I have a friend from Scotland who has just ordered a 4s and is really excited about Siri. I'll be interested to see how it gets on with his thick Dundee accent (especially since I can barely understand him half the time!).
Yea this is the problem I'm not sure that they've solved. There are loads of regional accents in the UK, and only one setting in the language options called 'British English'
I'm wondering about that too. It seems Nuance (the platform Siri is built on) supports lots of accents, though I'm not sure how this works on the iPhone. Maybe it uses your regional settings to choose an accent profile?
The voice seems to depend on the language. You seemingly can't explicitly switch it, you only can switch languages. It just so happens that iOS has both 'English' and 'British English' as languages, with female and male voice synthesis respectivly. (Those languages are already built into the current version of iOS as part of VoiceOver.)
If you are German or French you only ever get one voice.
The idea is to build voice recognition from a large base of samples from different people (male/female, age, accents...).
That's why Google offered GOOG-411, mostly to train their database. And that's why all these solutions include a server-side part, because they need the large sample database that keeps growing.
I can't wait to see how it copes with British accents. Not just English vs Scottish etc - but the hundreds of variations.
I grew up in the East Midlands and now live in Leeds, 70 miles north. The difference in accents is night and day (although no-one in the UK knows what a Nottingham accent is). There's even a significant difference between a Leeds accent and the next city, Bradford (about 5 miles away).
I really hope Siri has some sort of unobtrusive training built in...
