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.