[HN Gopher] AI Guesses Your Accent
___________________________________________________________________
AI Guesses Your Accent
Author : mikpanko
Score : 99 points
Date : 2024-12-11 19:54 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (start.boldvoice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (start.boldvoice.com)
| belval wrote:
| It's fun but as I tested it I realized how this is pretty much
| the modern equivalent of a Facebook quiz that asks you the name
| of your first pet, first car and mother's maiden name.
|
| If they recorded any of that they likely have enough to clone my
| voice somewhat faithfully.
|
| Congratulations on labelling my French Canadian accent as French
| though, I'll have to work on my pronounciation more to fool the
| AI.
| interloxia wrote:
| It would be nice if they were clear they wouldn't keep the
| sample on the page. They do have a privacy policy on their main
| site www.boldvoice.com/privacy
|
| It didn't guess for me other than to say I was a native
| speaker.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| French Canadian and France French accents are very different,
| so if the AI couldn't tell the difference, that doesn't speak
| well for it
| belval wrote:
| Does it regionalize at all? There are a few comments about
| Portugal Portuguese vs Brazil Portuguese so I think it only
| tries to find your first language, not actually pinpoint the
| underlying accent.
| imalerba wrote:
| Fell for it. 90% czech, 10% polish. Nothing further from the
| reality. I guess it just geolocates by IP?
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Don't think so, couldn't pick my Australian accent from here in
| Australia.
|
| I'll go back and lay it on real thick and see if it does
| better.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I think we both misunderstood.
|
| > You sound like a native English speaker. I couldn't
| identify any distinct non-native accent.
|
| I am a native English speaker, with an Australian accent. I
| think it's supposed to identify your non-english-native
| accent, which you wouldn't have one being Australian.
| markerz wrote:
| Doubt it. I'm traveling in Hawaii right now and am Chinese-
| American who can speak Spanish, but it labeled me as
| Hindi/Urdu.
| imalerba wrote:
| So I picked up the Czech accent but not the language, dang.
| WithinReason wrote:
| guessed 100% czech for me as well, wrongly
| glandium wrote:
| I'm in Japan, it correctly detected French. Can't be much
| further away geolocation wise.
| guytv wrote:
| worked 100% identifying my accent
| evan_ wrote:
| Interesting, I was hoping it would be more specific than
| "English" (e.g. "Southern Illinois"), but I'm sure that's just
| around the corner. It looks like this is an advertisement for a
| product to "lose" your accent, so as long as you sound like a
| native English-speaker they're happy.
|
| I tried again using an outrageously bad (probably to the point of
| offense) Scottish brogue and it pegged it as German.
| M3L0NM4N wrote:
| A part of my family is from rural southern Illinois. There is
| certainly an accent, and not a pretty one.
| mp3il wrote:
| Awesome growth move, love it
| sneeze-slayer wrote:
| Seems pretty bad. I tried it and got 99% Dutch but have never
| lived in the Netherlands.
| goshx wrote:
| I guess I don't have my native language's accent (which I tend to
| hear from native English speakers).
|
| It guessed Hebrew. My native language is Portuguese.
| xeckr wrote:
| It guessed Hebrew for me too when I was going for a German
| accent do caralho.
| leo3567 wrote:
| I think it's trained on Brazilian Portuguese. Although I have
| lived in the UK for the last 10 years, it got it right every
| single time.
| satoqz wrote:
| Well, as a German native speaker I'm quite satisfied that I can
| trick it into thinking I'm English :)
| loevborg wrote:
| Not me, I came out as 98% German. Oh well, I just need to own
| it!
| tetha wrote:
| 95% german, 5% dutch. Guess I can't stop schnacking on platt
| to some degree.
|
| Though this is raising the fun question: What makes a german
| accent in english? Harsh consonants? Is there some wiki or
| some articles to read up on that?
