Voice Assistants Have a Plurilingualism Problem
Amanda Kann · 2022
Intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) using speech interfaces have historically been limited to monolingual use in pre-selected languages. Although recent developments in some IPAs have allowed for increased multilingual flexibility, the plurilingual competence – ability to utilise more than one language in the frame of a single interaction – of state-of-the-art IPAs still falls short. This is demonstrated in a pilot study, where two widely used IPAs are shown to consistently fail in plurilingual interactions across 3 core tasks.