[kuschku]

> and then the device blurts out some description from Google without using an inside voice.

It would sound like an American tourist by doing that.

(There’s lots of articles from US expats in europe, or european expats in the EU, showing how US-Americans tend to speak a lot louder than Europeans in quiet settings, from museums to restaurants)

This leads to an interesting question: Which culture should a voice assistant follow? Should there be multiple variants of each assistant?

[acobster]

Detecting and adapting to volume isn't that big of a challenge in comparison to natural language processing. But if you mean something more subtle, like discretion or taboo...that's probably much harder than NLP.

[kuschku]

Yes, and also adapting to mental concepts of different things.

That starts with phrases, but also applies to other concepts – different cultures have different orientation systems even (some use cardinal directions (north, east, south, west), some use relative directions (front, right, back, left), etc)

[schoen]

I've only heard of one example of the cardinal directions being used as a main orientation reference in day-to-day language: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html...

I never read the research about this but examples are http://anthroweb.ucsd.edu/~jhaviland/Publications/ETHOSw.Dia... and http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:66622:3/compon... (very interesting stuff!).

Edit: I would highly recommend reading the 2nd paper (which includes some practical experiments testing how Guugu Yithimirr speakers thought about and remembered spatial positions and orientations). It's astonishing.

[kuschku]

The thing is, it doesn’t stop there.

Even colors depend on cultures heavily. The ancient greek are believed not to have seperated between yellow and green, other cultures similar.

Internationalization is a lot harder than it seems to most people. And then there’s also accessibility.

Even with traditional UIs where everything is hand made it’s already an extremely huge task, but a conversational UI is far more personal.

It has to deal with things like how much privacy or directness is expected in cultures, with taboos, it has to have a full perceptional model of the person who will hear it to be able to properly handle all this.