SINGAPORE – Singapore’s SingTel has developed an application to rival the voice-activated Siri on the iPhone 4S that can understand the republic’s widely spoken Singlish – a localised version of the English language which include words like leh, la, how huh etc.
This is probably a response by Singapore telco Singtel to ensure that customers get the best experience from their brand new iPhone 4S as there are many youtube videos that shows Siri either responding with a completely irrelevant answer or simply saying it does not understand when the phone was first launched in Japan.
Singapore Telecom (SingTel) says its new app, DeF!ND, will help Singaporeans who use “Singlish” to decipher uniquely Singaporean accents, names and locations.
It made its public debut at the stroke of midnight Thursday, when SingTel Singapore chief executive Allen Lew gave it an instruction in a decidedly local accent as he launched the iPhone 4S in the city-state.
“We have a voice application capability in DeF!ND that is unique because it understands the local language… which the voice recognition engine within an international device like Apple doesn’t quite have,” Lew said after the launch.
“When we tried to test different voice recognition systems including… Siri, we found that the Singaporean accent is pretty unique and the common international voice recognition systems don’t quite pick up the nuance of how we speak,” Lew added.
“And of course our street names and our food names are very local so we developed and trained this new system to allow it to recognise it better.”
DeF!ND will be available for free on the Android platform and Apple’s iTunes “soon,” a Singtel spokesman told AFP.