Like Henry Higgins, the phonetician from George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion,” Marius Cotescu and Georgi Tinchev recently demonstrated how their student was trying to overcome pronunciation difficulties.The two data scientists, who work for Amazon in Europe, were teaching Alexa, the company’s digital assistant. Their task: to help Alexa master an Irish-accented English with the aid of artificial intelligence and recordings from native speakers.During the demonstration, Alexa spoke about a memorable night out. “The party last night was great craic,” Alexa said with a lilt, using the Irish word for fun. “We got ice cream on the way home, and we were happy out.”Mr. Tinchev shook his head. Alexa had dropped the “r” in “party,” making the word sound flat, like pah-tee. Too British, he concluded.The technologists are part of a team at Amazon working on a challenging area of data science known as voice disentanglement. It’s a tricky issue that has gained new relevance amid a wave of A.I. dev …
