Humans claimed a 73 percent accuracy rate but were often fooled by details generated by machines, like British accents and background noises.

“We found humans weren’t perfect, but they were better than random guessing. They had some intuition behind their responses. That’s why we wanted to go into the deep dive — why are they making those decisions and what are they keying in on,” said co-lead Kevin Warren, a Ph.D. student with the department of Computer & Information Science and Engineering.