The BBC has decided that the US voice assistant monopoly needs a distinctly British flavor, which would see it become the first broadcaster to launch in-house digital voice assistant technology. Famous the world over for its R&D division, the BBC is currently asking UK-based employees to submit voice recordings with the aim of training a model to recognize a diversity of regional accents – an area where Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant all fall short. Certain companies in the voice market are real sticklers for nailing down components like accents, colloquialisms, dialects, slang, syntax, over-talk, and even more complex elements like sarcasm, which mainstream voice assistants struggle to process. The BBC’s focus on regional accents is therefore a real differentiator…