Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters

accent-explorer.boldvoice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 133 posts

Re: How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters

#61

Post by Jemaclus »

retrac wrote: post #49

I'm deaf. Something close to standard Canadian English is my native language. Most native English speakers claim my speech is unmarked but I think they're being polite; it's slightly marked as unusual and some with a good ear can easily tell it's because of hearing loss. Using the accent guesser, I have a Swedish accent. Danish and Australian English follow as a close tie. It's not just the AI. Non-native speakers of…

I'm also deaf, and I took 14 years of speech therapy. I grew up in Alabama. The only way you would know I'm from the South is because of the pin-pen merger[1]. Otherwise, you'd think I grew up in the American Midwest, due to how my speech therapy went. Almost nobody picks up on it, unless they are linguists that already knew about the pin-pen merger.

[1]https://www.acelinguist.com/2020/01/the-pin-pen-merger.html

Re: How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters

#63

Post by nocoiner »

Jemaclus wrote: post #61
retrac wrote: post #49

I'm deaf. Something close to standard Canadian English is my native language. Most native English speakers claim my speech is unmarked but I think they're being polite; it's slightly marked as unusual and some with a good ear can easily tell it's because of hearing loss. Using the accent guesser, I have a Swedish accent. Danish and Australian English follow as a close tie. It's not just the AI. Non-native speakers of…

I'm also deaf, and I took 14 years of speech therapy. I grew up in Alabama. The only way you would know I'm from the South is because of the pin-pen merger[1]. Otherwise, you'd think I grew up in the American Midwest, due to how my speech therapy went. Almost nobody picks up on it, unless they are linguists that already knew about the pin-pen merger. [1] https://www.acelinguist.com/2020/01/the-pin-pen-merger.html

I’m aware of the merger, but I literally can’t hear a difference between the words. I certainly pronounce them the same way.

I also think merry-marry-Mary are all pronounced identically. The only way I can conceive of a difference between them is to think of an exaggerated Long Island accent, which, yeah, I guess is what makes it an accent.

Re: How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters

#64

Post by f7f3 »

TomNomNom wrote: post #55

I tried the oracle and got this: > Your accent is Dutch, my friend. I identified your accent based on subtle details in your pronunciation. Want to sound like a native English speaker? I'm British; from Yorkshire. When letting it know how it got it wrong there's no option more specific than "English - United Kingdom". That's kind of funny, if not absurd, to anyone who knows anything of the incredible range of accents…

It's quite offensive. English is my native tongue, I got a perfect IELTS score, and one of my parents was an English professor. But my accent makes me less than "native".

Re: How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters

#65

Post by bikeshaving »

agrnet wrote: post #45
bikeshaving wrote: post #14

The source code for this is unminified and very readable if you’re one of the rare few who has interesting latent spaces to visualize. https://accent-explorer.boldvoice.com/script.js?v=5

could you explain what it means for someone to “have interesting latent spaces”? curious how you’re using that metaphor here

I don’t think I’m using it as a metaphor? To “have interesting latent spaces” just means you have access to the actual weights and biases, the artifact produced by fine-tuning/training models, or you can somehow “see” activations as you feed input through the model. This can be turned into interesting 3D visualizations and reveal “latent” connections in the data which often align with and allow us to articulate similarities in the actual phenomena which these “spaces” classify.

Not many people have the privilege of access to these artifacts, or the skill to interpret these abstract, multi-dimensional spaces. I want more of these visualizations, with more spaces which encode different modalities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_space

Re: How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters

#66

Post by gertlex »

retrac wrote: post #49

I'm deaf. Something close to standard Canadian English is my native language. Most native English speakers claim my speech is unmarked but I think they're being polite; it's slightly marked as unusual and some with a good ear can easily tell it's because of hearing loss. Using the accent guesser, I have a Swedish accent. Danish and Australian English follow as a close tie. It's not just the AI. Non-native speakers of…

Hard of hearing, from the midwest; also identified as Swedish by the accent guesser.

Re: How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters

#67

Post by JakeLester »

bheadmaster wrote: post #11
nosrepa wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, if only there was a protocol for that.

It would have taken you a second more to type out "RSS", and turn a sarcastic comment into an informative one. Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1053/

1: me 2: also thnx for the laugh

Re: How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters

#68

Post by gucci-on-fleek »

retrac wrote: post #49

I'm deaf. Something close to standard Canadian English is my native language. Most native English speakers claim my speech is unmarked but I think they're being polite; it's slightly marked as unusual and some with a good ear can easily tell it's because of hearing loss. Using the accent guesser, I have a Swedish accent. Danish and Australian English follow as a close tie. It's not just the AI. Non-native speakers of…

Wow, I'm not deaf, but almost everything you mentioned applies to me too. I've never met anyone else who has experienced this before, yet all of your following points apply exactly to me:

> standard Canadian English is my native language

> Most native English speakers claim my speech is unmarked

> Non-native speakers of English often think I have a foreign accent, too. Often they guess at English or Australian. Like I must have been born there and moved here when I was younger, right?

> They sometimes recognize that I have a speech impediment but there's something about how I talk that is recognized with confidence as a native accent.

At least 2 or 3 times a year, someone asks me if I'm British, but me and my parents were born in Canada, and I've never even been to England, so I'm not really sure why some people think that I have a British accent. Interestingly, the accent checker guesses that my accent is

  American English    89%
  Australian English  3%
  French              3%
which is pretty close to correct.

Re: How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters

#70

Post by glandium »

hencq wrote: post #51
dwohnitmok wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > By clicking or tapping on a point, you will hear a standardized version of the corresponding recording. The reason for voice standardization is two-fold: first, it anonymizes the speaker in the original recordings in order to protect their privacy. Second, it allows us to hear each accent projected onto a neutral voice, making it easier to hear the accent differences and ignore extraneous differen…

I'm kind of curious if it would be possible for it to use my own voice but decoupled from accent. I.e. could it translate a recording from my voice to a different accent but still with my voice. If so, I wonder if that makes it easier for accent training if you can hear yourself say things in a different accent.

That would be interesting for sure, but considering you don't hear yourself the same way someone else or a mic does, I'm not sure it would have the benefit you're expecting.
Post reply on HN