This is really cool.
Just had an employee at our company start expensing BoldVoice. Being able to be understood more easily is a big deal for global remote employees.
(Note - I am a small investor in BoldVoice)
Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English
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Re: Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English
#52This is fascinating work. Love seeing how you’re combining machine learning with practical coaching to support real accent improvement. The concept of an “accent fingerprint” is especially clever, and the visualization of progress in latent space really brings it to life. Excited to see where you take this next!
Re: Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English
#53The hear my own voice without an accent thing is a really cool party trick.
I’d consider making this feature available free with super low friction, maybe no signup required, to get some viral traction.
Re: Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English
#54Like 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)
I'm 42% Arabic apparently! And 20% Russian. Got an 81% American accent level. I guess it is tuned to non-native-English speaker accents.
Re: Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English
#55This is so cool. Real-time accent feedback is something language learners have never had throughout all of human history, until now. Along similar lines, it would be useful to map a speaker's vowels in vowel-space (and likewise for consonants?) to compare native to non-native speakers. I can't wait until something like this is available for Japanese.
> something language learners have never had throughout all of human history .. unless they had access to a native speaker and/or vocal coach? While an automated Henry Higgins is nifty, it's not something humans haven't been able to do themselves.
Native speakers are less helpful at this than you might think. Speech coaches are absolutely the way to go, but they're outside the price range for most people ($200+/hr for a good coach). BoldVoice gives coach-level feedback and instruction at a price point that everyone can access, on demand.
Re: Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English
#56The hear my own voice without an accent thing is a really cool party trick. I’d consider making this feature available free with super low friction, maybe no signup required, to get some viral traction.
What if it was already available? Try it out at https://accentfilter.com!
Re: Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
I'm 42% Arabic apparently! And 20% Russian. Got an 81% American accent level. I guess it is tuned to non-native-English speaker accents.
Was that right? Or what is the correct native language it should have predicted? Note the %s in the accent breakdown section are prediction probabilities
Re: Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English
#58[deleted]
Re: Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English
#59Victor's problem isn't really the vowels or pacing. The final consonants are soft or not really audible. I am not hearing the /ŋ/ of "long" as the most marked example. It sounds closer to "law". In his "improved" recording he hasn't fixed this. I sometimes see content on social media encouraging people to sound more native or improve their accent. But IMO it's perfectly ok to have an accent, as long as the speech mee…
Thank you for pinpoints my confusion/disconnect on what lack of improvement that I was sensing. There was an improvement on pacing, and cadence, yes, but that was not the main challenge with Victors accent. Visually I'd say victor improved by at most 5% and not 50% as indicated by the visualization. In some regards it was even harder to understand than the original due to speed and cadence without improvement in core pronunciation.
Re: Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English
#60The hear my own voice without an accent thing is a really cool party trick. I’d consider making this feature available free with super low friction, maybe no signup required, to get some viral traction.
What if it was already available? Try it out at https://accentfilter.com !
Hmmm. Initially impressive but upon retries and reflection ... not that great. It doesn't even maintain timing ... unless that's part of the transform.