AI misunderstands some people’s words more than others

By Roberto Rey Agudo, Dartmouth College The idea of a humanlike artificial intelligence assistant that you can speak with has been alive in many people’s imaginations since the release of “Her,” Spike Jonze’s 2013 film about a man who falls in love with a Siri-like AI named Samantha. Over the course of the film, the protagonist grapples with the ways in which Samantha, real as she may seem, is not and never will be human. Twelve years on, this is no longer the stuff of science fiction. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT and digital assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa help people get driving directions, make grocery lists, and plenty else. But just like Samantha, automatic speech recognition systems still cannot do everything that a human listener can. You have probably had the frustrating experience of calling your bank or utility company and needing to repeat yourself so that the digital customer service bot on the other line can understand you. Maybe you’ve dictated a note on your phone, only to spend time editing garbled words. Linguistics and computer science researchers have shown that these systems work worse for some people than for others. They tend to make more...