Show HN: Speech Meter – Improve Your English Pronunciation | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Speech Meter – Improve Your English Pronunciation

speechmeter.com

71 pointsjeanmayer66 comments

Hey HN!

We built Speech Meter as a tool to practice and improve English pronunciation. It uses AI to analyze your accent and score your pronunciation accuracy. It’s great for anyone who wants to practice their pronunciation in English. I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions for improvements. I really appreciate any feedback you could have (:

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This is completely non-functional. I read something completely different than the phrase given but it still gives me what seem to be high marks. I can't really tell because nothing is explained at all in the interface. The numbers seem completely random but always weighted towards US even if I mumble or say nothing at all.

Also the random string generation seems to only output "the cat is sleeping on me" did someone accidentally publish this with mock data in it or something?

the request might be cached, I'll fix it. Thanks for letting me know!

That proves my theory that people don't really understand English, they only get the message through intuition and context

that's true, I'll add a better explanation of how it works. thanks!

Nice, I made something similar[1] but as a general language learning tool that works with 36 languages.

The main idea to improve your pronunciation is that you hear a native speaker (from a podcast or YouTube) and repeat right after, via Whisper ASR you get a score to see how accurate your response was compared to the native speaker. The method is based on the "language shadowing" technique.[2]

[1] https://www.openlang.ai

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_shadowing#Language_lear...

> The main idea to improve your pronunciation is that you hear a native speaker

A religions historian once said that in US 2 people from 2 different neighborhouds do not speak the same language. What is a "native speaker" in this context ?

It's showing me someone else's scores or hallucinating, because I got good scores even before I said anything! I tried multiple times and the numbers varied somewhat.

Also: I wonder what the scoring is based on because not all imperfections are equally important. Further, what's important depends on the context as well.

Oh yeah. I hadn't even tried that but this seems to have no basis in reality in any way. My phrase was "the cat is sleeping on me" and I read "taco bell is delicious" and I got a score of 33 with what seem like decent results (still no idea what these even mean)

It's a scale of 0-100 I believe.

yep, it is 0-100. I'll add the scales. Thanks!

This is really interesting. I like the scoring system for each word. But if I can't pronounce one word correctly, shouldn't there be a way to listen to the right pronunciation?

yep, that's true! I'll add this feature, so you can listen to the whole prompt and each word. Thanks for the feedback!

As a French native who learned English by reading books and later spent a couple of years in English speaking countries, I'd really like to have a tool to help me fix my pronunciation.

So with that in mind I tried your tool and I was enthusiastic about seeing a score for each words, but then what? I tried a few sentences manually (the random button doesn't work) and for example it seems that I have an issue with the pronunciation of "to" where I always get around 50%, but there's no way to know what's wrong. As it is I'd stop using the tool after about a minute.

I'd suggest adding something to hear the correct US/UK pronunciation of the words.

That doesn't sound like it will cope with various correct English pronunciations, as spoken by the English in England. Or even Scots, Welsh, or Irish speaking English.

There are valid variations in pronunciations, even in England, "RP" is not the only valid way to pronounce words.

As an example, take "envelope" and "schedule". Some pronounce these as "En-ve-lope", some as "On-ve-lope"; for the latter some as "Shed-ule", some as "Sked-ule".

How does this facility propose to handle the vast differences in how English is pronounced in Great Britain, never mind anywhere else in the world?

You could just select the accent you want to learn. I assume the purpose of such a tool would be for 2nd language speakers to learn to imitate English spoken in a specific area and/or social/cultural class.

And while yeah, there might be multiple “correct” way to pronounce the same word mixing Scottish, Midwestern, Irish, RP etc. English in your every sentence wouldn’t be ideal.

Yep! You're totally correct. The reason why I made this tool, was to help me (a non-native English speaker) to understand how I sound in English. The next feature is to add some tips on how to increase your score, or how to pronounce clearer depending on your choice (UK, US, AUS)

(I hail from England)

So I tried it on:

  "I wrote a letter regarding Zebra's taking herbs, placed it in an envelope and posted it on schedule."

The first time it gave me an overall score of 20, and imagined that I was Australian. The third time an overall score of 10, and imagined that I was from the US. Both times I used the same form of pronunciation.

