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Comment by SerLava | Hacker News Reader

Similarly on Google and YouTube- nearly the entire search space for "how to pronounce xyz" has been taken over by videos of text to speech recordings that have absolutely no idea how to pronounce anything.

There are huge YouTube channels posting this scam content, and they never seem to go away. There are real ones in there too, but there are way more spam words than real ones.

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I use Forvo for this, it is great: https://forvo.com/

Seconded! I used Forvo for some Greek words and it had high quality recordings from actual humans with good accents.

Thank god for PronunciationManual, which seems to be the only channel taking things seriously.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6EekGFJhrg

I knew a student in a neighboring lab (very smart guy, postdocing at Stanford atm) who had to look up how to pronounce the word "schadenfreude". Sure enough he found the PronunciationManual video first, eventually leading to a hilarious conversation where his advisor was trying to figure out what he meant when he said "skoodenfruity".

I must say, PronunciationManual is one of the few YT channels that has me literally LOL frequently, and so did your story there. My enjoyment of those hilarious videos is just tempered a bit by pity with the innocent victims that fall for it.

FWIW, here's the link for Schadenfreude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3_DjiLLDfo

I never knew I could get pranked on HN. Kudos!

I also had the same issue with these. So i started using these AI narrator platforms. These are generally used to convert ebooks into audio books but i used it for pronunciations and accents. I used the one called Narration Box. Here is the link- narrationbox.com

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