Northerners Cannot Talk Correctly

Because they ran out of car hood and boiler-related stuff to talk about, BBC’s Watchdog programme has turned their attention to the fact that Brain Training isn’t capable of recognising northern accents. Yes, apparently the show has got numerous complaints from northerners who bought the game and found out it can’t understand them.

It seems the story got rolling when Manchester radio reporter Michelle Livesey complained the game failed to understand her pronunciation in the ’say the colour’ part of the daily training. “I’m going, ‘yeller’ and everyone’s saying to me you need to be a bit posher. You need to say ‘yellow’ and as soon as I did, it picked it up,” she reported. Laura Dickenson, a younger user of the game also commented and said “You get so annoyed you just start shouting at it, but it doesn’t make it any better.”

Of course, it should be noted that the title has already sold 2.5 million copies across the UK, so this is a really small percentage of buyers that are having probables. Furthermore, Nintendo has already commented on the matter in the manual for the game, suggesting users should be between 20 and 30 cm away from the DS when speaking, avoid shouting, aim for clear pronunciation, and “try to avoid using strong dialects or accents“.

S’thee later.