciation (a topic in which I keep finding things to grumble about) there is a section called Usage. It ends with a sentence that is pretty dubious but which raises an interesting question. The sentence reads "Most British voices in apps like Siri and Google Assistant speak RP, and most TV and radio stations across the UK use this accent." The second part of the sentence is clearly nonsense - across TV and radio broadcasting as a whole, the amount of speaking with an RP accent is extremely small. The first part of the sentence is given with no supporting citation, something which normally isn't approved of in Wikipedia.
I will remove the incorrect statement about TV and radio pronunciation, [NOW DONE} but if anyone knows of any respectable study of the choice of accent built into digital assistants I would be very glad to hear of it. I imagine the choice of voices for car SatNav systems would be a similar case.
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A blog that discusses problems in Wikipedia's coverage of Phonetics
Emeritus Professor of Phonetics, uArchives
January 2021
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