Is speech recognition technology prejudiced?!

We all know that Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and IBM’s speech recognition technologies are being used in immigration rulings, job hiring decisions, and court reporting; but how far are they reliable? According to the observations made in Stanford study, all 5 systems are prone to errors even when the speakers were of the same gender and age, and saying accurate words!

It is unknown if the same IoT technology is used in Alexa and Siri, as none of the firms reveal this information. Just in case if they are, then this will be the most low-grade service offered to huge number of users.

The research scrutinized every company’s technology with over 2,000 speech samples from recorded interviews with African Americans and White Americans. Shockingly, the systems misinterpreted 35% of the words spoken by African Americans and 19% of those by White Americans.

Sharad Goel, a Stanford professor of computational engineering said: “We can’t count on companies to regulate themselves.” “That’s not what they’re set up to do. I can imagine that some might voluntarily commit to independent audits if there’s enough public pressure. But it may also be necessary for government agencies to impose more oversight. People have a right to know how well the technology that affects their lives really works.”