Gridnorth
Bilingual by design: English and French
Gridnorth was built for English and French from the first line of code, not translated afterwards. In the laboratory evaluation, field accuracy was 86.4% in English and 82.3% in French. The target is to close that gap.
Why two languages
Canadian institutions work in both official languages, and coalition partners such as France work in French. A messaging tool that performs well only in English pushes the extra work onto the francophone operator, at the moment when least time is available for it.
What we measured
| Language | Field accuracy |
|---|---|
| English | 86.4% |
| French | 82.3% |
What we have not measured
- Speech from real speakers, in either language.
- Regional francophone accents, and speakers using English or French as a second language.
- How accented characters survive legacy character-oriented gateways. French text is routine in Canadian traffic, and not every gateway handles it. See COIE vs MTF-XML.
Fairness across speakers
Unequal error rates are one problem. Unequal flagging rates are another, because every flag costs an operator time to confirm. Once speech is tested we will report error rates and flagging rates for each speaker group, not only in total.
Last reviewed September 29, 2026