This is really hit-or-miss. My initial test gave me a 93% British (rather accurate considering I'm from a former British colony), but subsequently the results varied a lot, including a few cases where it claimed my accent is 74% American.
The way I pronounce "ask", "plastic" and "Bob" should be dead giveaways that my accent is not American...
I'm from Britain and it rated my accent as 99-100% British the few times that I tried it. So not bad from my point of view.
Meanwhile, I wonder what Cambridge Consultants are going to do with a dataset of thousands of Hacker News users reading out the sentence "Please call Stella and ask her to meet Bob the frog at the store with three small red plastic bags".
Probably just make refinements to the model they're using to classify samples.
The sentence is obviously taken (with some modifications) from the sample used by the speech accent archive ( http://accent.gmu.edu/howto.php ), which was constructed specifically to include every relevant phonological context in American English. (Not that this was necessarily achieved, but it was the goal.)
Indeed. They took a bunch of smaller words and spliced them together to fake his voice print. Cambridge Consultants are clearly harvesting our voice prints for the CIA. ;)
It's actually a famous sample; I remember seeing it in linguistics classes. It just happens to contain a lot of words that reveal differences between English dialects.
I'm American and I get mixed results between 89% American and 53% British on my normal accent. My pronunciation of "call" and "to" seems to tip the scales towards British and most of my other words are not strongly highlighted.
I can reliably fake a British accent although I seem to get stuck on frog and store still sounding American. When I do the stereotypical Texas style "yee haw" accent I get 99% American.
Depending where in northeast New York one is, one can end up with something close to the Northwest New England accent (which shares a lot more with an English accent than most of America).
Things like this are fun as a New Englander who doesn't have the "pahk the cah" accent of Boston. Our vowels are flat, and mine get flatter when I'm drinking--when I visited Ireland with my family the landlady at a little bed-and-breakfast took me aside and inquired if I had been educated in England. Nope--I just don't say "baaaaaaaag".
I’m 100% American from the mid-Atlantic region. Rated my accent 53% American and 47% UK. I tried on my best south London accent, which is fairly cartoony, and got a 60% UK.
Edit: just tried my best Southern accent (kinda Georgia) and rated 72% American.
Born in Washington DC and that is the southernmost point of my childhood. Father born in England to Eastern European immigrants. Mother is Italian American from Pennsylvania. West coasters semi-frequently think my accent is European, but nobody from back east or from Europe says that.
I got 84% British.
My wife was born in Russia and spent most of her life on the US west coast. She got 91% American.
Fun little app but given my results and some comments here I see it as a west coast accent detector.
> Born in Washington DC and that is the southernmost point of my childhood. Father born in England to Eastern European immigrants. Mother is Italian American from Pennsylvania. West coasters semi-frequently think my accent is European, but nobody from back east or from Europe says that.
I got 84% British.
That's really interesting. I have a very similar background (and from Washington DC) and I got 84% British, too. It rated my pronunciation of the word "call" as ~100% British. That's pretty interesting if it can regionally categorize people.
I suspect that is because a typical mid west or west coast accent has a moving pitch with the word "call", typically down then up within the one syllable. The usual British accent has a monotone or a slight drop in pitch for the word "call".
I grew up in Connecticut and it finds my pronunciation of "call" and "to" British, but still manages to find the right answer overall. For another datapoint, I guess.
This seems like it'd be hard to do reliably - if I recall, there were significant variations in the regional makeup of the various thirteen colonies to start with, and some of those linguistic peculiarities have outlived their originators, besides England having it's own subdialects and variations over time too.
Get a Mainer, a New Yorker, a Virginian, and a Georgian together, and they're hardly mutually intelligble, and that's just on the east coast.
My wife, who is not a native speaker of English, initially had trouble understanding AAVE and people with heavy Latin American accents when she moved to the US, for what it's worth, so maybe we could consider those particularly challenging, but I doubt any native-born American would struggle with those really.
