UPDATED 23:27 EDT / AUGUST 26 2019

AI

BBC to launch ‘Beeb,’ its own voice assistant

The BBC is planning to introduce its own voice assistant to rival Amazon.com’s Alexa, according to report Monday in the Guardian.

This will be a voice with a difference, though, since it’s being trained to understand British accents. For some time now, various British comedy TV shows have featured sketches in which artificial intelligent voice assistants fail to understand a British accent. It’s well-known that AI does sometimes struggle with certain accents spoken by British people or other countries.

The BBC hopes that the assistant, which will be called “Beeb,” will end that at least in the U.K. At the moment the media company is training its new AI to listen to regional accents from its offices all over the U.K. Released next year and created by the BBC’s own team, Beeb will help people find various services on the BBC and find the programs they want to watch.

The wakeup command will. of course, be “Beeb.”

The Guardian reported that Beeb won’t be launched as a standalone device such as the Amazon Echo, but will be built into BBC’s website and iPlayer app. It will also be available for manufacturers who sign up to have the Beeb software in their products.

“With an assistant of its own, the BBC will have the freedom to experiment with new programs, features and experiences without someone else’s permission to build it in a certain way,” a BBC spokesperson told The Guardian. “It will also allow the BBC to be much more ambitious in the content and features that listeners can enjoy.”

It’s also said that because this is being created by a small in-house team, it’s likely it will have fewer features than voice assistants created by large tech companies. Still, it will help BBC fans to interact with content and will at least understand them if they have a strong Glaswegian, Yorkshire or other regional accent.

Last year reports surfaced that Alexa did indeed have a poor understanding of accents that weren’t American. Researchers found that when the accent was non-American, Alexa was 30% less likely to understand the command. This study was undertaken inside the U.S., where many English speakers have a non-American accent. Amazon admitted that more needs to be done, especially to reach markets outside the U.S.

Photo: Chris Mayhew/Flickr

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