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Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English

accent-strength.boldvoice.com

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Re: Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English

#41

Post by [deleted] »

dmurray wrote: post #33
ccppurcell wrote: post #19

Oh pssh. There's no such thing as accent strength. There's only accent distance. Accent strength is just an artefact of distance from the accent of a socially dominant group.

The article defines accent strength in precisely this way, as the difference "relative to native speakers of English". That group has a vast range of accents, but it's believable that that range occupies an identifiable part of the multi-dimensional accent space, and has very little overlap with, for example, beginner ESL students from China. Even between native speakers, I bet you could come up with some measure of…

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Re: Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English

#42

Post by dmurray »

joshuaissac wrote: post #39
dmurray wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article defines accent strength in precisely this way, as the difference "relative to native speakers of English". That group has a vast range of accents, but it's believable that that range occupies an identifiable part of the multi-dimensional accent space, and has very little overlap with, for example, beginner ESL students from China. Even between native speakers, I bet you could come up with some measure of…

> relative to native speakers of English > Even between native speakers, I bet you could come up with some measure of centrality and measure accent strength as a distance from that Is that what BoldVoice is actually doing? At least from the article is saying, it is measuring the strength of the user's American English accent (maybe GenAm?), and there is no discussion of any user choice of native accent to target.

> Is that what BoldVoice is actually doing?

No, I don't think it is doing that, I'm just taking issue with cccpurcell, who seems to believe that any definition of accent strength is chauvinistic.

Re: Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English

#43

Post by SamBam »

Like others recently, I've been extremely impressed by LLM's ability to play GeoGuessr, or, more generally, to geo-locate random snapshots that you give them, with what seem (to me) to be almost no context clues. (I gave ChatGPT loads of holiday snapshots, screenshotted to remove metadata, and it did amazingly.)

I assume that, with enough training, we could get similarly accurate guesses of a person's linguistic history from their voice data.

Obviously it would be extremely tricky for lots of people. For instance, many people think I sound English or Irish. I grew up in France to American parents who both went to Oxford and spent 15 years in England. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if a well-trained model could do much better on my accent than "you sound kinda Irish."

Re: Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English

#44

Post by chris_va »

SamBam wrote: post #43

Like others recently, I've been extremely impressed by LLM's ability to play GeoGuessr, or, more generally, to geo-locate random snapshots that you give them, with what seem (to me) to be almost no context clues. (I gave ChatGPT loads of holiday snapshots, screenshotted to remove metadata, and it did amazingly.) I assume that, with enough training, we could get similarly accurate guesses of a person's linguistic hist…

I bet you are right.

I had a forensic linguistics TA during college who was able to identify the island in southeast Asia one of the students grew up on, and where they moved to in the UK as a teenager before coming to the US (if I am remembering this story right).

From what I gather, there are a lot of clues in how we speak that most brains edit out when parsing language.

Re: Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English

#45

Post by ilyausorov »

SamBam wrote: post #43

Like others recently, I've been extremely impressed by LLM's ability to play GeoGuessr, or, more generally, to geo-locate random snapshots that you give them, with what seem (to me) to be almost no context clues. (I gave ChatGPT loads of holiday snapshots, screenshotted to remove metadata, and it did amazingly.) I assume that, with enough training, we could get similarly accurate guesses of a person's linguistic hist…

We actually did something like this for non-native English speakers a few months back. Check out https://accentoracle.com (most mind-blowing if you're a non native English speaker)

Re: Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English

#49

Post by nmstoker »

SamBam wrote: post #43

Like others recently, I've been extremely impressed by LLM's ability to play GeoGuessr, or, more generally, to geo-locate random snapshots that you give them, with what seem (to me) to be almost no context clues. (I gave ChatGPT loads of holiday snapshots, screenshotted to remove metadata, and it did amazingly.) I assume that, with enough training, we could get similarly accurate guesses of a person's linguistic hist…

Yes, although I believe this is a speaker embedding model here, so not LLM related.

This kind of speech clustering has been possible for years - the exciting point with their model here is how it's highly focused on accents alone. Here's a video of mine from 2020 that demonstrated this kind of voice clustering in the Mozilla TTS repo (sadly the code got broken + dropped after a refactoring). Bokeh made it possible to directly click on points in a cluster and have them play

https://youtu.be/KW3oO7JVa7Q?si=1w-4pU5488WxYL3l

note: take care when listening as the audio level varies a bit (sorry!)

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