I agree with your point. It can be hard for a US native English speaker to recognize a Scottish accent.
But, other Scottish people certainly don't have trouble with understanding a Scottish accent. So I view that as a certificate that we should be able to build a speech recognizer which can recognize Scottish accents.
> But, other Scottish people certainly don't have trouble with understanding a Scottish accent. So I view that as a certificate that we should be able to build a speech recognizer which can recognize Scottish accents.
As a Scottish person, I'll say there's a huge amount of variation between Scots dialects. As someone who grew up in Fife, it took me well over a year of living in Glasgow to be able to reliably understand people there—and both of them are typically classed as Central Scots.
> I also grew up in Fife, although my parents paid good money so I would have an Edinburgh accent.
I grew up in St Andrews, both of my parents having grown up in England, and went through speech therapy as a young child (due to dyspraxia); unsurprisingly, with that, you can imagine my accent is much closer to RP than any broad Fife accent, though most of my speech is definitely Standard Scottish English.
A speech recognizer that has been trained with General American (which is likely the largest corpus we have), is analagous for a US native English speaker, so I wouldn't expect it to work on Scottish accents.
Whether or not gathering a sufficiently large corpus of other dialects will solve the problem would be interesting; also it might be uneconomical to gather a large enough corpus of some dialects, leaving minorities out.
But, other Scottish people certainly don't have trouble with understanding a Scottish accent. So I view that as a certificate that we should be able to build a speech recognizer which can recognize Scottish accents.