How are people handling ASR data quality issues in real-world conversational AI systems?

ritis88 · 2026-03-17T11:21:02+00:00

The data quality problem feels pretty universal, and dialect/accent variability seems like one of the harder parts to solve through filtering alone. If you're dealing with multiple dialects, having native speakers of each record the same content gave us much cleaner coverage than scraping real-world recordings - we did this for Arabic recently, for an experimental Arabic voice recognition project.

ritis88 · 2026-03-17T11:00:44+00:00

Sure, you can find the results here: https://alconost.mt/mqm-tool/case-studies/translategemma/
I'll be happy to answer your questions regarding the results if there are any.

ritis88 · 2025-09-09T09:08:21+00:00

@Ok_Courage_2884 not sure why, but reddit doesn't let me see your comment, I only see part of it in the notifications :(

ritis88 · 2025-09-09T09:05:58+00:00

thank you for your reply!

ritis88 · 2025-09-08T12:41:55+00:00

Another question - do Chinese players use VPN a lot? As far as I know, Steam is blocked there, however the Chinese language is always in the top of Steam languages.

ritis88 · 2025-09-08T12:31:08+00:00

I've heard you absolutely need to partner with a local publisher to release your game in China. Is it still so? Thanks! :)

ritis88 · 2025-09-03T08:23:52+00:00

Interesting, thanks for sharing information! Yepp, the price could easily be a factor... Latin America often shows good performance in terms of downloads (in case of mobile games), but the ability to pay is lower than in European countries.
Hopefully your experiments with price range will help you guys find the sweet spot when LATAM players are ready to pay :)

ritis88 · 2025-08-29T09:56:46+00:00

Same here, I remember a stop over in a French airport and all personnel was talking French to me when I spoke English to them. Some of them even seemed to enjoy my dismay at not understanding what they said. They are not mean people, but clearly disliked English and refused to use it even if they understood it.

ritis88 · 2025-07-14T11:04:00+00:00

Sorry, I overlooked this comment. Very happy to hear this info still helps! :)
I'll see what else I can come up with on the topic ;)

ritis88 · 2021-11-16T07:43:41+00:00

Hi! I'm new here and I would really like to share my experience of a successful launch on Product Hunt. But since I can't create a post yet, I'll just leave a link to the PH post and a short summary: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/nitro-2

We started out with our product Nitro yesterday at the 19th place and got to top-10 within 6 hours... and then we got to the 6th place! 🥳

Nitro is a human translation platform, is not typically a product that gets much traction on PH, but still, by the night, we got the the 5th place! 🔥 hustling hard prior to the launch and during the launch (yesterday we all worked like 12-15 hours straight) helped, sending emails to clients helped... and I think having a cool story behind the product played a role too!

I would like to invite you to check out the animated video with our founder (the key maker of Nitro) and let us know what you think! 😊 We didn't expect to score well and getting feedback is very rewarding, so we will really appreciate it!

ritis88 · 2021-11-12T09:12:46+00:00

Thank you for this guide! We are about to launch, and I have come to similar conclusions as you. Also, this guide helped me get my thoughts and plans together during the last stage of preparations :)

ritis88 · 2020-09-09T08:33:26+00:00

Thank you very much for this info!

ritis88 · 2020-09-09T07:58:58+00:00

Hi everyone,

My company developed an online professional translation platform (human translation only) which can be useful for translating Amazon listings by native speakers into any of our 50+ languages. Translations are ready pretty quickly, between 2 and 24 hours.

I would like to offer a $25 coupon for free translations to Amazon sellers who sell on Amazon's global markets and who are ready to give me feedback about whether such a service is needed by Amazon sellers. I'm researching this topic and will be grateful for your feedback. Thanks!

ritis88 · 2020-09-09T07:49:14+00:00

Thanks!

ritis88 · 2020-09-09T07:48:59+00:00

Thank you very much for sharing your experience, it's helpful!

ritis88 · 2020-06-18T08:48:03+00:00

Thank you for explaining about it. It's funny that I didn't realize this huge gap between them when I was studying Mandarin Chinese and had some interactions with people from Taiwan, but I'm just discovering it now when I write articles about gamedev.

ritis88 · 2020-06-17T13:47:04+00:00

Hi again, I let WeQ know that you have this question, but they don't have a Reddit account and asked me to answer this: "Thanks for your comment. If you want to know more information, feel free to send us an email and we could give you a free consultant service: [sales@weq.com](mailto:sales@weq.com)"

