AI Guesses Your Accent(start.boldvoice.com) |
AI Guesses Your Accent(start.boldvoice.com) |
- 65% English, 10% Dutch, 9% Russian
- 90% English, 3% Spanish, 2% German
- 89% English, 5% Spanish, 3% Russian
They couldn't guess my accent (they were all over the world, each time I tried it).
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.
It recognizes my accent correctly too btw
English: 91%
Nigerian: 4%
Spanish: 3%
well yes, but tell me what region!
or something other than just stating the obvious
Given our (good-natured) neighbor-rivalry I'm of course horribly offended.
Better luck next time!
Not bad, as I have been accused of having a not-so-prominent English accent by people around me
stop feeding these companies your data.
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?
The ones that first come to mind for me are:
- The "th" sound. It's often pronounced like "z" (like the s in German's "sein"). So "that" becomes "zat".
- W becomes V, ie, "When" becomes "ven".
- The short "a" as in "cat" turns into "eh". "Laptop" becomes "Leptop".
It guessed Hebrew. My native language is Portuguese.
My other issue is that it will have been trained on a large number of voice samples and no one will learn how to distinguish different accents by using it, or even by developing it.
An alternative, knowledge-based approach, would work by splitting the speech into phonemes and matching phonemes/sequences of phonemes against known accents or foreign languages, e.g. if a native speaker rhymes "good" and "food", you can reliably tell they're either from Scotland or Ulster. Telling close accents apart is easy with the right phrases, e.g. "fish and chips" (Australian vs. New Zealand), "I saw the White House" (General American vs. Canadian). For non-native speakers, you can use the phoneme inventory of their native language, so if someone has difficulty in pronouncing "th" you can rule out Greek or Spanish (from Spain), and if someone has difficulty in pronouncing "f" they're probably Korean.
Of course, that's a lot of work up front, but you'd learn a lot in the process of developing such a system, and it would be able to explain its decisions to users. And by asking you to repeat standard phrases (like "good food") you would allay security concerns.
So I tried it. It guessed (correctly) that I'm a native English speaker. It only tells you which foreign accent you have.
This is arguably somewhat aligned with the usual reaction which goes 50/50 between "English accent" and "I have no idea" ;)
[English-from-England is my native language, but I did live in Switzerland from age 4, and USA from age 27]
It had me as English, French and Spanish. I'm not very good at accents to be fair.
I am from south jersey and close enough to philly to have a similar accent. I have been traveling and had people pinpoint where I was from multiple times.
Its making me wonder if my reading voice is more proper. Or possibly the thing just doesn’t work.
Over the years, starting in my late teens (I'm in my late 30s now), I've put TONS of effort into sounding like a native speaker (moving to the US 10+ years ago has certainly helped).
I feel so validated right now :)
It only does non-English accents I guess. That wasn't clear.
I am not sure that is the case. There is an AI accent generator that can do different English accents, sort of what I was suggesting to identify:
https://www.narakeet.com/languages/british-accent-generator/...
Edit: Firefox 133.0. Console shows error giving url: https://react.dev/errors/418?invariant=418
I can also speak a bunch of other languages without accent so good luck for any AI to fit me in a box :P
(It guessed correctly after the 2nd round)
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.
It didn't guess for me other than to say I was a native speaker.
It was meant more as a reflection on how, due to how fast threat models evolve, even the seemingly innocuous act of recording 2 sentences on a random website can now be used to break into my bank account.
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)
Don't do this.
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.
Do people want to learn to speak English like a twangy guitar on purpose?
Also, I'm very suspicious when a credit card form is on $site.com rather than $financial-institution.com
Then I did my best Russian accent and on the first time it gave me Hindi/Urdu at 80+%. I tried it a second time rolling my r's a bit more and it settled on Russian at 70%.
I think it's very sensitive to specific tells and I suspect the dataset for Russian accents may not account for all the variations in regional pronunciation and dialects.
That said, if you want to teach people to speak with an “American accent”, you should probably be aware that there is no “American accent”, only regional accents.
I am super midwestern, lived here all my life. I didn't realize I was saying "ope" until I saw a meme about it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42393649
As a non-native speaker, it is very very accurate even for Hungarian, which is quite a tiny language. I have sent it to several friends and it "caught" them all.
edit- seems like remix customizations.
"remove-watch-video-requirement": {
"defaultValue": false,
"rules": [{
"condition": {
"env": "prod",
"email": {
"$in": ["<redacted>@gmail.com", "redacted"]
}
},
"force": true
}]
},
"score-only-lesson-phoneme": {
"defaultValue": true
},
"auto-stop-recording-for-all-practice": {
"defaultValue": true,
"rules": [{
"condition": {
"env": "prod",
"email": {
"$in": ["redacted", "redacted", "redacted@live.com"]
}
},
"force": false
}]
},
"use-speechace-v9": {
"defaultValue": true
},
"april-2022-price-increase-experiment": {
"defaultValue": false,
"rules": [{
"condition": {
"env": "prod",
"email": {
"$in": ["redacted@usorov.com", "redacted@gmail.com", "redacted@gmail.com", "redacted@boldvoice.com", "redacted@gmail.com"]
}
},
"force": falseI'll go back and lay it on real thick and see if it does better.
> 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.
I tried again using an outrageously bad (probably to the point of offense) Scottish brogue and it pegged it as German.
Second - I don't have russian accent. I don't even speak russian. I could agree that it can be 'slavic accent' but why attribute it to russia, majority of which is non-slavic literally Asia?
Because they're both Latin.