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| I tried it and it guessed correctly, but it can only guess
| between native and non-native accents. It can't guess "chicago"
| or something.
| andoando wrote:
| Holy shit. I grew up in Armenia when I was 8 and been in the US
| for 22 years, and by all accounts English is my primary language,
| and this got it spot on, with 84% confidence. Was not expecting
| that for such a unknown accent.
|
| I am guessing this was not trained on a dataset of people
| speaking English in various accents, but rather is directly
| detecting your native language.
| 3nwf248 wrote:
| I don't know, I'm Parska-Hye and came here when I was 9. I got
| 43% German, 23% English, 22% Hindu.
| andoando wrote:
| To be fair, parka-hye dialect is even more esoteric. I am
| guessing this was trained on eastern armniean
| rougka wrote:
| AI fingerprints your voice and sells it to ad companies
| DAGdug wrote:
| What does this mean - could you elaborate on what you mean by
| ad companies and how they would use voice data?
| jl6 wrote:
| Probably should be read as "bad actors", who, with enough
| samples of your voice, could theoretically do shady things
| like robo-call your mom, pretending to be you.
| DAGdug wrote:
| Okay, that's pretty different from ad companies. I've
| worked in the ads space and what the poster mentioned
| doesn't apply in any manner, AFAIK.
| rougka wrote:
| it's a joke, but it's not inconceivable that chatbots
| which support voice like chatgpt will use voice
| fingerprinting for ads
| anadalakra wrote:
| Not true - from the makers :)
| jayavanth wrote:
| do you store the recordings on your server?
| layer8 wrote:
| Probably on someone else's servers.
| rougka wrote:
| sorry, could not help myself :)
| ks2048 wrote:
| I'm not sure about that, but it is a good way to collect data
| on different accents.
| vidarh wrote:
| It guesses Swedish for me. I'm Norwegian. While they have some
| similar quirks, like sounding "sing-song-y" to a lot of native
| English speakers, Swedish and Norwegian English accents are
| usually quite distinguishable from each other.
|
| Given our (good-natured) neighbor-rivalry I'm of course horribly
| offended.
| yandie wrote:
| I've a very mixed accent and it just pretty much throw a random
| country in SE Asia (correct region) with different tries.
| world2vec wrote:
| Not even close, top 3 are geographically all on the other side of
| Europe. Nice try.
| personalityson wrote:
| It guessed right, but it does not go by the accent, but by
| pronunciation of certain consonants. You can fake/simulate the
| former, but not the latter.
| brap wrote:
| When I intentionally spoke in my native accent (which is not
| something I normally do), it guessed it with 100% confidence,
| even though it's not very common. Impressive.
|
| When I spoke like I normally do, it wasn't able to get anything
| on the first try, and on the second attempt it guessed 3 very
| different accents (e.g. Danish, Persian, ...) with more or less
| equal confidence. But it didn't guess my native accent at all.
|
| Huh, I always thought I sound almost American. Looks like my
| accent is untraceable at best.
| keybored wrote:
| I did a sing-songy Swedish impression and it got that right.
| jmdelatorre wrote:
| It guessed Spanish but I was expecting Chilean Spanish which is
| very different from your other Spanishes around the world.
| joshuamcginnis wrote:
| Did I just train a spam bot to use my voice?
| tartoran wrote:
| This tool works pretty well, it guessed me right as well as few
| of my coworkers who are from a different parts of the world and
| none of us have obvious accents. This is scary good but I'm
| afraid privacy will be impossible in the future, we'll be
| analyzed and categorized instantly. The only barrier to
| completely losing privacy is our own thoughts.
| jampa wrote:
| I knew my accent was strong, but I didn't expect to get 100%
| Portuguese, which is strange since Portuguese from Portugal
| sounds more like Eastern Europe, and Portuguese Brazil is more
| like Spanish. Maybe it considers both accents to be Portuguese?
|
| A fun fact: When using Whisper by OpenAI, there seems to be a ~1%
| chance that all my text, which was spoken entirely in English, is
| automatically transcribed and translated into pt-BR without any
| prompting. It happens more often when I am not paying too much
| attention to pronunciation.
|
| The weird thing is that all the words were transcribed correctly
| (beyond being entirely in a different language)
| specproc wrote:
| Didn't get my farm-Brummie.
| dboreham wrote:
| Hmm. I was expecting something that can differentiate between
| Stirling and Dunblane. Based on the comments it seems no.
| nu11ptr wrote:
| Not very good guesses. It had me read twice and I used a high
| quality mic. It guessed Spanish as my native language, but picked
| up a bit of Chinese and a bit of English. I am a native born
| American whose only language is English and a life long
| Midwesterner. I have a midwestern accent and occasionally some
| Canadian influences sneaks in (or so people have told me), but
| Spanish/Chinese? Completely wrong.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I had the same thing happen! 83% English, 3% Spanish, 2%
| Chinese.
