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Is Your English Accent British or American?

myaccent.cambridgeconsultants.com

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Re: Is Your English Accent British or American?

#111

Post by emodendroket »

asveikau wrote: post #13

Born in Washington DC and that is the southernmost point of my childhood. Father born in England to Eastern European immigrants. Mother is Italian American from Pennsylvania. West coasters semi-frequently think my accent is European, but nobody from back east or from Europe says that. I got 84% British. My wife was born in Russia and spent most of her life on the US west coast. She got 91% American. Fun little app bu…

I grew up in Connecticut and it finds my pronunciation of "call" and "to" British, but still manages to find the right answer overall. For another datapoint, I guess.

Re: Is Your English Accent British or American?

#112

Post by emodendroket »

115100 wrote: post #78
hliyan wrote: post #3

This is really hit-or-miss. My initial test gave me a 93% British (rather accurate considering I'm from a former British colony), but subsequently the results varied a lot, including a few cases where it claimed my accent is 74% American. The way I pronounce "ask", "plastic" and "Bob" should be dead giveaways that my accent is not American...

I've lived in London my entire life and the result flips between very American (~80%) or slightly British. I pronounce "ask" with a long "a" so I'm not sure why it keeps flagging that pronunciation as American either.

This may well not be the answer but some of the accents you'll hear around Boston do use the vowel from "father" to pronounce "ask."

Re: Is Your English Accent British or American?

#113

Post by emodendroket »

nerdponx wrote: post #20
megaman22 wrote: post #14

This seems like it'd be hard to do reliably - if I recall, there were significant variations in the regional makeup of the various thirteen colonies to start with, and some of those linguistic peculiarities have outlived their originators, besides England having it's own subdialects and variations over time too. Get a Mainer, a New Yorker, a Virginian, and a Georgian together, and they're hardly mutually intelligble,…

Other than some slang, I wouldn't call any of these accents mutually unintelligible.

Yeah, I can't think of any American accent that I just altogether can't understand.

Re: Is Your English Accent British or American?

#114

Post by coldtea »

forinti wrote: post #103
tbabb wrote: post #66

It's hard to tell if the speech recognition is working, or even if the microphone is on. If I hum the star spangled banner, it rates me as 79% British.

I said the sentence in Spanish and it gave me 62% British. I tried Portuguese, and it gave me 55% British.

The NN (I guess) checks the accent, so it doesn't care about the content of the words. One could speak Spanish in a more or less British accent.

Re: Is Your English Accent British or American?

#115

Post by acranox »

emodendroket wrote: post #109
tbabb wrote: post #66

It's hard to tell if the speech recognition is working, or even if the microphone is on. If I hum the star spangled banner, it rates me as 79% British.

If it's machine learning-based it probably just doesn't know how to handle weird invalid input like that.`

“Weird invalid input” is an interesting description. That’s the reason I don’t use the voice features on my phone. I have to spend too much time tailoring my input for its expectations rather than Speaking as I normally do, and having it know how to interpret better.

Re: Is Your English Accent British or American?

#116

Post by IIAOPSW »

hyper_reality wrote: post #5

I'm from Britain and it rated my accent as 99-100% British the few times that I tried it. So not bad from my point of view. Meanwhile, I wonder what Cambridge Consultants are going to do with a dataset of thousands of Hacker News users reading out the sentence "Please call Stella and ask her to meet Bob the frog at the store with three small red plastic bags".

I'm American and I get mixed results between 89% American and 53% British on my normal accent. My pronunciation of "call" and "to" seems to tip the scales towards British and most of my other words are not strongly highlighted.

I can reliably fake a British accent although I seem to get stuck on frog and store still sounding American. When I do the stereotypical Texas style "yee haw" accent I get 99% American.

Re: Is Your English Accent British or American?

#117

Post by baxtr »

Side question. I’ve been always wondering: how has the American accent evolved? Where does it come from? Is there any region in Britain that sounds American? Or did just evolve independently as a mix of British and something else?

And: since when is it that different? Did Lincoln had an American accent?!

Re: Is Your English Accent British or American?

#118

Post by cillian64 »

acranox wrote: post #115
emodendroket wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's machine learning-based it probably just doesn't know how to handle weird invalid input like that.`

“Weird invalid input” is an interesting description. That’s the reason I don’t use the voice features on my phone. I have to spend too much time tailoring my input for its expectations rather than Speaking as I normally do, and having it know how to interpret better.

Getting any use out of voice recognition personal assistants is a learned skill (just like effective googling or using the command line) but pretty handy once you get it figured out.

I'd be interested to see a voice-controlled personal assistant with a specific machine-friendly syntax you have to learn instead of it trying to deal with natural language. In exchange for me learning the syntax I'd probably have a much better user experience than fumbling through variations of English.

Re: Is Your English Accent British or American?

#120

Post by antirez »

baxtr wrote: post #117

Side question. I’ve been always wondering: how has the American accent evolved? Where does it come from? Is there any region in Britain that sounds American? Or did just evolve independently as a mix of British and something else? And: since when is it that different? Did Lincoln had an American accent?!

It's somewhat the contrary if I remember correctly. It's the British accent that changed after the split.
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