LANCASHIRE accents are to be recorded by researchers to help develop better speech recognition systems on computers.
The sensitive systems are not picking up regional dialects, and tend only to decipher southern English.
Engineers from the University of Birmingham are visiting Burnley on Thursday and Friday to record the voices of locals.
Volunteers must have lived in the area all their lives and have parents who come from Lancashire.
Speech recognition software is already available for personal computers and is being more widely used in mobile phones, cars and over the telephone.
The researchers are measuring the effects of the accents on the performance of the systems - and recording speech to improve them.
They are visiting 15 different locations in the UK to complete the research.
The researchers will be recording the voices at the Burnley Mechanics concert venue.
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article