I lived in Japan for a while. My name contains sounds that just didn't work for them. No one pronounced it correctly.
I was not upset, annoyed, or confused. It's just the way language acquisition works. You learn the sounds you need and the rest are hard to acquire later in life.
Be strict in what you send, forgiving in what you receive.
> It's just the way language acquisition works. You learn the sounds you need and the rest are hard to acquire later in life.
As a point of interest, this is actually backwards. You're born recognizing all the sounds; what you learn is to ignore the difference between sounds that aren't distinct in your language.
You do keep that ability for the rest of your life, but it isn't helpful when you try to learn to recognize foreign sounds.
But that's exactly the issue here when people use the correct pronunciation, which happens to be different than how normal words in their language are pronounced, but the voice assistant assuming normal language, which leads to absurd misfirings. The issue is not people not knowing how to pronounce something, the problem is that it's a hard problem for "dumb" AIs to know how a certain name is pronounced, as long as they are not multimodal LLMs.
I was not upset, annoyed, or confused. It's just the way language acquisition works. You learn the sounds you need and the rest are hard to acquire later in life.
Be strict in what you send, forgiving in what you receive.