There are a couple of differences with Mandarin that made us think it would be very difficult to have our English speech system work well with it. One is that i

There are a couple of differences with Mandarin that made us think it would be very difficult to have our English speech system work well with it. One is that it’s a tonal language, so when you say a word in a different pitch, it changes the meaning of the word, which is definitely not the case in English. This is fascinating. I've been living in Vietnam for a while now and struggling to learn Vietnamese. Mastering any tonal language is quite difficult for native English speakers so I've wondered how hard it would be to develop speech recognition algorithms for Chinese or Vietnamese. Sounds like it's actually not that difficult but it requires a different approach than non-tonal languages.