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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
#62How's the "accent conversion model" work? Is it all embedding based?
If so—and if you want to transfer-learn new downstream models from embeddings—then seems to me you are onto a very effective way of doing data augmentation. It's expensive to do data augmentation on raw waveforms since you always need to run the STFT again; but if you've pre-computed & cached embeddings and can do data augmentation there, it would be super fast.
Re: Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Indeed yeah that’s one of the key weaknesses of the approach that we’re using. It overrides the speakers cadence and accent while keeping their voice profile / timbre in place. Different techniques may not do this but also may not copy over the accent to the resulting clip as effectively. So far we’re using this to support pedagogical (and lead-gen) use cases where we think it works sufficiently enough.
Re: Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English
#64Like 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…
Correct, not LLM
Re: Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English
#65Victor'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…
Yeah, as long as it’s intelligible an accent is perfectly fine
It’s also perfectly fine to want to sound like a native speaker - whether it be because they are self conscious, think it will benefit them in some way, or simply want to feel like they are speaking “correctly”
Sorry to pick on you, it’s just amazing to me how sensitive we are to “inclusivity” to the point where we almost discourage people wanting to fit in
Re: Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmmm. Initially impressive but upon retries and reflection ... not that great. It doesn't even maintain timing ... unless that's part of the transform.
Indeed yeah that’s one of the key weaknesses of the approach that we’re using. It overrides the speakers cadence and accent while keeping their voice profile / timbre in place. Different techniques may not do this but also may not copy over the accent to the resulting clip as effectively. So far we’re using this to support pedagogical (and lead-gen) use cases where we think it works sufficiently enough.
Let's put it a different way. I grew up in the UK till 24. I've lived in the USA for 36 years. The UK/US accent conversions dramatically altered my voice/accent; the AU one left it mostly unchanged.
This is offensive :))
Re: Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English
#67Victor'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…
Yeah, as long as it’s intelligible an accent is perfectly fine It’s also perfectly fine to want to sound like a native speaker - whether it be because they are self conscious, think it will benefit them in some way, or simply want to feel like they are speaking “correctly” Sorry to pick on you, it’s just amazing to me how sensitive we are to “inclusivity” to the point where we almost discourage people wanting to fit…
Intelligibility heavily depends on what you expect to hear, and that depends on your native language or even locality. Even a tiny amount of French accent in English makes it sound like gibberish to me (but not others, and I don't have this issue with other thick accents). I'm sure my native accent is also incompatible with someone else's ears. That's the reason people pay accent coaches.
Re: Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English
#68I (an American from suburban Connecticut) was recently in London for an event and someone misheard me. Another Londoner said “It’s because of your accent!”, which of course was nonsense to me. What accent?
I’d be really interested to play with this tool and see what it thinks of my accent. Can it tell where I grew up? Can it tell what my parents’ native languages are (not English!)
A free tool like this would be great marketing for this company.
Re: Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, as long as it’s intelligible an accent is perfectly fine It’s also perfectly fine to want to sound like a native speaker - whether it be because they are self conscious, think it will benefit them in some way, or simply want to feel like they are speaking “correctly” Sorry to pick on you, it’s just amazing to me how sensitive we are to “inclusivity” to the point where we almost discourage people wanting to fit…
Intelligibility heavily depends on what you expect to hear, and that depends on your native language or even locality. Even a tiny amount of French accent in English makes it sound like gibberish to me (but not others, and I don't have this issue with other thick accents). I'm sure my native accent is also incompatible with someone else's ears. That's the reason people pay accent coaches.
Yes, should go without saying that intelligibly is perfectly provided it’s intelligible in whatever context you’re in
Re: Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English
#70I (an American from suburban Connecticut) was recently in London for an event and someone misheard me. Another Londoner said “It’s because of your accent!”, which of course was nonsense to me. What accent? I’d be really interested to play with this tool and see what it thinks of my accent. Can it tell where I grew up? Can it tell what my parents’ native languages are (not English!) A free tool like this would be grea…
We did built two free tools, which are geared towards non-native English speakers. You can find them at https://accentoracle.com and https://accentfilter.com. They're less effective for English native speakers, but could still be fun.