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Irish Mirror
Irish Mirror
National
Michelle Cullen

'Alexa, who's yer man?' - Amazon introduce Irish accent for Echo devices

Amazon has announced that it is introducing an Irish accent for its Echo smart devices in Ireland.

The native accent is now available on thousands of smart speakers and other tech gadgets and is only be available in a female voice for the time being.

Amazon has spent months ensuring that, when activated, certain sounds will differ from their British and American variants. For example, words ending with "ght" will sound more like the Dublin "sh" than the British "t".

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The new tech will also recognise well-known Irish Phrases such as "Alexa, who's your man?" and "Alexa, what's the craic?"

The latest software update is needed to avail of the new accent, and the device's location needs to be set to Ireland.

Dennis Stansbury, Amazon's Alexa country manager for Ireland and the UK, said: "When customers told us they wanted an Irish-English voice option for Alexa, we knew we had a big challenge on our hands as there's so many different and distinct Irish accents.

"Our team of language experts created a number of different accent variations and we tested them with internal and external Irish natives to help us define the final accent."

The new Irish-English voice option is available from today on Amazon's Echo devices.

And it's not the first time Irish accents have been introduced in the tech world as Apple's Siri developed an Irish-English variant in recent years.

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