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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

#101

Post by dqv »

lurk2 wrote: post #9
pjc50 wrote: post #5

What the vector-space data gets right, and what the human commentary tends not to, is the idea that accents are a complex statistical distribution. You should be careful about the concept of a "default" or "neutral" accent. Telecommunications has spent the 20th century flattening accents together, as has accent discrimination. There's always the tendency for people to say " my accent is the neutral standard against w…

> There's always the tendency for people to say "my accent is the neutral standard against which all others should be measured". You can measure this by mutual intelligibility with other accent groupings.

Well, no. That would also measure what accents someone has the most exposure to, which doesn't necessarily reflect its "absolute intelligibility", but rather its popularity. Popularity and optimality are not the same thing. You would first need to measure if an accent's popularity is a result of its optimality to make the claim that your measure is accurate.

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

#102

Post by yorwba »

anadalakra wrote: post #55
pjc50 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Do you have another blog post showing your product giving targeted feedback about individual speech sounds? That's what I would expect from a coach.

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

#103

Post by reactormonk »

ilyausorov wrote: post #45
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)

Swiss-German accent doesn't seem to be on the list, so it guessed mostly Swedish.

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

#104

Post by vunderba »

ilyausorov wrote: post #45
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)

Fun. I have a strongly modulated North American midwestern accent so unsurprisingly it had me read several paragraphs before only being able to say with any certainty that my accent was 83% English with the rest being Spanish/Russian. It couldn't detect the country of origin.

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

#105

Post by IshKebab »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #85
IshKebab wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Accent strength is just ... distance from the accent of a socially dominant group. Yes, that is a good definition of accent strength. > There's no such thing as accent strength. ??! You literally just defined it.

Which "socially dominant group" would you pick in the United States? Or the UK?

Native white middle class, from the South East. BBC accent is fairly neutral these days. If you're American, someone like John Oliver has a very neutral English accent.

I'm not American so I don't want to comment on that.

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

#107

Post by haarolean »

vunderba wrote: post #104
ilyausorov wrote: post #45

Earlier 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)

Fun. I have a strongly modulated North American midwestern accent so unsurprisingly it had me read several paragraphs before only being able to say with any certainty that my accent was 83% English with the rest being Spanish/Russian. It couldn't detect the country of origin.

Agreed, pretty meh. Tried my usual accent (the one where natives mostly can’t tell where I'm from) — got 78%. Then went full cartoon russian ‘bad neighborhood’ mode — somehow scored 68%.

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

#108

Post by astrange »

Muromec wrote: post #88
astrange wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can take a language class rather than have a personal instructor. Although accents are a sensitive topic so I don't remember mine going into it much.

Language class and accent coaching are very different things.

Try learning a language where they won't understand you with a foreign accent. I assume tonal languages are like this but haven't tried learning any.

Japanese is sort of like this - you have to say foreign words the Japanese way very forcibly, to the point that Americans will think you're being racist if they hear you do it.

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

#109

Post by UltraSane »

asveikau wrote: post #98
gxs wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hence in quotes, man

I've literally heard a story of a kid arriving to the US from Scotland and being sent to speech therapy to remove a Scottish accent. And I've heard other such stories of American schools flagging kids for speech therapy when what they have is an accent. I feel like Americans are actually some of the worst about that.

A strong enough accent can make someone impossible to understand.

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

#110

Post by yodsanklai »

screcth wrote: post #90
asveikau wrote: post #13

Victor'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…

A very important part of people trusting you is them being able to understand what you say without making extra efforts compared to a native speaker. An easy way to improve intonation and fluency is to imitate a native speaker. Copying things like the intervocalic T and D is a consequence of that. It would be easier for a native Spanish speaker to say the Spanish /t/ and /d/ but intonation and fluency would be impair…

> An easy way to improve intonation and fluency is to imitate a native speaker.

There are lots of variations in English pronunciation. Singaporean, Australian or Scottish native speakers do sound very differently. I don't know to what extent they benefit from adjusting their accent if working in a different English speaking country to match the local dialect.

Also, as a non-native speaker I wonder if it's worth practicing my accent considering that everybody has a different accent anyway. Rather than trying to mimic a north american accent (which I'll never be able to do anyway), I'd be more interested to identify and fix the major issues in my prononciation.

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