Dear YouTube, Please Recognise New Zealand.

In March of this year, Google released a service known as "Auto-Captioning" to all its users, simply stated it works by transcribing audio from videos  into captions. You can read our previous article relating to this launch here. For the deaf or the hearing impaired this has meant an increased opportunity to watch videos, which have not been captioned by the person who uploaded them. And it is only available for English videos - although it can also be further translated into 50 different languages at users risk (if you have used translators of any type, you probably have had experiences of how certain things can not be directly translated between languages).However, in a New Zealand Herald article the auto-caption service has recently come under fire following the Prime Minister's monthly video newsletter which had been incorrectly subtitled for most of the audio - after personally watching it, we found it was significantly different to the point of being incomprehensible. This sparked our need to compare it to other videos within the YouTube Channel for the National Party (NZNats) and found that it wasn't much improvement between MP's. So we wondered: is it the New Zealand accent that maybe the Google service couldn't recognise ? After all when you clicked the "closed caption" button for the captions you do get this warning message.

To ensure we were impartial, we searched around YouTube to compare videos of speeches from US President Barack Obama to former President George W. Bush who both have different accents - and found that the service was able to correctly detect what they were saying. A few weeks ago when Julia Gillard, leader of the Labour Party was appointed to Prime Minister of Australia, there was talk about how interviews featuring her may have to be subtitled if played overseas due to her thick accent - despite that, Google's service was still able to detect what she was saying.

So that made us wonder: If Australian accents could be effectively detected by Google's service why not the New Zealand accent? After a few views of various videos on the NZNats channel, we finally deduced it to two factors: speed and annunciation. As a country we have been previously criticised by the way, we talk - this has really highlighted by this latest news, something maybe we never realised before. If our country's representatives can't be understood for the way they talk, what does that mean for us as a country? Just to be sure, we also compared to videos of Helen Clark, former New Zealand Prime Minister now Administrator of UN Development - and the service made no errors.

So what do you think? Should we blame Google? Or blame ourselves?

Let us know.