Irish accent appears to break it.
We are working on this - we don't have quite enough Irish speech data.
How do you know? Your “UK” set is liable to have some Irish accents in it. You need to break down regions more
How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters
81–90 of 133 posts
Re: How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters
#82Try yourself here: https://start.boldvoice.com/accent-oracle
It wrongly pegged me as Swedish.
It's second choice was the place I live, and third place was where I'm from, so not too bad overall. I have been told I have a very ambiguous accent though.
Re: How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters
#83I 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…
> I also think the question "Do you have an accent when speaking English?" is an odd one. Everyone has an accent when speaking any language. Sure, I agree. But look at it from the perspective of a foreigner living in an English-speaking country, which is probably their target demographic. We know that as soon as we open our mouth the locals will instantly pigeonhole us as "a foreigner". No matter how good we might be…
It's not ethical to lie to people about whether they need something you're selling, especially if you're playing on their fears of vulnerability to make the sale. Laundering the lies through an AI model doesn't make it any less bad.
BoldVoice is very clear about being an American accent "training app", so that's not (necessarily) what's happening here, but the point remains.
Re: How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters
#84I 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".
IELTS is a test for non-native English speakers. Why did you have to take it?
Re: How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters
#85I 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…
I agree there is no such thing as a "British accent", though I'm lucky that my mockney lilt is considered to be one, but Dutch, Danish and Yorkshire are very similar for historical reasons so it's somewhat understandable for you to be detected as Dutch in this app.
I find Danes speaking Danish to sound like a soft Yorkshire accent, and the vowels that Yorkies use are better written in Danish, like phøne.
Re: How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters
#86It got me, native English speaker with British accent.
I was hoping it might drill down into regional accents though, there is a huge variety in the UK. I have a Midlands accent which can occasionally confuse non-native speakers.
Re: How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
IELTS is a test for non-native English speakers. Why did you have to take it?
It's often required for immigration purposes. Countries/Universities will let you off where you're coming from a country that has english as it's main language or have studied a degree in the language, but they often won't if you're a native English speaker living elsewhere.
Re: How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters
#88I 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…
> I also think the question "Do you have an accent when speaking English?" is an odd one. Everyone has an accent when speaking any language. Sure, I agree. But look at it from the perspective of a foreigner living in an English-speaking country, which is probably their target demographic. We know that as soon as we open our mouth the locals will instantly pigeonhole us as "a foreigner". No matter how good we might be…
[deleted]
Re: How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters
#89I 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…
>That's kind of funny, if not absurd, to anyone who knows anything of the incredible range of accents across the UK.
Yeah I was disappointed when I realised this post was about foreign accents and not regional accents in English across the world.
Re: How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters
#90> 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.
I wonder if they have a large population of African French speakers in the dataset?