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

Post by lurk2 » Wed, May 07, 2025, 7:36 PM UTC

dqv wrote: post #101

lurk2 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Post by lukeinator42 » Wed, May 07, 2025, 9:27 PM UTC

ilyausorov wrote: post #56

WhitneyLand wrote: post #53

The 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 !

Post by dqv » Thu, May 08, 2025, 5:14 AM UTC

lurk2 wrote: post #121

dqv wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Popularity and optimality are not the same thing. Yes they are. If we lived in a world where Australia was a world superpower we might be having this conversation upside down and with r’s where there shouldn’t be any, but we don’t. Every student wants to learn to speak with an American accent because it has the highest level of intelligibility owing to exposure via cinema, music, expatriate communities, etc.

Post by vintermann » Thu, May 08, 2025, 9:07 AM UTC

orbital-decay wrote: post #67

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…

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.

Post by ahazred8ta » Thu, May 08, 2025, 9:31 PM UTC

ilyausorov wrote: post #29

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…

For sure, and I don't think we ever use the term default or neutral. The "the American English accent of our expert accent coach Eliza" is just that -- it's one accent. As a learning platform that provides instruction to our users, we do need to set some kind of direction in our pedagogy, but we 100% recognize that there isn't just 1 American English accent, and there's lots of variance.