The following map, extracted from Ethnologue shows the distribution of languages across the world.
Try hovering your mouse over the colored dots and you’ll discover the worderful diversity of languages that exist in the world.
If you take a closer look at North America, where the language distribution is popularly regarded as homogeneous you’ll notice that there are many more languages than the usual English, French and Spanish. The same situation applies to South America with regard to Spanish and Portuguese. Take a look at South East Asia, Africa and Oceania and you’ll see a multitude of different languages all very close together. Just try to count the languages in Nigeria, Indonesia or Papua New Guinea. Immagine how hard it would be to use speech recognition services in those areas. Whatever language you choose for speech processing would force all the other language communities to learn another language just to use those services.
Below is a map of the languages that are already endangered.
For these languages just a small nudge in the wrong direction would bring them to extinction.
There’s no need to show a map of speech disorders. Each of us knows someone with at least a slight speech problem, stuttering, nasal speech or that “r” that is just different. Whether it’s a slight problem or a severe one speech recognition just doesn’t work for them.