One is not amused
The Nintendo DS game, Brain Training, received the Nicki Campbell ‘Watchdog’ treatment on Monday evening following a complaint from a viewer upset that the voice recognition system on the hand-held doesn’t recognise her strong local accent.“Basically you have to say the different colours that flash up on the screen as quickly as possible. I'm saying, blue, blue, blue and it's saying no, even though it was blue. Then it got to yellow. I'm going, 'yeller' and everyone's saying to me you need to be a bit posher. You need to say, 'yellow' and as soon as I did, it picked it up," she told the show.
Michelle went on to explain that she had numerous colleagues who had the same problem, as well as their children. Children like Laura Dickenson, who said, "You get annoyed so you just start shouting at it, but it doesn't make it any better."
In typical Watchdog style, Nintendo were on hand to offer an explanation to the problem.
Nintendo says it has been carefully and continuously monitoring the voice recognition efficiency in its software since the launch in June 2006 of "Dr Kawashima's Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain?" Over 2.5 million copies of the Brain Training series of games have been sold in the UK and the company's customer services department has received only a very small number of calls from people with regional accents who have indicated that they've been affected when using this function. Of course, Nintendo understands the frustration experienced and would like to apologise for this.
Extensive research and time has been dedicated by Nintendo's developers on software that supports the voice recognition functions of the Nintendo DS to ensure that it can recognise a range of different regional accents and dialects. Based on the feedback the company has already received it continues to make every effort to further enhance and improve its voice recognition functionality.
Use the Queen's English only folks.
Watchdog via CVG
