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How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters

accent-explorer.boldvoice.com

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

#91

Post by kallistisoft »

johnwatson11218 wrote: post #30

I just got a project running whereby I used python + pdfplumber to read in 1100 pdf files, most of my humble bundle collection. I extracted the text and dumped it into a 'documents' table in postgresql. Then I used sentence transformers to reduce each 1K chunk to a single 384D vector which I wrote back to the db. Then I averaged these to produce a document level embedding as a single vector. Then I was able to apply…

This sounds like an interesting project. Do you have any plans to publish a tutorial/journal article + source code?

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

#92

Post by chronci739 »

physicsguy wrote: post #87
Antibabelic wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Countries/Universities will let you off where you're coming from a country that has english as it's main language

Singapore is a “native” English speaking country yet has an extremely distinctive accent.

(usually seen as a negative by both Singaporeans and non-Singaporeans)

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

#93

Post by fnands »

fnands wrote: post #82

Try 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.

Tried again and this time it got me. Second place is still Swedish. Looking at the UMAP visualisation, there is a South African cluster overlapping with a Swedish cluster, so makes sense I guess.

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

#94

Post by blixt »

It would be interesting to do a wider test like this but instead of trying to clump people together into "American English" and "British English" it would be interesting if the data point was "in which city do people speak like you do?" and create a geographic map of accents.

I'm from the south of Sweden and I've had my "accent" made fun of by people from Malmö just because I grew up outside of Helsingborg, because the accent changes that much in just 60 kilometers.

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

#95

Post by CamouflagedKiwi »

tavavex wrote: post #78
bashtoni wrote: post #72

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.

It's not common any more, very few people really speak RP these days. The more usual thing accent that people might think of is sometimes called "Standard Southern British" (I've heard "BBC English" as well).

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

#97

Post by FromTheSteppe »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #22
afiodorov wrote: post #12

Apparently Persian and Russian are close. Which is surprising to say the least. I know people keep getting confused about how Portuguese from Portugal and Russian sound close yet the Persian is new to me.

Idea: Farsi and Russian both have simple list of vowel sounds and no diphtongs. Making it hard/obvious when attempting to speak english, which is rife with them and many different vowel sounds

While Persian has only two diphtongs and 6-8 vowels, Other Languages of Iran are full of them(e.g. Southern Kurdish speakers can pronounce 12+1 vowels and 11 diphtongs). I find it funny if all Iranians are speaking English with the Persian accent.

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

#98

Post by stared »

I am curious - why UMAP not t-SNE? (See https://pair-code.github.io/understanding-umap/) When I saw the vis, there is a a collection of lines, which look as an artifact. t-SNE (typically) gives more "organic" results of blobs, provided you set perplexity high enough.

Also, while I admire examples of instances, it would be interesting to the map or original laguages - which is close to which, in terms of their English accents.

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

#99

Post by stared »

chronci739 wrote: post #92
physicsguy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Countries/Universities will let you off where you're coming from a country that has english as it's main language Singapore is a “native” English speaking country yet has an extremely distinctive accent. (usually seen as a negative by both Singaporeans and non-Singaporeans)

I had a 3-month stay in Singapore (at CQT, NUS).

The first two days were a shock, as I felt it was a different language. But just after some time, god adjusted. And I find endearing both Singlish pronunciation and phrases.

For example, the first time I hear "ondah-cah?" I was puzzled. Then understood that it is "Monday can?". Which, as I learned, means "Would Monday work for you?".

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

#100

Post by alex-moon »

Fascinated by the cluster of Australian, British and South African. As an Australian living in UK, I hear an enormous difference between these accents - even just in the British ones, the Yorkshireman and the Geordie stick out like a sore thumb to me - the narcissism of small differences perhaps. Interestingly, my partner, who is from England, often says, of various Australians we hear (either on TV or my friends), that they sound British to her. I, meanwhile, can pick an Australian from very few words. What are we hearing differently? It is a mystery to me.
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