I have to talk in an American accent despite setting voice recognition to English UK Is there a way around this, or perhaps a 3rd party voice recognition app that gets around it?

I also ran a few tests in a Scouse accent and it didn't like any of them - are people with strong regional dialects ever going to be able to use this technology? 

Is there a way of training it to better recognaise the nuances of your voice?

In the past this sort of technology works best with:-


no training but a low number of words
high amount of training allowing a larger recognaised vocabulary


It's fair to assume the technology has moved on a lot but there's still scope for it to be trained to an extent. We'd all prefer it to work out of the box of course.
I'm English, but a southerner with a fairly RP accent, and using voice recognition for Google searching is pretty accurate for me. Unfortunately this sounds like it's an accent thing.

I know Google offer their 411 directory voice service in the US, apparently one of the main benefits of this for them is that they can capture a huge amount of speech and use it to train their voice recognition with the words that people really use, in the accents they really use.

Until they start offering something like that over here I don't think their British regional accents are going to get better very quickly.

UPDATE 15 Dec 2010: Things are changing. Google are starting to trial a new version of Google Voice that does Personalised voice recognition and learns based on the way you pronounce words. Unfortunately as it's a trial this for US Android 2.2 users only at the moment, but hopefully it should be going out to the rest of the world if this trial is successful. If you're an English speaking Android 2.2 user in the US, you can get the update here.