First:

  Overall: 20
  Words: "I"1 "wrote"34 "a"1 "letter"34 "regarding"25 "Zebra's"7 "taking"40 "herbs"0 "placed"28 "it"50 "in"50 "an"42 "envelope"15 "and"34 "posted"7 "it"1 "on"0 "schedule"0
  Accent: US1% UK1% AU91%
  Exam: IELTS: 3 TOEFL: 0-11 CEFR: A1A2B1B2C1C2 PTE General: 1

Third:

  Overall: 10
  Words: "I"0 "wrote"16 "a"1 "letter"1 "regarding"34 "Zebra's"8 "taking"17 "herbs"1 "placed"9 "it"42 "in"22 "an"1 "envelope"0 "and"0 "posted"7 "it"21 "on"1 "schedule"0
  Accent: US76% UK5% AU3%
  Exam: IELTS: 2 TOEFL: 0-11 CEFR: A1A2B1B2C1C2 PTE General: 1

I used "Zeb-ra" (not "Zee-bra"), "Her-bs" (nor "Er-bs"), "On-ve-lope", and "Shed-ule". I was speaking in my natural manner, without mixing throwing in any weirdness.

(In my second attempt, I used "En-ve-lope", and got an even lower score.)

Overall, I have to same I am not too impressed.

I've been using the Boldvoice app (no affiliation), it's not perfect but pretty good; my spoken English has definitely improved in a few months. I would recommend it.

It would be nice to have a specific set of prompts that are good to evaluate speech. For example, I am a native Portuguese speaker so I might struggle with Th's and R's.

Also the random phrase generator always generate the same phrase.

This feels to me like someone published this with demo data or they didn't train the model at all and this is like a 0.0.2 beta or something.

I'm the dev and I'm also a native Portuguese speaker. I'll fix the generator, it's caching the request. Thanks for the feedback mate!

Does that really work? I tried my best Oxford English accent, and i slurred like a total drunk: almost no change in the results, which for some reason are not explained anywhere?

This has been what I've found in testing as well. Zero change in anything. Seems completely non-functional. Even the "random string generation" only outputs the same string over and over.

hmmm right, I'll add a better explanation of the results. Thanks!

There is something interesting about pronunciation. Some sounds, unless you learned them as a child, you can't pronounce them. English not being my native language, some words I just accepted that I can't say them. I discovered that after recording an Audiobook.

But hey, no American 18+ of age can read "2", "deux" or "de" in french. Or even better, no one can say 2 in Pulaar.

It doesn't seem to work for long bits of text. I copied the first paragraph from Wiki:Random[0], and it submitted successfully on the website, but didn't receive analysis back. No error was shown either.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leport–Toupin_House

It really doesn't work well with long text. I'm adding a limit of 80 characters. Thanks for the feedback!

I'd like something like that for French. I've extreme difficulty to differentiate between "deux", "de" and "des" among other very similar phonemes that are so common in the French language.

Check out this channel: https://www.youtube.com/@MasterYourFrench

They have lots of videos that go into the different pronunciations of specific phonemes, and will for example teach you when to use the open or closed variation for a word.

As for OP, the site just gives a score? How does one know how to improve with that? I was expecting something like "you pronounced this vowel like this when it should be like that"

To be fair, between french from different regions, people will pronounce those differently or not, and not pronounce it the same way…

exactly, in the context of "de" and "deux" depending on the person (native or not) , you won't be able to differentiate the pronunciation without context

> I've extreme difficulty to differentiate between "deux", "de" and "des"

French here, a few tips:

«deux» and «de» are pronounced the same (almost everywhere at least). The only thing that change is the «liaison»: if you have «deux» in from of a word that starts with a vowel, then you'll need to add a “Z” sound in between: ex. «deux animaux» is being pronounced as if it was spelled «deux Zanimaux».

«des» sounds different, it pronounces like «dé» with an «é» sound like in «thé» or «café», and since it finishes with a “s”, you have a «liaison» as well: «des animaux» => «des Zanimaux».

It's been a long time, but I feel like "de" is just a tad shorter than "deux." Might that be on account of my youthful exposure to French was in the Alsace? It was mostly older speakers.

There may be some slight inter-regional variations in pronunciation (I haven't been in Alsace in ten years so I don't remember about that) but pronouncing both the same way is at least perfectly acceptable, so no foreign speaker should ever bother about that.

Moi aussi. I was just speaking with one of my friends on Sunday at my local French meetup, and she said there are tools for correcting/verifying one's pronunciation, but she couldn't name any specific tools for French. I have a good accent and generally decent pronunciation, but I still make many errors in my French. I'd love something that would help me improve.

I have about enough French to read the menu and order properly at a restaurant. Nevertheless these are really obvious to me. I'm not sure why that is, but I suppose it's probably due to having had some exposure to the language at a young age thanks to having some French family.