|
| I am super midwestern, lived here all my life. I didn't realize
| I was saying "ope" until I saw a meme about it.
| bkovacev wrote:
| I'm genuinely surprised it got my accent right. Coming from
| Serbia, I'd never expect to get it right. My first guess was that
| it's geo-ip based, but I could be wrong.
| jcmp wrote:
| a lot of my international friends tried it form the same german
| wifi and it got all right :)
| itsadok wrote:
| The app this is advertising helps non-native speakers with their
| accent, I assume to sound more American. This is a great goal,
| and I'm sure there are a lot of people who would be willing to
| pay the $200-$300 yearly subscription cost. Apparently the AI
| part is not even the main function of the app, that's what the
| extra $100 are paying for[1].
|
| I would be interested in an AI-only product that would help me
| learn to passably immitate various English accents, like
| Australian, Irish and so forth, for fun. I know that ChatGPT
| Voice can do accents pretty well, I've been wondering if it would
| also be able to help me with mine, but I haven't tried it
| seriously.
|
| [1] https://www.boldvoice.com/frequently-asked-questions
| keybored wrote:
| > The app this is advertising helps non-native speakers with
| their accent, I assume to sound more American.
|
| Do people want to learn to speak English like a twangy guitar
| on purpose?
| elmerfud wrote:
| I could absolutely see people be willing to pay for this. I am
| from the Midwest in the United States and I happened to be at
| an airport in some foreign country. Someone else heard me
| talking and they came up and asked me where I learned to speak
| English because it was so smooth. They were looking to get
| lessons to make their English better or at least more smooth. I
| thought their English was fine and they were a bit disappointed
| when I mentioned I was from the United States.
| psb wrote:
| I would pay for an equivalent app that helped my German
| pronunciation
| glandium wrote:
| I would be interested in an equivalent app for Japanese.
| glandium wrote:
| It's kind of annoying when services like this provide a free
| trial that you have to give a credit card number to even try,
| capitalizing on people forgetting to unsubscribe after trying.
|
| Also, I'm very suspicious when a credit card form is on
| $site.com rather than $financial-institution.com
| kyleblarson wrote:
| Would be cool if it could detect area specific accents. I grew up
| in Kentucky and tried it in a very thick Eastern KY accent and it
| just said native english speaker. (technically true) Here's what
| it sounds like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB8vHRH9A6M
| xyst wrote:
| this is the gen z/gen alpha equivalent of those "useless"
| personality surveys.
|
| stop feeding these companies your data.
| noncoml wrote:
| Bold voice is an app for improving your accent. This makes a
| case for a legitimate publicity stunt.
| delduca wrote:
| In my case, it said twice that it was Portuguese, but it's wrong,
| it should be Brazilian. :-)
| stuckkeys wrote:
| Tried it. You know for science. Told me 99% Russian. WRONG! I
| guess, "Good luck" to you Bryan Mills.
| souvlakee wrote:
| 100% russian, sad.
| felipelalli wrote:
| <<Your accent is Persian my friend. I identified your accent
| based on subtle details in your pronunciation. Listen to your
| audio, and bask in my predictive abilities.>> --- Wrong, my
| friend! I'm Brazilian and I speak Portuguese.
| tristor wrote:
| This was less interesting than I was hoping for, because it
| wasn't specific. It said I don't have a non-native English
| accent. Great, I already knew that. But I'm curious if it could
| place my regional accent in the United States. I'm originally
| from the Southern Midwest which has a distinct accent, but have
| made a great effort to neutralize my accent and believe I now
| sound neutrally American (what used to be called Nebraska
| Newscaster).
|
| Sounds like others tried and had similar results (not identifying
| Australian or Irish accents).
| jackdawed wrote:
| This was a big confidence booster for me as when I first started
| learning English, people would complement me on how well I spoke
| English, but I took that as my accent was still detectable. It's
| only been in the past 5 years that people assumed I was American
| and made no comment on my English at all, until I disclosed that
| English was my second language. It's usually certain words that
| give me trouble, like "cupboard" or "chef". The AI detected my
| accent as a mixture of German and English. When I tried to
| exaggerate my accent, it correctly detected Thai.