The app also crashed towards the end.
NotFoundError: Failed to execute 'removeChild' on 'Node': The node to be removed is not a child of this node.
at https://start.boldvoice.com/build/_shared/chunk-NFFSPFRU.js:1:627
at Ti (https://start.boldvoice.com/build/_shared/chunk-WREYPQ4L.js:8:22278)
at _t (https://start.boldvoice.com/build/_shared/chunk-WREYPQ4L.js:8:23972)
at Xn (https://start.boldvoice.com/build/_shared/chunk-WREYPQ4L.js:8:41320)
at Bf (https://start.boldvoice.com/build/_shared/chunk-WREYPQ4L.js:8:40880)
at hn (https://start.boldvoice.com/build/_shared/chunk-WREYPQ4L.js:8:39936)
at Qo (https://start.boldvoice.com/build/_shared/chunk-WREYPQ4L.js:8:36620)
at pn (https://start.boldvoice.com/build/_shared/chunk-WREYPQ4L.js:6:3250)
at Bf (https://start.boldvoice.com/build/_shared/chunk-WREYPQ4L.js:8:40935)
at hn (https://start.boldvoice.com/build/_shared/chunk-WREYPQ4L.js:8:39936)
The app assumes that there's only one kind of "native" speaker i.e. Americans, British folks and Australians. That's not the case. Over 80 countries have native english speakers. Many of them have accents that are outside the American and British norm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territor...
Sounds like others tried and had similar results (not identifying Australian or Irish accents).
I suspect they use the same technique for guessing the accent - detect which sounds are not well pronounced (and they have no interest in distinguishing accents amont native speakers).
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.
I'm surprised it considered my truly awful American native, but it needed two clips to decide that time. And 30% Hindi/Urdu? What?
If we’re talking about specific parts like a regional dialect then I would agree, those are tricky to acquire later, at least to those undetectable levels. They can be extremely specific.
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!"
Surely you mean the opposite? Portugal is literally next to Spain and both languages have coexisted since they were both born following Rome's fall. Both Galician and Portugal's Portugese are likely similar to each other and closer to Spanish than Brazil's Portuguese
You are right regarding Galician, but Galician isn't Spanish, rather original Portuguese, where some words changed throughout the centuries.
The way we both speak is rather different than the native Spanish speakers, that never have been exposed to native Portuguese/Galician speakers.
In fact, even native Catalan speakers have easier time understanding Galician/Portuguese speakers, than Spanish speakers do, probably due to the French roots in Galician/Portuguese carried by the crusades involved in the founding of both regions and naturally influeced the language evolution.
Even my slavic gf was tricked for a few seconds and wasn't sure if it was some kind of eastern language she wasn't aware of.
And for the explanation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pik2R46xobA
I've heard it described as if a drunk russian was trying to speak spanish.
I presume there's enough difference between English spoken by Portuguese and English spoken by Russians for those also to be distinct clusters.
Or, given similar concerns about image and video generation, our faces.
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?
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)
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
#!/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;"My. Voice. Is. My. Pass. Port... Verify. Me."
No. Its fine. go ahead and do this ( if you want).
> "successEnterReferralCodeDuringOnboardingBody": "You've just unlocked 10% off your BoldVoice subscription, thanks to [firstName]'s referral!",
An AI might be able to gain a higher success rate than me.
So if this thing isn't a trap from big tech you are fine.
Also want to note that I am not passing judgement, I am sure I might become a bit brusque with tourists if Montreal had the same volume.
On the way out of the country she stopped in Paris for a few days to take it in. She went into some shop and the proprietor asked my wife if she needed help. My wife replied asked about some clothes. The proprietor insulted my wife over her southern accent -- French southern, not US southern, and it made my wife's day. Someone in France finally thought she was french.
While my own French is pretty decent, I can barely understand Quebecois. OTOH, native French speakers get along with Quebecois just fine.
Many (large and small) American companies (and other nationalities as well, sure) a top down management approach is the norm. I.e. "CEO" (or "your manager" / "person in power") says something and you jump and do it without asking any questions because you fear you'll be fired otherwise (or have other repercussions).
In such an environment, imagine the CEO / person in power giving the best sample ever to the crooks, such that they can clone your voice almost perfectly. Now, of course, CEOs are likely to be recorded in various events anyway but some others are less likely, say the CFO.
Then order some lowly finance drone to wire a billion bucks to your account (well, maybe a bit less, and make sure to use someone else's account, seven levels of money mules and 17 different crypto currencies with mixers etc. before cashing out) with your faked voice.
We caught a CEO scam that was pretty good but noticeable recently. They had cloned his voice.
It’s like how those ransomware thieves incentivize all the critical computer systems in the world to remain air gapped, which seems like an overall net positive.
In a sense I agree with you. However, really great organizations have weak links. It only needs one unfortunately. I personally don't want to be out of job because of one weak link.
Sort of to your point, we do have training (which I find obnoxiously dumb, but many seem to find it great - I just let the video run in the background and answer the questions without actually watching a single second of it) around this sort of thing and we have phishing tests that are super easy to figure out (the email headers literally tell you it's a phishing test) but various people post on internal channels "Is this a scam? I'm not sure, please help!" and not all of them are non-technical people at all.
Above a certain size of company there just are gonna be some weak links in just the wrong place(s) randomly even with the best procedures unfortunately.
I'm more than half a century old, an internet geek since a few years before the conventional "dawn of the web" and AFAIK there is no recording of my voice on the internet.
Added to which, controlled samples like this with a good range of syllables will always be more helpful, won't they?