Big change for smart speaker users as Amazon’s Alexa gets Irish accent for the first time

Starting today, AMAZON Echo smart device users can hear Alexa with an Irish accent.

The move will affect hundreds of thousands of smart speakers and other devices across the country.

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The new Irish accent will initially only be available in a female voice.

The company spent months making sure that localized “th” sounds, when activated, were different than those in England or America.

Likewise, words ending in “ght” sound more like “sh” in Dublin than the English “t”.

Amazingly, Alexa also recognizes commonly used Irish phrases and responds to questions like “Alexa, what’s up?” and “Alexa, who’s your husband?”

Dennis Stansbury, Amazon’s Alexa Country Manager for Ireland and the UK Independent.ie: “When customers told us they wanted an Irish English language option for Alexa, we knew we faced a huge challenge as there are so many different and varied Irish accents.”

“Our team of linguists created a number of different accent variations and we tested them with internal and external native Irish speakers to help us define the final accent.”

In the meantime, Google is hoping to ease that annoyed feeling you get when an app randomly crashes with a handy new feature.

There’s nothing worse than scrolling through your favorite app, only to have it suddenly stop leaving you scratching your head and feeling a little frustrated.

Sometimes it’s a bug that just needs a small fix – but how do you know?

Well, Google would like to better alert you to individual updates that might fix issues.

The next time an app crashes on your Android device, you’ll be notified of available updates.

According to the company’s latest release notes, it will “help users fix app crashes with new update prompts.”

This should come via an update to the Google Play Store – v33.2 – that rolled out on November 15th.

Of course, such a feature only works if an update is actually available for the app.

And not every problem is due to the need for an update.

But it’s a useful way to potentially relieve you from your app crashing issues.