Live data from Hacker News

AI Guesses Your Accent

start.boldvoice.com

241–250 of 274 posts

Re: AI Guesses Your Accent

#241
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, founder here! We're a YC-funded education app with over 1 million downloads, currently #7 on the Education chart of the App Store. The goal of the accent oracle tool is to help more non-native English speakers find out about BoldVoice. While it's important as consumers to be aware of data privacy with AI tools in general, I want to set the record straight that that's not the point of what we're doing here. But gr…

Hey! Just to be clear I really didn't want to imply that you were trying to clone my voice. I think your product is very interesting and this demo is a nice showcase of your tech. It was meant more as a reflection on how, due to how fast threat models evolve, even the seemingly innocuous act of recording 2 sentences on a random website can now be used to break into my bank account.

Gotcha, totally fair to be discerning with your data these days.

Re: AI Guesses Your Accent

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, founder here! We're a YC-funded education app with over 1 million downloads, currently #7 on the Education chart of the App Store. The goal of the accent oracle tool is to help more non-native English speakers find out about BoldVoice. While it's important as consumers to be aware of data privacy with AI tools in general, I want to set the record straight that that's not the point of what we're doing here. But gr…

I tried the app, and it's great. As a near-native French speaker I would be interested in working out my French pronunciation, hopefully you will go multi-language soon.

Thanks for checking it out! We're 100% in on English for now, but some day!

Re: AI Guesses Your Accent

#244
I'll be impressed when it can tell me I have a California English accent. Surprised it doesn't even discriminate the vast pronunciation differences between British, Oceanic, Caribbean, African and American native English accents.

Re: AI Guesses Your Accent

#246
post #159
post #2

It's fun but as I tested it I realized how this is pretty much the modern equivalent of a Facebook quiz that asks you the name of your first pet, first car and mother's maiden name. If they recorded any of that they likely have enough to clone my voice somewhat faithfully. Congratulations on labelling my French Canadian accent as French though, I'll have to work on my pronounciation more to fool the AI.

Just want to say "Thank you!" for sharing your instinct for privacy concerns. That also made me pause to click on Try Me on the site. Hard pass.

A privacy policy wouldn't stop a bad actor, just like a robots.txt wouldn't prevent scraping.

Re: AI Guesses Your Accent

#247
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or use a phone. Who knows what they could be doing on their end?

Re: AI Guesses Your Accent

#248

Really fun is trying to do various accents and seeing what it thinks you sound like, I tried my best South African and it thought Japanese. Guess I need to work on my mimicry

I'm half South African and can do many of the different accents, notably Afrikaans, Cape Town (white and coloured) and black SA, they're all very different. I'm pretty sure most people think of Wickus v.d. Merwe from District 9, but that's not the only one!

I can also speak a bunch of other languages without accent so good luck for any AI to fit me in a box :P

Re: AI Guesses Your Accent

#250

I’d be interested in a version of this that guesses regional American accent backgrounds. I’d like to think it would have a hard time with me.

Nice suggestion! BoldVoice focuses on helping non-native English speakers to learn the American accent, so we tailored the accent oracle to non-native accents specifically.

Have you thought of expanding to native American English speakers who want to learn a more "standard" accent? There are many Americans who feel that their strong regional accent (think e.g. Chicago, Mississippi, Baltimore, and different black accents) can be career-limiting.
Post reply on HN