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AI Guesses Your Accent

start.boldvoice.com

191–200 of 274 posts

Re: AI Guesses Your Accent

#191
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this website know who you are?

Did you know that something like 80% of the websites you visit are tracked by a handful of companies which are all effectively sharing that with many thousands of ad and data broker companies which can easily narrow you down? It's not tinfoil hat land to knkw that nearly every site you visit has cross-site tracking.

Well yea but as far as I know these companies know your identity but the website only know you as a number shown in statistics.

So if this thing isn't a trap from big tech you are fine.

Re: AI Guesses Your Accent

#192
Complete garbage. Native USA-born (but well travelled) English speaker and it tagged me with Swahili (24%), French (19%), and Persian (19%). I was speaking quietly because it's late here, but that shouldn't have made a difference.

Re: AI Guesses Your Accent

#193
post #30

I knew my accent was strong, but I didn't expect to get 100% Portuguese, which is strange since Portuguese from Portugal sounds more like Eastern Europe, and Portuguese Brazil is more like Spanish. Maybe it considers both accents to be Portuguese? A fun fact: When using Whisper by OpenAI, there seems to be a ~1% chance that all my text, which was spoken entirely in English, is automatically transcribed and translated…

> Portuguese from Portugal sounds more like Eastern Europe, and Portuguese Brazil is more like Spanish. Surely you mean the opposite? Portugal is literally next to Spain and both languages have coexisted since they were both born following Rome's fall. Both Galician and Portugal's Portugese are likely similar to each other and closer to Spanish than Brazil's Portuguese

He is correct.

I've heard it described as if a drunk russian was trying to speak spanish.

Re: AI Guesses Your Accent

#194

Congratulations: you gave someone a standardised sample of your voice they can use in a programmatic scam. Don't do this.

Now all they need to do is somehow work out who you are from only your IP - no email, name, location or anything - then simply get a voice cloning model to work perfectly from this small sample, then either somehow hack all the other information needed to get into your bank account or chase down your family to get them to send them crypto and they've got you dead to rights. Simple as that, which is why I also never t…

Better not publish anything on youtube either.

Re: AI Guesses Your Accent

#195

Whenever time permits, I have a (bad) habit of viewing source code of new website. In this case, I found this on this website: (haven't read the js yet to see what's the true intent but surely a sign of horrible engineering) edit- seems like remix customizations. "remove-watch-video-requirement": { "defaultValue": false, "rules": [{ "condition": { "env": "prod", "email": { "$in": [" @gmail.com", "redacted"] } }, "for…

Between typescript and all the front-end frameworks, reading web code nowadays is worse than reading disassembled native code.

Re: AI Guesses Your Accent

#196
I haven't tried it, as you get asked for the answers to common security questions, and supply a voice sample. You could lie but many people won't.

My other issue is that it will have been trained on a large number of voice samples and no one will learn how to distinguish different accents by using it, or even by developing it.

An alternative, knowledge-based approach, would work by splitting the speech into phonemes and matching phonemes/sequences of phonemes against known accents or foreign languages, e.g. if a native speaker rhymes "good" and "food", you can reliably tell they're either from Scotland or Ulster. Telling close accents apart is easy with the right phrases, e.g. "fish and chips" (Australian vs. New Zealand), "I saw the White House" (General American vs. Canadian). For non-native speakers, you can use the phoneme inventory of their native language, so if someone has difficulty in pronouncing "th" you can rule out Greek or Spanish (from Spain), and if someone has difficulty in pronouncing "f" they're probably Korean.

Of course, that's a lot of work up front, but you'd learn a lot in the process of developing such a system, and it would be able to explain its decisions to users. And by asking you to repeat standard phrases (like "good food") you would allay security concerns.

Re: AI Guesses Your Accent

#197

Fun to see this in the wild! I'm one of the co-founders of BoldVoice, AMA :) p.s. I'm Albanian and it guesses either Albanian or English for me, sometimes randomly Spanish.

What do you have to say about all the claims this is just a pretext to clone voices for nefarious ends?

Re: AI Guesses Your Accent

#198

I haven't tried it, as you get asked for the answers to common security questions, and supply a voice sample. You could lie but many people won't. My other issue is that it will have been trained on a large number of voice samples and no one will learn how to distinguish different accents by using it, or even by developing it. An alternative, knowledge-based approach, would work by splitting the speech into phonemes…

Have we tested the same website? You don’t get asked anything. You just read a text.

Re: AI Guesses Your Accent

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

French Canadian and France French accents are very different, so if the AI couldn't tell the difference, that doesn't speak well for it

Indeed. I learned Quebecois in school and when I started speaking it in Paris I got confused looks and "... do you speak English?"

I have a similar experience, but my impression is that Parisians have little patience for accents in general. People elsewhere in France where I've visited (Aix-en-provence, Lyon, Toulouse) had no trouble chatting with me.

Also want to note that I am not passing judgement, I am sure I might become a bit brusque with tourists if Montreal had the same volume.

Re: AI Guesses Your Accent

#200
post #30

I knew my accent was strong, but I didn't expect to get 100% Portuguese, which is strange since Portuguese from Portugal sounds more like Eastern Europe, and Portuguese Brazil is more like Spanish. Maybe it considers both accents to be Portuguese? A fun fact: When using Whisper by OpenAI, there seems to be a ~1% chance that all my text, which was spoken entirely in English, is automatically transcribed and translated…

> Portuguese from Portugal sounds more like Eastern Europe, and Portuguese Brazil is more like Spanish. Surely you mean the opposite? Portugal is literally next to Spain and both languages have coexisted since they were both born following Rome's fall. Both Galician and Portugal's Portugese are likely similar to each other and closer to Spanish than Brazil's Portuguese

One cool fact is that Galician sounds closer to Brazilian Portuguese. It also has much of the same vocabulary (with the notable exception of the days of the week which it borrows from the other Romance languages while Portuguese has its boring days of the week)
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