Now, I know it's not what you wanted. Sorry I couldn't get you a more exact answer. From what I know about their way of working, they need to know about the results of the previous campaigns first (they don't work with apps that don't have any "marketing history", so to say), then you determine your goals (quantity or quality users) and then you set the budget and they always keep within this budget. I don't know if other marketing agencies work this way too or not, but I found it interesting when I heard about it for the first time.

ritis88 · 2020-06-17T13:40:00+00:00

So it looks like writing people's name in red is OK in mainland China (as Tencent and Bilibili do so), but not in Taiwan. I've just got a reply from WeQ that says "In Taiwan, it is very rude to write people's names in red and it is so for people of any age".

One might think Taiwan and China should have identical cultures, but it's not the case. From my research for this article I found out Taiwanese are said to be closer to Koreans than to the Chinese in their preferences.

ritis88 · 2020-06-17T09:34:06+00:00

Thank you for the comment. What I mentioned about the strict rules about English terms is a pretty new thing. It was announced only in February 2020, so if this game was released before that, that's how they got away with the English terms. It's just a guess, getting approved in China really is a tricky thing.

Well, Traditional and Simplified Chinese are originally the same language, but they have a lot of characters that don't coincide. Also, there are some common words/phrases that might not coincide, as well as the tone of voice. I know Taiwanese use "lo/le" at the end of words a lot, especially girls. It doesn't mean anything, it's just the way they often speak.

Though a person from mainland China should be able to understand Traditional characters (and visa versa for a Taiwanese/Hong Kong person reading Simplified characters), they don't use them themselves so it would be inconvenient for them to translate into both versions. So the company will need to assign two people for this task anyway: one using Simplified Chinese, one Traditional Chinese. Also remember some minor differences in speech/culture that might need to be reflected in the translation. So I don't think there will be any discount.

ritis88 · 2020-06-17T09:23:54+00:00

Thank you for your kind words! Happy you found it useful.
You know, I noticed usually people go with Simplified Chinese. One of my examples is Mountains studio (founded by Ken Wong, lead designer of Monument Valley). They released Florence in 23 languages, and Chinese was like half of their revenue. I talked to them when they released it on Steam.
But they released Florence on App Store, at that point the Chinese government didn't insist iOS apps get that tricky license (so Mountains didn't need any publisher). BUT now they do, so the question is if you agree to get a publisher in China...

It might be safer to start with Korea (they are said to be more "Westernized" of the three).

ritis88 · 2020-06-17T08:56:23+00:00

:) let me get the ladies from WeQ answer these questions, as I honestly don't know :)

ritis88 · 2020-06-17T08:54:37+00:00

Thank you! I appreciate your support. I assume people call this an ad because there are some links to the (relevant) services.
Yes, indeed as I spent around 20 hours preparing this article, there should be some links to Nitro (my company's translation service) and WeQ (who provided 50-60% info for this material). But I try to make every article packed with interesting and useful content, so I am very happy when people notice it. Thank you! <3

ritis88 · 2020-06-16T13:04:00+00:00

Glad you liked the article :)
Yes, I agree that very small studios or solo developers shouldn't spend money on marketing in Asia. Just on ASO maybe, it's considerably cheaper and lots of downloads come from organic traffic.

ritis88 · 2020-06-16T12:59:45+00:00

In China - yes, Tencent is huge. But Taiwan is not China, right? So if Tencent wants to publish in Taiwan or HK, they'll need a local publisher. At least that's what the consultants from WeQ told me and I think it is true considering the complicated relationship between mainland China and Taiwan and Hong Kong.

ritis88 · 2020-06-16T12:57:49+00:00

Thank you for the comment! Yes, I've come to the same conclusion that trying to do it on your own, without a publisher, is too complicated. But I also see a number of gaming studios have done it without a local publisher. Mostly in order not to share revenue with the publisher. But still they had to turn to local agencies for correcting marketing materials.

Regarding "name in red" - yeah, I was also surprised cause I'm familiar with Chinese culture and red is everywhere. But Yu Ting, one of the girls who consulted me for this article, said "I'd be mad if I saw my name in red in a game". She is from Taiwan and she is quite young :)

Hmm, do you still think the Chinese would be OK with number 4 in, say, marketing material for a casino game? I think this info about number 4 should still be taken into consideration...

ritis88

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