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I'll give you my experience. Manager asked me if we could use the Watson Speech-to-text API a couple of years ago, because he was impressed with the ads he'd seen. I worked for a week. Turns out the "dialect" of spanish that is spoken in Argentina (and this was tested against porteños, not even the accents from the provinces!) is utterly unsupported. Even when speaking slowly, it'd throw a random set of words with even more random looking probabilities.

Manager was expecting that after a week we'd have something akin to Googles "hello google!" at hand, through Watson. It took a couple of coworkers to come up with even more impressive broken examples to finally convince him that the technology was bad.



An interesting example of negative-sum advertising. Everyone involved lost money.

I wonder how often that happens.


I hadn't even considered that point of view ... quite interesting.

EDIT: I have to say, I bet this happens quite often in fact, especially with software.


Interesting! Thanks for the concrete example. It's bad enough trying to convince managers as to the specifics of why some product doesn't work for your project.. even worse when said product has great marketing.




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