Does Azure Pronunciation Assessment handle Hong Kong, Japanese, and other East Asian English accents accurately?

Question

We’re building a language learning app for English speakers in Hong Kong, Japan, and other East Asian countries.

We plan to integrate Azure Speech Service — Pronunciation Assessment using PHP (Laravel). My main question is: How well does it handle English spoken with Hong Kong, Japanese, and other East Asian accents?

We want to ensure it provides accurate fluency, pronunciation scores, and word-level feedback. Are there any known limitations or best practices for these accents?

Looking forward to your confirmation — thank you!

Answer 1

Hello Darsh !

Thank you for posting on Microsoft Learn.

Azure Pronunciation Assessment in the Speech Service is generally robust and supports a wide range of non-native English accents, East Asian accents such as those from Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, and mainland China.

While Azure does well with common non-native accents, extreme deviations in intonation, consonant sounds (like /l/ and /r/ for Japanese speakers), and syllable timing may result in lower-than-expected scores.

It may not recognize certain locally accepted pronunciations or loanwords common in Hong Kong English and some users experienced some difficulties with consonant clusters and vowel insertion might receive low pronunciation scores, even when the meaning is clear.

Use ReferenceText Mode with full sentences to improve context-based scoring where you set "EnableMiscue": true to allow insertions, omissions, or word order changes, which are common among non-native speakers.

You have also the possibility to adjust the GradingSystem (HundredMark vs FivePoint) depending on how sensitive you want the scoring to be.

What I highly recommend is that you create a calibration dataset using recordings from real users in your target demographic.