| shusaku wrote:
| It's funny because an app like this is probably more
| entertaining if it gets the wrong answer!
| create-username wrote:
| those words are your Shibboleths, words that give your origin
| away.
|
| When I was in Germany, friendly people used to compliment me on
| my language skill saying "your German is good!". To which I
| would reciprocate: "thanks, yours too!"
| donohoe wrote:
| It told me my accent was Spanish. I'm a native English speaker
| from Ireland living in NYC :)
| bmitc wrote:
| Wasn't even close. It suggested a language I do not speak.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Well, that's a terrible way to market a product. Not only do I
| not speak Hindi, but I also don't sound like I speak Hindi.
| layer8 wrote:
| ...or so you think. ;)
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| For me:
|
| English: 91%
|
| Nigerian: 4%
|
| Spanish: 3%
| davidw wrote:
| My wife is Italian. It guessed Greek.
| chamanbuga wrote:
| The first guess was shockingly spot on. Tried it again and it
| thought I was English. Tried it again and it thought I was Dutch.
| First guess was right though.
| 1317 wrote:
| quite disappointing, it just said English and nothing else
|
| well yes, but tell me what region!
|
| or _something_ other than just stating the obvious
| anadalakra wrote:
| Fun to see this in the wild! I'm one of the co-founders of
| BoldVoice, AMA :) p.s. I'm Albanian and it guesses either
| Albanian or English for me, sometimes randomly Spanish.
| ks2048 wrote:
| Doesn't work in Firefox.
|
| Edit: Firefox 133.0. Console shows error giving url:
| https://react.dev/errors/418?invariant=418
| yorwba wrote:
| It works in Firefox Nightly (135.0a1) for Android for me,
| although I have to accept the microphone prompt twice for
| some reason.
| glandium wrote:
| Works fine in Firefox 133 here.
| neom wrote:
| I have a particularly flat affect, apparently due to my autism,
| this thing could only tell I'm a native english speaker.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| It gave this native English speaker "Swedish" with p > 90%. Just
| confirms the feeling I get every time I go to Sweden that they
| really do speak better English than me.
| thr3000 wrote:
| Isn't it like 68 degrees today in Minnesota? I guess no one can
| accuse you of being snowed in and bored ;)
| binary132 wrote:
| I'd be interested in a version of this that guesses regional
| American accent backgrounds. I'd like to think it would have a
| hard time with me.
| anadalakra wrote:
| Nice suggestion! BoldVoice focuses on helping non-native
| English speakers to learn the American accent, so we tailored
| the accent oracle to non-native accents specifically.
| 3836293648 wrote:
| Speaking normally it identified me as English (seems it just
| means native and not actually specifically English?). Putting on
| a Swedish accent it got that too, but if it really picked up
| subtle details as claimed it should've identified that as English
| too as I break waaay too often with certain vowels.
|
| I'm surprised it considered my truly awful American native, but
| it needed two clips to decide that time. And 30% Hindi/Urdu?
| What?
| oytis wrote:
| Not quite, but pretty close, I am impressed. I'd say it's doing
| better than most people at least for me
| throw646577 wrote:
| Congratulations: you gave someone a standardised sample of your
| voice they can use in a programmatic scam.
|
| Don't do this.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I don't follow. Why is the data they are getting from this
| better than the billions of hours of captioned voice data
| available from youtube/tiktok/instagram/whatever?
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Maybe IP correlation?
| throw646577 wrote:
| That too I guess. And it sets a few cookies.
| throw646577 wrote:
| I don't mean to suggest that _this_ particular toy is much
| use. I just mean you should not give random internet games
| standardised samples of your voice, for this reason.
|
| It's a standardised sample, already correlated to text, close
| to the microphone, for one thing. You're just making it
| easier for them.
|
| I mean I suppose you can use "like and subscribe", "without
| further ado", and "let's get started" as standardised samples
| if you want to catch a youtuber.
|
| But AFAIK my voice isn't on the internet anywhere. Quite a
| lot of people are not.
|
| There's a number of ways this information can be connected
| back, with varying precision, to the person who recorded it.
|
| And we should have learned from the Cambridge Analytica
| scandal that data is used in ways we do not expect. For
| example, what if you don't care to reproduce someone's voice,
| but you do care to extract age/gender/racial
| background/sexual orientation from it?
