Scottish grandmother gets X-rated message after AI accent blunder

Yahoo

07-03-2025

A SCOTTISH grandmother was shocked after she received an AI voicemail from a garage which referenced sex and called her "a piece of s***".
Louise Littlejohn, 66, from Dunfermline received a message on Wednesday which had been left from a Lookers Land Rover garage in Motherwell inviting her to an event.
However, the message which had used Apple's AI service to turn speech-to-text asked if she had been "able to have sex" before calling her a "piece of ****".
Littlejohn told BBC News: "Initially I was shocked - astonished - but then I thought that is so funny. The text was obviously quite inappropriate.
"The garage is trying to sell cars, and instead of that they are leaving insulting messages without even being aware of it. It is not their fault at all."
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Littlejohn said she had thought the call was a scam, before recognising the number was from the Motherwell area where she had bought a car years ago.
An expert has told the BBC the AI system may have struggled because of the caller's Scottish accent, but background noise was also likely to contribute to the technological fail.
It is understood the transcription had mistaken "sixth" for "sex".
Apple and the garage declined to comment.
Peter Bell, a professor of speech technology at the University of Edinburgh, listened to the message left for Littlejohn and suggested it was at the "challenging end for speech-to-text engines to deal with".
He believes the fact it is over the telephone, background noise in the call perhaps a prepared script rather than speaking in a natural way lead to the failure.
"All of those factors contribute to the system doing badly, " he added. "The bigger question is why it outputs that kind of content.
"If you are producing a speech-to-text system that is being used by the public, you would think you would have safeguards for that kind of thing."