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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

#71

Post by matsemann »

gxs wrote: post #65
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…

Yeah, as long as it’s intelligible an accent is perfectly fine It’s also perfectly fine to want to sound like a native speaker - whether it be because they are self conscious, think it will benefit them in some way, or simply want to feel like they are speaking “correctly” Sorry to pick on you, it’s just amazing to me how sensitive we are to “inclusivity” to the point where we almost discourage people wanting to fit…

Being legible also means to cater to your audience. I work in an English-speaking company in a country where English isn't the native language, with loads of non-native speakers from around the world. Sometimes the native/best English speakers are the ones being misunderstood, because they use idioms or advanced words. None of us are bad at English, and I don't mean that I need to "dumb it down" (if anything, verbally I'm one of the worser ones), but I don't feel like I'm missing out on speaking simple with an accent.

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

#72

Post by IshKebab »

ccppurcell wrote: post #19

Oh pssh. There's no such thing as accent strength. There's only accent distance. Accent strength is just an artefact of distance from the accent of a socially dominant group.

> Accent strength is just ... distance from the accent of a socially dominant group.

Yes, that is a good definition of accent strength.

> There's no such thing as accent strength.

??! You literally just defined it.

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

#73

Post by SamBam »

ilyausorov wrote: post #45
SamBam wrote: post #43

Like others recently, I've been extremely impressed by LLM's ability to play GeoGuessr, or, more generally, to geo-locate random snapshots that you give them, with what seem (to me) to be almost no context clues. (I gave ChatGPT loads of holiday snapshots, screenshotted to remove metadata, and it did amazingly.) I assume that, with enough training, we could get similarly accurate guesses of a person's linguistic hist…

We actually did something like this for non-native English speakers a few months back. Check out https://accentoracle.com (most mind-blowing if you're a non native English speaker)

Well, it says I'm Finish. But now I have a new game, where I put on my best Italian or Russian or Greek or Australian accent and try to see how close I am.

I'm terrible, according to the program. My Italian is Russian or Hungarian or Swedish, my Australian is English.

New party game unlocked.

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

#74

Post by dhosek »

matsemann wrote: post #71
gxs wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, as long as it’s intelligible an accent is perfectly fine It’s also perfectly fine to want to sound like a native speaker - whether it be because they are self conscious, think it will benefit them in some way, or simply want to feel like they are speaking “correctly” Sorry to pick on you, it’s just amazing to me how sensitive we are to “inclusivity” to the point where we almost discourage people wanting to fit…

Being legible also means to cater to your audience. I work in an English-speaking company in a country where English isn't the native language, with loads of non-native speakers from around the world. Sometimes the native/best English speakers are the ones being misunderstood, because they use idioms or advanced words. None of us are bad at English, and I don't mean that I need to "dumb it down" (if anything, verball…

Generalizing from my own experience, it’s easier for me to understand a non-native Spanish speaker than a native Spanish speaker and I would guess that the same applies with ESL speakers. One thing I found really fascinating is that even though I’d never studied French¹, I actually had an easier time understanding a conversation between my ex-wife and her aunt in French than when they spoke Spanish in which I was functional (my skill in the language has gone up a great deal since then so that I now read fluently, and speak and listen reasonably well, albeit less well than I would like).

⸻

1. Thanks to my kids studying French on Duolingo and my joining them, I can no longer say that I’ve never studied it.

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

#75

Post by ilyausorov »

SamBam wrote: post #73
ilyausorov wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We actually did something like this for non-native English speakers a few months back. Check out https://accentoracle.com (most mind-blowing if you're a non native English speaker)

Well, it says I'm Finish. But now I have a new game, where I put on my best Italian or Russian or Greek or Australian accent and try to see how close I am. I'm terrible, according to the program. My Italian is Russian or Hungarian or Swedish, my Australian is English. New party game unlocked.

Amazing! If you can make it go viral again too, I will love you!

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

#76

Post by dhosek »

SamBam wrote: post #43

Like others recently, I've been extremely impressed by LLM's ability to play GeoGuessr, or, more generally, to geo-locate random snapshots that you give them, with what seem (to me) to be almost no context clues. (I gave ChatGPT loads of holiday snapshots, screenshotted to remove metadata, and it did amazingly.) I assume that, with enough training, we could get similarly accurate guesses of a person's linguistic hist…

I’ve seen some online quizzes that based on regional variations in accent (does root rhyme with foot or boot?) and vocabulary (what do you call a sweet fizzy beverage) that did a great job of locating where my Facebook friends back in the day grew up. It got me a bit off largely because while I grew up in Chicago, I had spent most of my adult life in Los Angeles so I tend to prefer “freeway” to “expressway” (changing that answer moved me from Rockford to Chicago).

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

#77

Post by dhosek »

chris_va wrote: post #44
SamBam wrote: post #43

Like others recently, I've been extremely impressed by LLM's ability to play GeoGuessr, or, more generally, to geo-locate random snapshots that you give them, with what seem (to me) to be almost no context clues. (I gave ChatGPT loads of holiday snapshots, screenshotted to remove metadata, and it did amazingly.) I assume that, with enough training, we could get similarly accurate guesses of a person's linguistic hist…

I bet you are right. I had a forensic linguistics TA during college who was able to identify the island in southeast Asia one of the students grew up on, and where they moved to in the UK as a teenager before coming to the US (if I am remembering this story right). From what I gather, there are a lot of clues in how we speak that most brains edit out when parsing language.

Or the classic scene in Mrs Doubtfire where Pierce Brosnan attempts to locate the origin of Robin Williams’s fake English accent.

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

#78

Post by dhosek »

avalys wrote: post #68

I (an American from suburban Connecticut) was recently in London for an event and someone misheard me. Another Londoner said “It’s because of your accent!”, which of course was nonsense to me. What accent? I’d be really interested to play with this tool and see what it thinks of my accent. Can it tell where I grew up? Can it tell what my parents’ native languages are (not English!) A free tool like this would be grea…

What I find interesting is that it seems that folks from the UK tend to focus on consonants in distinguishing accents while in the US we distinguish more on vowels.

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

#79

Post by AJoxo »

SamBam wrote: post #73
ilyausorov wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We actually did something like this for non-native English speakers a few months back. Check out https://accentoracle.com (most mind-blowing if you're a non native English speaker)

Well, it says I'm Finish. But now I have a new game, where I put on my best Italian or Russian or Greek or Australian accent and try to see how close I am. I'm terrible, according to the program. My Italian is Russian or Hungarian or Swedish, my Australian is English. New party game unlocked.

I've been building that exact game

accentgame.xyz

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