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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

#21

Post by anadalakra »

fxtentacle wrote: post #18
anadalakra wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can reach out and request your data to be deleted at any time.

"if you wish to opt out of future collection of voice samples, you may do so by disabling voice-related features in the BoldVoice app. Please note that this may limit the functionality of certain services." Yeah, I can opt out. By not using any voice-related feature in their voice training app.

If you're still actively using the app, the voice will be retained and processed so that you can receive instant feedback, and also so that you receive additional personalized practice items and video lessons based on your speech needs. If you don't want the samples saved "in perpetuity", you can request them to be deleted once you decide that you're done with the application. Hope this helps!

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

#22

Post by vessenes »

pjc50 wrote: post #20
vessenes wrote: post #11

This is super cool. A suggestion and some surprise: I’m surprised by your assertion that there’s no clustering. I see the representation shows no clustering, and believe you that there is therefore no broad high-dimensional clustering. I also agree that the demo where Victor’s voice moves closer to Eliza’s sounds more native. But, how can it be that you can show directionality toward “native” without clustering? I wo…

> It seems to have a list of “okay” and “bad” idiolects baked in We're back to "AI safety actually means brand safety": inept pushback against being made into an automated racism factory with their name on it.

100%

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

#23

Post by anadalakra »

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…

"If Victor wanted to move beyond this point, the sound-by-sound phonetic analysis available in the BoldVoice app would allow him to understand the patterns in pronunciation and stress that contribute to Eliza’s accent and teach him how to apply them in his own speech."

Indeed Victor would likely receive a personalized lesson and practice on the NG sound on the app.

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

#24

Post by vessenes »

BalinKing wrote: post #14
vessenes wrote: post #11

This is super cool. A suggestion and some surprise: I’m surprised by your assertion that there’s no clustering. I see the representation shows no clustering, and believe you that there is therefore no broad high-dimensional clustering. I also agree that the demo where Victor’s voice moves closer to Eliza’s sounds more native. But, how can it be that you can show directionality toward “native” without clustering? I wo…

(Minor nitpick, but I think "dialect" is a more appropriate word than "idiolect" here—at least according to Wikipedia, "idiolect" refers to a single person's way of speaking, whereas AAVE et al. are shared and are therefore considered dialects.)

OK, good read for me here. Based on your feedback and some research, I think I should have use ‘sociolect’ for both in that I was less complaining about ChatGPT’s unwillingness to use, say, finna, in a sentence, and more complaining about the vocalized accents. Anyway good catch, thanks!

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

#26

Post by ilyausorov »

treetalker wrote: post #2

This is cool and one of the applications of LLMs that I'm actually looking forward to: accent training when acquiring a new language, particularly hearing what you would sound like without an accent! That said, I found the recording of Victor's speech after practicing with the recording of his own unaccented voice to be far less intelligible than his original recording. Looking forward to seeing the developments in t…

Fair point! When Victor tried to speed up to speak as fast as Coach Eliza, while it sounded somewhat less accented, a few parts of the phrase did get less intelligible. 10 minutes of practice is only a start after all.

Interesting to note that we're also developing a separate measure of intelligibility that will give a separate sense of how intelligible versus accented something is.

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

#27

Post by ilyausorov »

wbroo wrote: post #17

Very interestng! Have you tested for other factors like speaking speed, emotional tone, or microphone quality to see what else is (or isn’t) influencing model perception?

For sure we did! The training data we used for this was purposely highly varied to account for these various factors so they don't cause too much bias in the model. But there's also an error rate regardless of how good you make it. We keep improving!

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

#28

Post by ilyausorov »

Goofy_Coyote wrote: post #25

Glad to see BoldVoice here. I’ve been using it for a few months, and I can confirm it’s working.

Happy to see a happy BoldVoice user. Please don't hesitate to reach out to our team with feedback or thoughts on how we can continue to improve your learning journey. Helping you succeed is our #1 priority!

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

#29

Post by ilyausorov »

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.

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

#30

Post by ilyausorov »

adhsu01 wrote: post #12

Super cool work, congrats BoldVoice team! I've always thought that one of the non-obvious applications of voice cloning/matching is the ability to show a language learner what they would sound like with a more native accent.

This and more exciting features are coming to the BoldVoice app soon!
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