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The team contended with various linguistic challenges of Irish English.

Irish English is also rhotic, meaning the “r” is overpronounced.

They relied heavily on an existing speech model of primarily British-English accents — with a far smaller range of American, Canadian and Australian accents — to train it to speak Irish English.

Irish English, said Mr. Cotescu, who is Romanian and was the lead researcher on the Irish Alexa team, “is a hard one.”

When they asked, she described herself as “Irish, English, French, Native American, and Hungarian.”