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…
Some variants of Australian English are very similar to Canadian English. I can't always immediately tell if someone is from Canada or home.
This is probably because some states in Aus use Queens English passed down from the colonies.
> This voice standardization model is an in-house accent-preserving voice conversion model. Not sure this model works really well. As a french/spanish native speaker, I can immediately recognize an actual French or Spanish person speaking in english, but the examples here are completly foreign to me. If I had to guess where the "french" accent was from I would have guessed something like Nigeria. For example spanish…
For sure the voice standardization model is not perfect, but it was important for us to do especially for the voice privacy. It’s still pretty early tech.
Since our own accents generally sound neutral to ourselves, I would love someone to make an accent-doubler - take the differences between two accents and expand them, so an Australian can hear what they sound like to an American, or vice-versa
If we assume this model is accurate, I sound to Americans like I'm South African!
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 was born in Brooklyn, to Yiddish speaking parents and Yiddish was my first language. I now spend half my time in California and half in Israel. The accent checker said 80% American English, 16% Spanish, and 4% Brazilian Portuguese. In Israel they ask if I’m Russian when I speak Hebrew. In the US, people ask where I’m from all the time because my accent—and especially my grammar—is odd. The accent checker doesn’t look for grammatical oddities but that’s where a lot of my “accent” comes from.
Did research on accent, pronunciation improvement, phoneme recognition, kaldi ecosystem, etc … nothing really changed in the public domain past few years. There’s no even accurate open source dataset. All self claimedccc manually labelled dataset with 10k+ hours was partly done with automation. Next issue, model models operates in different latent space often with 50ms chunks while pronunciation assessment requires m…
You are right and I don't think incentives exist to solve the issues you describe, because currently many of the building blocks people are building are aligned to erase subtleaccent differences: the neural codecs, transcription systems such as whisper want to output clean/compressed representations of their inputs.
> This voice standardization model is an in-house accent-preserving voice conversion model. Not sure this model works really well. As a french/spanish native speaker, I can immediately recognize an actual French or Spanish person speaking in english, but the examples here are completly foreign to me. If I had to guess where the "french" accent was from I would have guessed something like Nigeria. For example spanish…
It's probably an artifact of them lumping together all varieties/dialects of a given language. I don't speak Spanish, but I know that the R is one of the things that's different in e.g. Argentina.
The fact that they believe there to be a single 'British' accent means this can be quickly discounted as nonsense.
When people mention a single "British accent", in 99% of the cases it's just a more widely understood shorthand for Received Pronunciation. I don't see how that's bad or wrong, considering how common it is in education.
Since our own accents generally sound neutral to ourselves, I would love someone to make an accent-doubler - take the differences between two accents and expand them, so an Australian can hear what they sound like to an American, or vice-versa
I've found that when I'm listening to recordings of me my accent really sticks out to me in a way that's completely inaudible when listening to myself live. This happens with both English and my native German.
The fact that they believe there to be a single 'British' accent means this can be quickly discounted as nonsense.
When people mention a single "British accent", in 99% of the cases it's just a more widely understood shorthand for Received Pronunciation. I don't see how that's bad or wrong, considering how common it is in education.
I would say in 99% of cases people mean Estuary English.