<i>There are a couple of differences with Mandarin that made us think it would be very difficult to have our English speech system work well with it. One is that it’s a tonal language, so when you say a word in a different pitch, it changes the meaning of the word, which is definitely not the case in English.</i><p>This is fascinating. I&#x27;ve been living in Vietnam for a while now and struggling to learn Vietnamese. Mastering any tonal language is quite difficult for native English speakers so I&#x27;ve wondered how hard it would be to develop speech recognition algorithms for Chinese or Vietnamese. Sounds like it&#x27;s actually not that difficult but it requires a different approach than non-tonal languages.