EEE By Gum! Boffins are to mount a major new study on East Lancashire accents - because Britain's high-tech computer systems don't understand them.

Automated phone services were programmed only to recognise the Queen's English and are unable to fathom out Lancashire dialect made famous by TV stars like ex-Coronation Street actress Julie Goodyear and former Bullseye host Jim Bowen.

Now engineers from the University of Birmingham are to collect recorded examples of the Northern accent to update the voice recognition systems which can be found on computers, mobile phones and cars.

They are visiting Burnley to recruit people for £15 a time so they can tape their voices and use them in the project.

Capture twank

Each person will be asked to read a set of words for 30 minutes so the researchers can capture the regional twang.

Words include the common differences between southern and northern grass and bath as well as a long list of vowel sounds.

Those taking part need to have lived in the Burnley area all their lives and have parents who come from and have lived in the region.

While the system is being developed to improve the recognition of accents, it will not as yet be able to pick up on Lancashire sayings and phrases like "Eee By Gum" and "By 'eck chuck."

Lancashire comedian Jim Bowen said: "My favourite Lancashire phrase is "thy should think before thy opens thy mouth! They should get the Queen to come up from London and learn how to speak properly."

Shona D'Arcy, who is in charge of the project based at Birmingham University's division of electrical, electronic and computer engineering, said: "Speech recognition software is already available for personal computers from high street stores and is being more widely used in mobile phones, cars and over the telephone network.

"However speech recognition does not take into account the way in which English is spoken throughout the British Isles and currently works best for people with standard southern British accents.

"Generally accents in the north tend to be stronger. In the south there is a higher influx of people from London and so the accents are much weaker and the systems recognise them much easier.

"With this information we hope to build up a database of accents so that these systems can work effectively.

"It needs to be spot-on and able to understand all regional speech if it is to be used in cars."

Amazing dialect

Lancashire dialect poet Jim Atherton said: "It doesn't surprise me that it can't figure it out.

"Lancashire derives from Norman and Saxon. For instance, we are the only place in the country which calls the fish 'plaice' and fluke. It comes from the Icelandic fisherman who used to come to Fleetwood and call it a 'Flokkie'. It is an amazing dialect."

The university is visiting 14 other locations throughout the British Isles ranging from Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.

It is working on the project in conjunction with 20/30 Speech Ltd, based in Malvern, Worcestershire, which develops and supplies speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis software products.

Martin Abbot, business development manager, said: "One of the problems we frequently find is that if people start speaking with different accents they can cause many, many problems.

"One of the ways in which we need to be able to work is not only to be able to understand how well out systems operate but also if our systems will function if people are not speaking the Queen's English.

"Hopefully this new research will introduce ways of compensating for this."