[HN Gopher] AI Text-to-Speech models have accents too
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AI Text-to-Speech models have accents too
Author : jtwaleson
Score : 62 points
Date : 2021-07-10 11:59 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.waleson.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.waleson.com)
| yogue wrote:
| Fascinating. I tried Hindi, and at best, it's pretty similar to
| how Hollywood portrays a native Hindi speaker talk in English.
| Unlike the 1000+ Hindi speakers I know.
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| It took me around 5 plays of the English accented German to
| understand what it was attempting to say!
| numpad0 wrote:
| I guess this is today's lucky 10k[1] thing - Speech synthesis
| engines in most OS are not deep int[]-to-sound mappings, they are
| decades old hand built language specific algorithms that parse
| sentences and synthesize audio by patching library sounds or
| generate out of trigonometric in whatever way its designers
| thought would make sense.
|
| Some engines [ignore] foreign words, some pronounce as if _TEE-
| AYCH-EE-EYE_ are initialisms, some are built multilingual or
| otherwise as flexible and accommodating as possible. OS included
| engines are flexible kind because users would make them say
| "Your Souffle au Chocolat is arriving" _et cetra_.
|
| 1: https://xkcd.com/1053/
|
| e: ok maybe 100k or more than 10k
| pmontra wrote:
| I typed "Buongiorno, quanto fa venti per dieci?" and made the
| English voices read it. They sound like Stan Laurel and Oliver
| Hardy: they subbed themselves in Italian without knowing the
| language much. It surely added to their performance. You can
| check their accent at https://youtu.be/057aVSbqWiU
| high_byte wrote:
| They all sound the same on my end (Brave)
| qayxc wrote:
| It's using OS level TTS, you don't have the required language
| packages installed then and it falls back to the installed
| system default which in your case seems to be English.
| jefftk wrote:
| To really do this you want to break the text to speech into two
| pieces: use English to turn the text into phonemes, and then use
| the other language to turn the phonemes into audio.
|
| This only works if your phonemes are encoded pretty generically,
| though. For example, /f/ in English is labiodental while it's
| bilabial in Spanish, so if you want your accent changing to work
| right you'll need to either represent both as /f/ or have a
| reasonable model for picking the closest sound a speaker of a
| given language is likely to be able to reproduce for any given
| input.
| Retr0id wrote:
| What browser/OS combo do I need, to make this work?
|
| Edit: Worked on Firefox on Android
| jtwaleson wrote:
| I know Chrome works (not Chromium, as it uses online Google
| services) and iPhone should work too.
| wh33zle wrote:
| Firefox for Android works for me. Running version 89.
| jtwaleson wrote:
| Author here: I discovered this when I was building a
| multiplication table practice app for my 7 y/o son. You can play
| around with that here (try quiz mode): https://hugo-
| tafels.waleson.com/ . Note that the compliments and
| encouragements are a bit .. weird .. as I just took them from a
| random 'compliments to kids' website.
| smcameron wrote:
| Trivially, pico2wave has two English voices, "en-US" and "en-GB",
| having an "American" and "English" accents, respectively.
| Incidentally the "en-GB" one is quite a bit better than the "en-
| US" one to my ear.
|
| pico2wave also has:
|
| German (de-DE) English, US (en-US) English, GB (en-GB) Spanish
| (es-ES) French (fr-FR) Italian (it-IT)
|
| I think pico2wave's accents induced by cramming English text
| through the "wrong" language sound a bit better than the few I
| tried on the Mozilla web speech API, and it works offline, but I
| don't know that they sound good enough, similar enough to a real
| person's accent, to be really very useful for that.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| I tried a couple of most of them don't sound super accurate to
| foreign accents. The Dutch one the author highlighted is pretty
| far off from what I'm used to. It sounds more like a Dutch person
| trying to pronounce English like it was Dutch, rather than an
| actual Dutch accent.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| Yeah. The Japanese one does not sound like a Japanese accent at
| all. I think it's just reading it as though it were English.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| How can I run this on Wine? I'm getting this error
| $ wine Pix2Pix.exe
| Application could not be started, or no application associated
| with the specified file. ShellExecuteEx failed: Bad EXE
| format for Z:\Pix2Pix.exe. $ file Pix2Pix.exe
| Pix2Pix.exe: PE32+ executable (GUI) x86-64, for MS Windows
| jessedhillon wrote:
| What does `uname -a` return for you?
| C-x_C-f wrote:
| IMHO one of the reasons for the author's surprise is the
| colloquial use of the word _accent_ , whereby one usually means a
| mix of pronunciation [1] and intonation [2].
|
| I think that the surprise disappears once we look at these two
| factors individually. As per jefftk's comment, it is to be
| expected that TTS in a certain language will be limited to the
| phones (and thus the pronunciation) of its language. On the other
| hand, intonation is always bound to sound "foreign" seeing as
| this TTS software cannot get even the _original_ intonation right
| (try listening to the sample text with the US voice to see what I
| mean), let alone that of a different language.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intonation_(linguistics)
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| The surprising thing to some of us is how much it sounds like a
| human native speaker of that language speaking English. Not
| that it doesn't sound like 'native' English intonation, nobody
| would expect that, but still surprising to see how after being
| trained to speak language A, it sounds like a human language A
| speaker's accent when reading English too, even though that
| wasn't the training intent/setup. Perhaps not surprising to you
| that it would go like this because you understand the
| technology better so expected it!
|
| And then there are other people in this thread who disagree and
| _don 't_ think most of them sound very much like a human
| speaker of non-English language speaking English! So maybe it's
| not obvious after all...
| ionwake wrote:
| In a similar vein - can anyone recommend the lastest and best
| effort at emotive TTS? ( Preferably with an accessible API? )
| Thank you
| malf wrote:
| I noticed this last year and made a dumb game out of it:
| thisaccentdoesnotexist.com
| [deleted]
| JoeyBananas wrote:
| This is a well-understood phenomenon. I believe that a similar
| phenomenon occurs with vocaloids (which is basically text to
| speech software that is designed to sing songs.) I had no idea
| this was a thing until I happened to meet a person who is a
| vocaloid connoisseur.
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(page generated 2021-07-10 23:01 UTC)