New Jersey accent in the top 3 of the most difficult in the U.S.

Right off the bat, I'm calling BS. In a recent survey of the most difficult accents for AI to understand, the New Jersey accent ranks third.

First of all, there is no ONE Jersey accent. There is a tiny sliver of New Jersey that sounds like a mild New York City accent. That can be heard in Hudson County and that's about it.

The biggest chunk of the state would be Central Jersey and there is not much of an accent there at all.

SEE MORE: Out-of-state vacationers at the Jersey Shore won’t be coming back

It's hard to tell what voices their AI machines were fed, but if they counted on the South Jersey accent that might be where the trouble lies.

Full disclosure, that's the accent I grew up with and that most of my family and friends speak with. Yeah, it's challenging but it's hardly what you would categorize as the typical Jersey accent. The northwest corner of the state also has a pretty straightforward lack of any discernable accent.

The website Guide2Fluency ranked the southern accent as the most difficult to understand and the New York City accent as second. That was followed by the great Garden State. 

Their study involved testing several AI voice recognition systems with audio samples from speakers with different regional accents. The results indicated that the New Jersey accent frequently led to higher error rates in transcription and comprehension.

The only conclusion one can come to is that the sample size was too small and relied too heavily on Southern New Jersey accents. That part of the state doesn't represent the greatest concentration of the population, but we find most of these studies are flawed.

Like I said in the beginning of the piece I say the study is pure BS. We know that every part of our state says that word clearly.

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Dennis Malloy only.

Report a correction 👈