Japanese Game Show Voice Recognition Challenge

A Japanese game show/comedy challenges a group of six women to pronounce American English words well enough for a voice recognition system to understand. The system does not understand, but takes its best guess anyway. For example, when a contestant tries to pronounce "rhythm," the device hears "Pizza Hut."

The skit is funny, but it also highlight the difference in phonemes used in the two languages. Hirata, the contestant in the short skirt, is a ringer who speaks both languages fluently. The rest did well enough in their English classes to be understood in context, but only by a real person. The championship round is stupid, asking contestants to guess the other's top insecurity. The game was stopped as they heaped more insecurity on each other. (via Digg)