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AI Guesses Your Accent

start.boldvoice.com

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Re: AI Guesses Your Accent

#201

Post by DonaldFisk »

rcruzeiro wrote: post #198
DonaldFisk wrote: post #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…

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

A couple of comments implied this. If you just read some text, security is much less of an issue.

So I tried it. It guessed (correctly) that I'm a native English speaker. It only tells you which foreign accent you have.

Re: AI Guesses Your Accent

#205

Post by the_mar »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #201
rcruzeiro wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A couple of comments implied this. If you just read some text, security is much less of an issue. So I tried it. It guessed (correctly) that I'm a native English speaker. It only tells you which foreign accent you have.

"native English speaker" - is many different accents

Re: AI Guesses Your Accent

#206

Post by glandium »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #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…

The app this is kind of a PR for does phoneme-level analysis, so for all we know, this AI could be doing that as well. See https://youtu.be/j6z2WHAvqEs?t=100

Re: AI Guesses Your Accent

#207

Post by DonaldFisk »

jampa wrote: 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…

Presumably each training speech sample is labelled with native language. For Portuguese there would be two distinct clusters: Portugal and Brazil. If your speech is in either cluster, it would just tell you that your native language is Portuguese without being any more specific. Sure, it's a missed opportunity but it doesn't distinguish Jamaicans from Australians either.

I presume there's enough difference between English spoken by Portuguese and English spoken by Russians for those also to be distinct clusters.

Re: AI Guesses Your Accent

#208

Post by 1209412comb »

corpMaverick wrote: post #133
jackdawed wrote: post #52

This was a big confidence booster for me as when I first started learning English, people would complement me on how well I spoke English, but I took that as my accent was still detectable. It's only been in the past 5 years that people assumed I was American and made no comment on my English at all, until I disclosed that English was my second language. It's usually certain words that give me trouble, like "cupboard…

If you learned English after 16. You probably still have an accent. Native speakers are really, really, really good at detecting it. They probably know as soon as you say "Hi".

Non native can do this pretty good just due to how much American Media is available to the world.

Re: AI Guesses Your Accent

#209

Post by tasty_freeze »

jszymborski wrote: post #199
cperciva wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My wife was a French major in college and spent a year in Aix in the mid 80s. She didn't really enjoy the experience -- although her grammar and vocab were fine, she had enough of an accent that people treated her as an outsider.

On the way out of the country she stopped in Paris for a few days to take it in. She went into some shop and the proprietor asked my wife if she needed help. My wife replied asked about some clothes. The proprietor insulted my wife over her southern accent -- French southern, not US southern, and it made my wife's day. Someone in France finally thought she was french.

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