[jturpin]

There's a difference between an accent and pronouncing words wrong. I would expect an English speech recognition system to handle the various accents there are in the world (the US has several accents of course), but it shouldn't handle incorrect pronunciation of syllables if it comes at the expense of recognizing clean data. If it doesn't come at its expense then I guess it's fine.

[jpetso]

Unfortunately, there's always a trade-off. You want both quality data for your use case, but you also want lots of data so it generalizes well. Those are conflicting goals.

Fortunately, splitting models into separate accent-specialized variants and helping them out with language model training will often help in case the model doesn't cope well enough with the cognitive dissonance.