| With the ubiquity of voice assistants across the UK and the world, speech recognition of the regional accents across the British Isles has proven challenging due to varying pronunciations. This paper proposes an automated recognition of the geographical origin and gender of a voice sample based on the six regional dialects of the United Kingdom. Twenty six features are extracted from 17,877 voice samples and then used to design, implement and evaluate machine learning classifiers based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF) and k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) algorithms. The results suggest that the proposed approach could be applicable for areas such as e-commerce and the service industry, and it provides a contribution to NLP audio research. |
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