| adverbly wrote:
| Jokes on them. I only tried impressions. It's going to make for
| some pretty funny programmatic scams!
| throw646577 wrote:
| I have often wondered how much of someone's actual voice
| leaks through into their impersonations in a way that can be
| detected.
|
| I just saw an incredible Facebook reel of a voice actor,
| Shelby Young, saying the same thing in a striking range of
| theatrical voices, and I still wonder. How much of her true
| vocal fingerprint is unavoidably there?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyNnyeu_kPU
|
| (As a fan of old movies, "Vintage" was particularly
| impressive to me -- she is impersonating not just voices but
| also the choice of tonality those actors made in light of
| recording technology)
| amiga386 wrote:
| It reminds me of the old Mr T Name Generator
| (http://brunching.com/mrtname.html)
|
| You enter your First Name, Last Name, Gender, Date of Birth,
| Pet's Name and Mother's Maiden Name and press the button to
| find out what your Mr T Name is...
|
| ... Mr T says your name is FOOL
| tln wrote:
| Ha ha now it prints the CGI source
| #!/usr/bin/perl use CGI; $section =
| "toys"; $author = "steveb"; $title = "Your Mr.
| T Name"; $s_title = "mrtname"; $cat1 =
| "moviestv"; print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
| require "makehead.pl"; print &MakeHead; print
| <<EOFILE; <P>Your Mr. T name is:</P> <CENTER><P
| CLASS="head1">Fool</P></CENTER> EOFILE print
| &MakeFoot;
| sixothree wrote:
| Why is this on the front page of HN?
| EGreg wrote:
| https://start.boldvoice.com/accent-guesser
| gobins wrote:
| Interesting that it actually guessed as the neighbouring country.
| I live close to the border but have never interacted with the
| people across. Wonder if there might be similarities in tone and
| inflection.
| amelius wrote:
| Maybe the GPS signal was slightly off ;)
| muhammadusman wrote:
| I'm happy with my mix of Urdu + English accent, I got an 80% on
| Urdu which seems about right. I am impressed by this and now I'd
| like to hear others and how well it matches their voice.
| Although, I don't need coaching or anything to remove my accent,
| it makes me me.
| adverbly wrote:
| I tried my best Arnold Schwarzenegger accent.
|
| It had me as English, French and Spanish. I'm not very good at
| accents to be fair.
| wigster wrote:
| i'm english - it gave me 99% danish, 1% swedish. hmmm
| a13n wrote:
| Did my best Borat voice and got Italian - Russian - Bulgarian.
| belfalas wrote:
| For a really hard one give it audio of William F Buckley!
| Oarch wrote:
| Or Moira Rose
| harel wrote:
| Got my accent wrong twice in a row. Was not even close.
| jart wrote:
| 97% English? Boring. It should be able to detect regional English
| dialects. I want to know what kind of English.
| gauravphoenix wrote:
| Whenever time permits, I have a (bad) habit of viewing source
| code of new website. In this case, I found this on this website:
| (haven't read the js yet to see what's the true intent but surely
| a sign of horrible engineering)
|
| edit- seems like remix customizations.
| "remove-watch-video-requirement": {
| "defaultValue": false, "rules":
| [{ "condition": {
| "env": "prod", "email": {
| "$in": ["micaelajhilmeet@gmail.com",
| "ilya+demoaiconversation@usorov.com"]
| } },
| "force": true }]
| }, "score-only-lesson-phoneme": {
| "defaultValue": true },
| "auto-stop-recording-for-all-practice": {
| "defaultValue": true, "rules": [{
| "condition": { "env":
| "prod", "email": {
| "$in": ["ptisch@duck.com", "7gydmwmvqv@privaterelay.appleid.com",
| "lalageophone@live.com"]
| } },
| "force": false }]
| }, "use-speechace-v9": {
| "defaultValue": true },
| "april-2022-price-increase-experiment": {
| "defaultValue": false, "rules":
| [{ "condition": {
| "env": "prod", "email": {
| "$in": ["ilya@usorov.com", "anada.lakra@gmail.com",
| "murphyarman@gmail.com", "david@boldvoice.com",
| "jagadishd9@gmail.com"] }
| }, "force": false
| sergiotapia wrote:
| That's amazing, I always thought I had no accent but there you go
| right on the money it guessed Spanish!
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(page generated 2024-12-11 23:00 UTC)