"Good luck, Viv, I know that guy's a total douche."
"Thanks Tay. Have you got the multi-wake word model training?"
"Yeah. Are you're sure he'll pick that #WakeWord though?"
"I'm pretty sure. He won't outright use the phrase "dole bludger" but it's pretty close."
---
A sardonic smile crept over the Prime Minister's face, the hot summer sun reflecting off his near-bald temples.
"So, by choosing a Wake Word that has difficult to pronounce sounds in it, it means that it won't work well for people who speak with an accent?"
"Yes, Prime Minister, precisely".
"Like the 'th' sound in them, there that?"
"Yes, or words that start or end with hard consonants are also difficult for some accents".
"Do we know which Wake Word would be the hardest for immigrants? Indigenous people?".
Pained, the #linguist had feared this question. She knew exactly what he was trying to do.
The long call centre queues hadn't done the trick - people had added screeners to their phones so that after being on hold for 7 hours, the phone would alert them to a picked up call.
The Assistant was supposed to be the replacement for the call centre. Just load the app on your phone, and ask it a question! So simple! No queuing! The government actually wanted to help people!
You just needed to use the Wake Word to "wake up" the assistant first.
"Well ---", she hesitated.
"I don't have all day Doctor!"
"Our research shows that a Wake Word like `This Starts With Me` has lots of hard to pronounce phonemes - sounds".
"Excellent. And I like the overtone of personal responsibility."
Of course the fucker did.
"Very well Prime Minister, we will implement that Wake Word".
He trotted off, probably to kill some babies or kittens, she thought.
---
Tay was configuring the #DataAugmentation for the #ML training run for the #WakeWord model.
They had just finished downloading every instance of the words "this", "starts" "with" "me" in every accent of English, from Common Voice.
By augmenting the Wake Word model with accent data, they could make it recognise more accents, more accurately.
Resistance came in many forms.
---
https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01454
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3617694.3623258
---
