A team of researchers working with The Washington Post found that Alexa comprehends certain non-American accents and dialects poorly in the US, and that there was a pattern to this weakness. The team had more than 100 people from nearly 20 US cities dictate thousands of voice commands to Alexa. From the exercise, it found that Amazon’s Alexa-based voice-activated speaker was 30 percent less likely to comprehend commands issued by people with non-American accents.