It turns out that they took 640lbs (!) of weight to mars to be tossed off at various points during EDL. The video is worth watching if you'd like some more of the nitty-gritty behind the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0NakShgbHY
https://www.simscale.com/blog/2017/12/nasa-mars-climate-orbi...
I'm sort of surprised we don't yet have ML powered "de-accent-ization". His french accent isn't hard to understand at normal speed, but when I set it to 1.5x or 2x speed it becomes hard to decipher in a way native speakers usually are not. If there was just a button (for him or me) to hit to tweak the sounds a bit to reduce the accent, I bet this problem would go away.
The way someone speaks is very unique ... and it is actually very, very important how you speak to bring your point across. Or ... to convince people.
A robot voice might present the best arguments, but it will very likely loose to a good speaker who can (literally) tune in to his audience.
Speech is a complex pattern of sound waves, containing much more information, than binary encoded words.
So if there was a ML tool to make people with strong accent more understandable, why not. But you can also numble without any accent.
And I can enjoy and understand certain people with strong accents much better than natives, because they are just good speakers.
And having subtitles is one thing, but changing their voice .. would require consent I believe. (unless you run the tool for yourself, but I believe parents point was, he speaks and then automatically a tool enhances his voice, I would not like that, too)
Consider responding to the substance of the comment instead.
Notice that, for the case of English, most speakers are not native, by a huge margin! Native English speakers are a biased minority, and with a lot of variation within. Not sure that an "average native" accent is a useful concept at all. I, for one, tend to find most non-native English speakers vastly easier to understand than many native speakers.
Maybe he wants to change the accent to a Texas accent, or the Queen's english, who cares, it's the ML part that's interesting.
I'm well aware, and this does not rebut any of my points.
> I, for one, tend to find most non-native English speakers vastly easier to understand than many native speakers.
That "many" native speakers in a language of hundreds of millions of speakers are hard to understand does not challenge the claim that a non-native accent brought closer to any native accent, much less the mean native accent, will for the large majority if listeners be easier rather than harder to understand.
If the speech recognition / subtitling algorithm can't understand the nuances of the language, that's going to be a problem anyway... accented pronunciation is so multidimensional, you're pretty much going to have to transcribe syllables/phonemes first...
Some of the other videos on this channel are just as in-depth: the ones about the plumes/exhaust of rocket engines as well as star occlusions are incredibly detailed.