No obvious explosions, but it doesn't know what to make of it. First submission: 18% American, 82% British, second submission: 68% American, 32% British.
I tried putting on American and British accents and could easily get it over 90% either direction, so at least it's working for those.
I'm also an American and get consistently 80-90% British. It seems to think I pronounce "Bob" in an especially British way. I pronounce it in a way that sounds like "Bahb" to me, same sound as in not and cot (I don't have the cot-caught merger). I believe it's the vowel <ä> in IPA that I use. To my ears that's not the way most UK speakers would pronounce it, which I think is more <ɔ> or <ɒ> for all of Bob/not/cot.
Heh. In my regular accent (American) I got 90% American (although, I got 99% American when I spoke normally and didn't purposefully enunciate). But my God-awful British accent got 98% British.
It picked up on the parts of the generic British accent (London accent?) that us Americans think about and exaggerate when mimicking a British accent—tall vowels, especially the "O"s and "A"s.
My normal accent is British but I affected a crappy American accent and got 98% first try. I think this will classify you as American if you just put in rhotic Rs and ham up the vowel sounds.
But I bet Aussie doesn't sound American either. It's a binary classification, it will give spurios results if you feed it with input outside its domain.
I'm from St. Louis and it guessed 65% American. I then tried a fake British accent and it thought I was 63% British. I guess I need to work on my British accent.
Born in London and lived there til I was 3 but I’m American and it rated me once as 53% American and another time as 37% American. I know I say a few words differently but not that differently.
143 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] threadThe way I pronounce "ask", "plastic" and "Bob" should be dead giveaways that my accent is not American...
I pronounce "ask" with a long "a" so I'm not sure why it keeps flagging that pronunciation as American either.
Meanwhile, I wonder what Cambridge Consultants are going to do with a dataset of thousands of Hacker News users reading out the sentence "Please call Stella and ask her to meet Bob the frog at the store with three small red plastic bags".
The sentence is obviously taken (with some modifications) from the sample used by the speech accent archive ( http://accent.gmu.edu/howto.php ), which was constructed specifically to include every relevant phonological context in American English. (Not that this was necessarily achieved, but it was the goal.)
I can reliably fake a British accent although I seem to get stuck on frog and store still sounding American. When I do the stereotypical Texas style "yee haw" accent I get 99% American.
When I speak with a poorly done, make-believe Southern accent it tells me American 90%.
67% American 33% British
Edit: just tried my best Southern accent (kinda Georgia) and rated 72% American.
I got 84% British.
My wife was born in Russia and spent most of her life on the US west coast. She got 91% American.
Fun little app but given my results and some comments here I see it as a west coast accent detector.
That's really interesting. I have a very similar background (and from Washington DC) and I got 84% British, too. It rated my pronunciation of the word "call" as ~100% British. That's pretty interesting if it can regionally categorize people.
Get a Mainer, a New Yorker, a Virginian, and a Georgian together, and they're hardly mutually intelligble, and that's just on the east coast.
Then, I clapped my hands twice (and didn't speak), which classified me as 72% British.
As a final test, I did both at the same time: 90% American.
I tried putting on American and British accents and could easily get it over 90% either direction, so at least it's working for those.
Would be cool to see if it had any data for identifying some more specific American accents though.
Edit: and now 99% British every time. Methinks the site is broken.
American: over-pronounce your Rs and try to get the æ sound wherever "ah" is called for. (I guess this is a great lakes accent)
British: imitate the intonation of BBC broadcasts I occasionally hear syndicated on npr stations.
It picked up on the parts of the generic British accent (London accent?) that us Americans think about and exaggerate when mimicking a British accent—tall vowels, especially the "O"s and "A"s.
This thing put me at 94% American ;)
-------------------
Sorry, your browser doesn't support audio recording, which is required by our site.
Why not try again using Chrome, Firefox, or Edge?
Note that iOS only supports in-browser audio from iOS 11 onwards.
-------------------
This is in Chrome on iOS 11.2.2 with microphone access enabled.