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.<p>If they recorded any of that they likely have enough to clone my voice somewhat faithfully.<p>Congratulations on labelling my French Canadian accent as French though, I'll have to work on my pronounciation more to fool the AI.
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.
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?<p>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.<p>The weird thing is that all the words were transcribed correctly (beyond being entirely in a different language)
The homepage sort of implies that "having an accent" is something only non native speakers do? Like an accent only comes from your exotic mother tongue. Kinda weird. It told me I'm a native speaker, and I am a non American native speaker so... good I guess?
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].<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.boldvoice.com/frequently-asked-questions" rel="nofollow">https://www.boldvoice.com/frequently-asked-questions</a>
My mind is blown right now. My whole life I've been told that my speech is so American and that I don't have a Russian accent (left Russia when I was 4). Lo and behold, this app tells me that my accent is Russian (61%) with English being a distant second (13%).
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.
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.
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.<p>I tried again using an outrageously bad (probably to the point of offense) Scottish brogue and it pegged it as German.
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:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB8vHRH9A6M" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB8vHRH9A6M</a>
It doesn't work - it seemed to catch my accent once I ran it a couple of times on the same browser, but... in the incognito mode, it fails every single time, ranging from French and Swedish to Swahili. :D When I mumbled a bit and lowered my voice, it said 97% English, lol. Maybe its model treats mumbling as the UK, hard to say. When I added a bit of "R," it immediately recognized me as Russian, ignoring everything else. And when I increased my pitch without changing anything else, it started detecting Persian and Spanish. When I used a proxy server pointing to Scandinavia, it started detecting Swedish, lol. Fake as hell. I'm Polish, btw.
The AI couldn't guess my accent correctly which is OK as it's fairly non-standard. However, the onboarding flow needs work. I feel like it took too long to ask too little and it made the wrong assumptions.<p>The app also crashed towards the end.<p><pre><code> 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)
</code></pre>
re:assumptions I realize my experience is outside the norm. But there are "native" english speakers in most countries on Earth. Immigrants and expatriates are an example of one such community.<p>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.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territories_where_English_is_an_official_language" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territor...</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-speaking_world" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-speaking_world</a>
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).<p>Sounds like others tried and had similar results (not identifying Australian or Irish accents).
I've tried the app (free trial), it's doing a good job at identifying issues in my pronunciation. It can rate my level and highlight the vowel / consonants within words that need improvement. The app looks quite good, but a bit expensive. I'd be very interested if it supports more languages in the future.<p>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 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.<p>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.<p>Huh, I always thought I sound almost American. Looks like my accent is untraceable at best.
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.<p>I'm surprised it considered my truly awful American native, but it needed two clips to decide that time. And 30% Hindi/Urdu? What?
Well, I am not a native English speaker and it says 77% English (and 6% Chinese, 5% Spanish). I guess I should take that to mean that my English is pretty good.
Try this one as well. It can distinguish between British and American accents.<p><a href="https://accentguesser.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://accentguesser.ai/</a>
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.
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.
I guess I don't have my native language's accent (which I tend to hear from native English speakers).<p>It guessed Hebrew. My native language is Portuguese.
I haven't tried it, as you get asked for the answers to common security questions, and supply a voice sample. You could lie but many people won't.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Well my regular accent just confuses it, though it did think it was French when I put on my "fake" French accent at least...<p>This is arguably somewhat aligned with the usual reaction which goes 50/50 between "English accent" and "I have no idea" ;)<p>[English-from-England is my native language, but I did live in Switzerland from age 4, and USA from age 27]
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'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.
I got English 57%, Spanish 23%, Hindi/Urdu 14%<p>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.<p>Its making me wonder if my reading voice is more proper. Or possibly the thing just doesn’t work.
I'm not a native English speaker, but that's what it guessed.<p>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).<p>I feel so validated right now :)
I'll be impressed when it can tell me I have a California English accent. Surprised it doesn't even discriminate the vast pronunciation differences between British, Oceanic, Caribbean, African and American native English accents.
Complete garbage. Native USA-born (but well travelled) English speaker and it tagged me with Swahili (24%), French (19%), and Persian (19%). I was speaking quietly because it's late here, but that shouldn't have made a difference.
<<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.
Was rather surprised to see Russian / Urdu with the strong preference for the former. I do not speak either.<p>I wonder if the founder being Russian is related to the virtually unlimited availability of reliable training data? :)
Hmmm... it doesn't differentiate between English accents, like UK (actually there are a bunch of sub-accents), Canadian or US (of which there are a bunch of sub-accents.)<p>It only does non-English accents I guess. That wasn't clear.
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.
What I really want is an AI to translate difficult accents into ones more familiar to me because there is lots of content that is just too taxing for me to listen due to the mental load.
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.
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.
Does it ask everyone to do two rounds or was that just me? It did say something like "you're special, retrying" but who knows...<p>(It guessed correctly after the 2nd round)
Really fun is trying to do various accents and seeing what it thinks you sound like, I tried my best South African and it thought Japanese. Guess I need to work on my mimicry
The big question now would be: has anyone used BoldVoice or any other method to convert from 90%+ of accent A to 90%+ to accent B and can switch between those seemlessly?
It doesn't work. I tried atleast 15 times and it says it has trouble identifying and something not right! Well, There you go! for wasting my time....
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.
It guesses Danish for me. I was born in the UK, had mostly an east London accent, been in the US for 35 years 23 of which where in Philadelphia.<p>Better luck next time!
I'm Ghanaian:
English: 44%
Ghanaian: 36%
Nigerian: 17%<p>Not bad, as I have been accused of having a not-so-prominent English accent by people around me
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.<p>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.
"English (US, UK, or AU)". There are dozens of regional accents lumped in that, come on, try harder. See <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/dialect-quiz-map.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/dialect-quiz...</a>
quite disappointing, it just said English and nothing else<p>well yes, but tell me what region!<p>or <i>something</i> other than just stating the obvious
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.<p>Given our (good-natured) neighbor-rivalry I'm of course horribly offended.