I feel like anyone with children and the opportunity to do so should try to expose them to as broad a set of phonemes as possible from an early age.

As someone with a very midwestern US accent, I got a much better UK score when I used my terrible Cockney accent, about 93% UK, than I did when I used my default accent, at roughly 80% US.

Interestingly, it looks like the model has quite the UK bias for words like "queen", "tea", "chips", and "pub." All words that are used pretty frequently in US English but have a clear cultural affinity to the UK. When I use sentences with these words in my casual midwestern accent, they almost always come up as 80+% UK.

As a Britisher, I can confirm that a sentence like "Cor blimey, it's only bleedin' raining! And on the day of the Queen's funeral, an all! Oh well, I'm off dahn the pub for a cup of tea and a plate of chips" is most conversation here.

This is very interesting, I didn't notice before. It makes sense in a way

Could you show a key for the numbers? I did not know what they meant.

Yeah, I'm adding the scales, I'll update in a few mins

I said "tomatoe" but it scored me better when I pronounce it "tomatoe" instead. I say let's call the whole thing off.

Now seriously, a small detail: on my first usage (Firefox mobile, private tab) the score already appears on screen immediately after I press "record", but it behaves properly in subsequent attempts. Perhaps some weird interaction with the "allow access to microphone" pop-up?

thanks for the feedback, I'll dig into that Firefox mobile bug

For what it's worth, I am having a blast with this. Great excuse to practice foreign accents. I'm American, so US is trivial, but it's rewarding to see your fake UK accent actually register as UK accent.

Still haven't managed Australian, but as a test, I shared the website with an Australian friend, and he showed me it is possible, and that this is just a "skill issue."

That's funny! For me, the Australian accent is really hard to reproduce too

I wish I could have this on something like superpowered.me, so

I could log what I say, and give me ongoing feedback on my dictation.

When I read prompts I am being more deliberate about my speech, and my results will be better than they actually should be.

This, combined with a spoken grammar feedback, would be meaningful to help non native speakers to improve their English.

dude, that's a pretty good idea. It makes a lot of sense what you said about reading prompts. As a non-native speaker, I'd love it too. I'll do something about it and launch it as Same Day Skunkworks soon https://ae.studio/same-day-skunkworks

Very cool tool. It looks like the browser base encodes a recording and sends it to a server. I'm aware that some browsers support different type of recording mimeTypes (webm, wav) - did you have any cross-browser difficulties? Or anything of interest when solving this problem?

Actually, I made this project in 1 hour (I'll write a blog about how I did this). I'm using the audio-react-recorder NPM package to record the audio, get the blob and convert it to base64 and then, send it to my server. I'll make it open source today, by EOD. (:

Accents are political. Its not only a great way to challenge the norm but it can also be inspirational for others with a similar cultural migration background. As long as people can understand you, I believe one should embrace their accent.

I made this tool and I totally agree with you. I love the different accents around the world. But the point is the pronunciation, a lot of people want to speak clearer, and maybe, this tool could help

I like this! I am surprised to find out my accent heavily leans towards the US's despite me being an Indian. Then again I grew up watching a lot of American movies, it's not really a surprise.

Well that's probably because Indian accents are not present as a category and everyone is forced into the US/UK/AU categories?

Could be. But still one would expect the Indian accent to lean towards the UK's because of the colonial past.

I would guess that's because the numbers this thing spits out are crap. It seems to just output random crap every time. Always 70+ percent US regardless of any attempts at accents or even saying absolutely nothing. Try just mumbling into it

That must be it. It's almost always 70+ percent US.

I asked ChatGPT for a list of words that Brits and Americans pronounce very differently, combined them into some silly sentences ("my aunt gave vitamins and herbs to the zebra in the bathroom"), and tested them in the app with my native British accent. It consistently told me that my accent was 80%+ U.S..

This app is, as we say in Britain, complete rubbish.

I tried it three times using the same phrase. Random results each time. The first one I supposedly had Australian accent. The second, British. The third, American. I forced no accent.

I've been looking for something like this, however the accuracy makes it useless.

Has anyone tried the new gpt4 to help with pronunciation?

What's your recommendation for adding an accent? Speech therapist?

This is fun to test as a native English speaker from New England. It doesn't seem to be a fan of my accent on certain words.

What words? Could you share? I'm just curious hahah

Is it open source ?

It's not, but it can be! I'll work on that, by EOD it'll be open source.

Je veux ça, mais pour mon accent français.

Good idea, terrible implementation.

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