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.
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.
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.
Ya it doesn't seem to go down into dialect, its the broad scope, it nailed my wifes spanish accent even though i really can't hear it at all and she talks very american
I have a similar experience, but my impression is that Parisians have little patience for accents in general. People elsewhere in France where I've visited (Aix-en-provence, Lyon, Toulouse) had no trouble chatting with me.
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.
My wife was a French major in college and spent a year in Aix in the mid 80s. She didn't really enjoy the experience -- although her grammar and vocab were fine, she had enough of an accent that people treated her as an outsider.
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.
Did you know that something like 80% of the websites you visit are tracked by a handful of companies which are all effectively sharing that with many thousands of ad and data broker companies which can easily narrow you down? It's not tinfoil hat land to knkw that nearly every site you visit has cross-site tracking.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> Portuguese from Portugal sounds more like Eastern Europe, and Portuguese Brazil is more like Spanish.
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
One cool fact is that Galician sounds closer to Brazilian Portuguese. It also has much of the same vocabulary (with the notable exception of the days of the week which it borrows from the other Romance languages while Portuguese has its boring days of the week)
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.
Presumably each training speech sample is labelled with native language. For Portuguese there would be two distinct clusters: Portugal and Brazil. If your speech is in either cluster, it would just tell you that your native language is Portuguese without being any more specific. Sure, it's a missed opportunity but it doesn't distinguish Jamaicans from Australians either.
I presume there's enough difference between English spoken by Portuguese and English spoken by Russians for those also to be distinct clusters.
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.
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.
272 comments
[ 10.3 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadIf 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.
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.
So if this thing isn't a trap from big tech you are fine.
I'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.
It guessed Hebrew. My native language is Portuguese.
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".
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.
Given our (good-natured) neighbor-rivalry I'm of course horribly offended.
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.
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)
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
I've heard it described as if a drunk russian was trying to speak spanish.
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 presume there's enough difference between English spoken by Portuguese and English spoken by Russians for those also to be distinct clusters.
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.