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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

#111

Post by jfim »

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)

Interestingly enough, it thought I was Russian, even though my native language is French. It was tied at 32% with French though.

Edit: Tried it a few times and also got English as an accent. Pretty fun application!

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

#113

Post by voidUpdate »

gxs wrote: post #65
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…

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…

I believe I have some kind of auditory processing issue because with some accents, it can be really hard for me to understand what someone is saying, when other people can understand them fine. It's gotten to the point where I avoid going to some shops in my town because I know the staff have quite strong accents and I feel embarrassed having to ask them to repeat themselves all the time

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

#114

Post by jgwil2 »

Muromec wrote: post #86
dhosek wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generalizing from my own experience, it’s easier for me to understand a non-native Spanish speaker than a native Spanish speaker and I would guess that the same applies with ESL speakers. One thing I found really fascinating is that even though I’d never studied French¹, I actually had an easier time understanding a conversation between my ex-wife and her aunt in French than when they spoke Spanish in which I was fun…

>Generalizing from my own experience, it’s easier for me to understand a non-native Spanish speaker than a native Spanish speaker and I would guess that the same applies with ESL speakers. You guessed right -- it's /usually/ easier to understand other non-native speakers, both because of accent and less idioms. That is unless the accent is really heavy and doesn't match your own.

I don't think it's really to do with accent, but rather that non-native speakers tend to talk slower and use simpler grammar and a more limited vocabulary (including fewer idioms).

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

#115

Post by wincy »

voidUpdate wrote: post #113
gxs wrote: post #65

Earlier 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…

I believe I have some kind of auditory processing issue because with some accents, it can be really hard for me to understand what someone is saying, when other people can understand them fine. It's gotten to the point where I avoid going to some shops in my town because I know the staff have quite strong accents and I feel embarrassed having to ask them to repeat themselves all the time

My wife has this problem. She got chided because she asked for a translator for the doctor at the children’s hospital and they just assumed she was being racist. He was Thai and his English was very difficult to understand.

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

#116

Post by voidUpdate »

wincy wrote: post #115
voidUpdate wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe I have some kind of auditory processing issue because with some accents, it can be really hard for me to understand what someone is saying, when other people can understand them fine. It's gotten to the point where I avoid going to some shops in my town because I know the staff have quite strong accents and I feel embarrassed having to ask them to repeat themselves all the time

My wife has this problem. She got chided because she asked for a translator for the doctor at the children’s hospital and they just assumed she was being racist. He was Thai and his English was very difficult to understand.

Yeah, that's my concern too. I went to a beauty salon where the woman who saw me had a strong Eastern European accent, and the only fabric shop in town is staffed by people who have a strong... Indian accent? it feels like somewhere in that region. I have no problem with the people themselves, but I just struggle to properly understand their accent sometimes

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

#117

Post by Nopoint2 »

dgroshev wrote: post #94

I'm torn. On the one hand, the tech is impressive, and the demo is nicely done. On the other, I think the demo completely misses the point. There's a disconnect between what learners need to learn and what this model optimises for, and it's probably largely explainable by how difficult (maybe even impossible) getting training datasets is. That, and marketing. I believe most learners optimise for two things: being und…

I don't believe that phonemes are real. They are a product of centuries long literacy, and the stereotypically "foreign" accent results from people being taught to construct the words from phonemes.

Not all languages can be neatly split into a nice set of phonemes - Danish phonology in particular seems mostly imaginary, and the "insane grammar" of Old Irish appears to result from the fact that word/morpheme boundaries can occur within the "phonemes".

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

#118

Post by oscarfree »

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…

People have all sorts of motivations for learning languages and accents. Right now, I'm using this tech to work on my accent in Spanish. Honestly I would rather mumble almost unintelligibly with an decent Mexican accent than speak Spanish slowly and clearly with an American accent. There is a difficult but necessary period of learning an accent where intelligibility drops. For a while, I made a strange [ð]-like noise when learning the alveolar trill (rolled R), and it would have been more intelligible to use something like alveolar tap. But, I built up the muscle memory, and can now make the correct sound. Hearing a version of myself (rather than a different speaker) gives me a more useful target to mimic, and the distance metric gives me a useful measure of whether I'm closer or further from the target.

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

#119

Post by dhosek »

jgwil2 wrote: post #114
Muromec wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Generalizing from my own experience, it’s easier for me to understand a non-native Spanish speaker than a native Spanish speaker and I would guess that the same applies with ESL speakers. You guessed right -- it's /usually/ easier to understand other non-native speakers, both because of accent and less idioms. That is unless the accent is really heavy and doesn't match your own.

I don't think it's really to do with accent, but rather that non-native speakers tend to talk slower and use simpler grammar and a more limited vocabulary (including fewer idioms).

That does help, I’m sure. There’s also a tendency to incorrectly apply foreign grammatical structures to the language in a way that might be strange or incomprehensible to a native speaker while making perfect sense to a fellow second-language speaker.

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

#120

Post by anadalakra »

yorwba wrote: post #102
anadalakra wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not yet - this was our first technical blog post. You can check out the BoldVoice app and test out the sound-level feedback yourself. Or watch this app walkthrough video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Sv5K4Z9P4c
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