AI Guesses Your Accent | Hacker News Reader

AI Guesses Your Accent

start.boldvoice.com

222 pointsmikpanko262 comments

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.

French Canadian and France French accents are very different, so if the AI couldn't tell the difference, that doesn't speak well for it

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

Indeed. I learned Quebecois in school and when I started speaking it in Paris I got confused looks and "... do you speak English?"

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.

Thanks, that's a great story.

One of the tests for native / non-native speakers aside from the famous colored words quiz for spies is how well they understand accents.

While my own French is pretty decent, I can barely understand Quebecois. OTOH, native French speakers get along with Quebecois just fine.

Just want to say "Thank you!" for sharing your instinct for privacy concerns. That also made me pause to click on Try Me on the site. Hard pass.

It was the no privacy policy for me.

BoldVoice.com/privacy

A privacy policy wouldn't stop a bad actor, just like a robots.txt wouldn't prevent scraping.

That’s all we need: FarmVille but trickier.

How does this website know who you are?

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.

Well yea but as far as I know these companies know your identity but the website only know you as a number shown in statistics.

So if this thing isn't a trap from big tech you are fine.

Hi, founder here! We're a YC-funded education app with over 1 million downloads, currently #7 on the Education chart of the App Store. The goal of the accent oracle tool is to help more non-native English speakers find out about BoldVoice. While it's important as consumers to be aware of data privacy with AI tools in general, I want to set the record straight that that's not the point of what we're doing here. But great to hear that we got your accent right :)

I tried the app, and it's great. As a near-native French speaker I would be interested in working out my French pronunciation, hopefully you will go multi-language soon.

Thanks for checking it out! We're 100% in on English for now, but some day!

Hey! Just to be clear I really didn't want to imply that you were trying to clone my voice. I think your product is very interesting and this demo is a nice showcase of your tech.

It was meant more as a reflection on how, due to how fast threat models evolve, even the seemingly innocuous act of recording 2 sentences on a random website can now be used to break into my bank account.

Gotcha, totally fair to be discerning with your data these days.

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.

It’s funny because an app like this is probably more entertaining if it gets the wrong answer!

those words are your Shibboleths, words that give your origin away.

When I was in Germany, friendly people used to compliment me on my language skill saying "your German is good!". To which I would reciprocate: "thanks, yours too!"

My ex-wife whose native language is Spanish worked hard to eliminate her accent because she got tired of people calling her accent “cute.” Her shibboleths were anything with a schwa. The whole concept of schwas offends her sense of vocalic purity.

So her shibboleths were approximately every word in the English language?

Only some schwas escaped her. “Digital” is the one that I remember best.

If you learned English after 16. You probably still have an accent. Native speakers are really, really, really good at detecting it. They probably know as soon as you say "Hi".

there are people who are better than other people at blending in their accents, even in more difficult languages than English (for accent coding), perhaps they are just very good at that.

If you tune up your detector that high it’s very likely you’ll get false positives. I’ve met Americans with fairly strong “accents” that aren’t necessarily a dialect either, just a different way of speaking. It could also be a mix with parents who are non-native. American English is vast, and very heterogeneous.

If we’re talking about specific parts like a regional dialect then I would agree, those are tricky to acquire later, at least to those undetectable levels. They can be extremely specific.

Non native can do this pretty good just due to how much American Media is available to the world.

Yep big difference in accents of my cousins who moved here when they were 9 and another when they were 18. Now they are in their mid forties and you can still tell who moved when based on their accent. Its impossible to change your accent after late teens.

What do you think helped you the most to eliminate your accent?

Don't worry, even sneaky Canadians give it away, with words like PRO-cess vs PRAH-cess.

Perhaps the most famous...ABOOT.

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

No. I literally thought people in Portugal are speaking Russian at first!

He is correct.

I've heard it described as if a drunk russian was trying to speak spanish.

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)

As native Portuguese / Spanish, they are right.

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.

It caught me off guard too, portugese from portugal do sound somewhat slavic if you're not familiar with either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdDQEHL7i44

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

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.

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?

Congratulations: you gave someone a standardised sample of your voice they can use in a programmatic scam.

Don't do this.

I don't follow. Why is the data they are getting from this better than the billions of hours of captioned voice data available from youtube/tiktok/instagram/whatever?

Maybe IP correlation?

That too I guess. And it sets a few cookies.

I don't mean to suggest that this particular toy is much use. I just mean you should not give random internet games standardised samples of your voice, for this reason.

It's a standardised sample, already correlated to text, close to the microphone, for one thing. You're just making it easier for them.

I mean I suppose you can use "like and subscribe", "without further ado", and "let's get started" as standardised samples if you want to catch a youtuber.

But AFAIK my voice isn't on the internet anywhere. Quite a lot of people are not.

There's a number of ways this information can be connected back, with varying precision, to the person who recorded it.

And we should have learned from the Cambridge Analytica scandal that data is used in ways we do not expect. For example, what if you don't care to reproduce someone's voice, but you do care to extract age/gender/racial background/sexual orientation from it?

Or teach people not to trust that you said something just because something sounds like you. Use actual authentication instead of implied. Same for photos, videos

This is perfect for CEO scams in most American companies.

Many (large and small) American companies (and other nationalities as well, sure) a top down management approach is the norm. I.e. "CEO" (or "your manager" / "person in power") says something and you jump and do it without asking any questions because you fear you'll be fired otherwise (or have other repercussions).

In such an environment, imagine the CEO / person in power giving the best sample ever to the crooks, such that they can clone your voice almost perfectly. Now, of course, CEOs are likely to be recorded in various events anyway but some others are less likely, say the CFO.

Then order some lowly finance drone to wire a billion bucks to your account (well, maybe a bit less, and make sure to use someone else's account, seven levels of money mules and 17 different crypto currencies with mixers etc. before cashing out) with your faked voice.

We caught a CEO scam that was pretty good but noticeable recently. They had cloned his voice.

Isn’t it desirable to weed out organizations with such fragile procedures…?

It’s like how those ransomware thieves incentivize all the critical computer systems in the world to remain air gapped, which seems like an overall net positive.

Haha!

In a sense I agree with you. However, really great organizations have weak links. It only needs one unfortunately. I personally don't want to be out of job because of one weak link.

Sort of to your point, we do have training (which I find obnoxiously dumb, but many seem to find it great - I just let the video run in the background and answer the questions without actually watching a single second of it) around this sort of thing and we have phishing tests that are super easy to figure out (the email headers literally tell you it's a phishing test) but various people post on internal channels "Is this a scam? I'm not sure, please help!" and not all of them are non-technical people at all.

Above a certain size of company there just are gonna be some weak links in just the wrong place(s) randomly even with the best procedures unfortunately.

There are already voice cloning tools that work without needing a standardised sample like this

There are, and they still need people to provide voice samples. So don't play games like this.

What do you mean? They can work on any voice recording without needing to get someone to say a specific thing

What I mean is that there are still billions of people whose voices are not on the internet.

I'm more than half a century old, an internet geek since a few years before the conventional "dawn of the web" and AFAIK there is no recording of my voice on the internet.

Added to which, controlled samples like this with a good range of syllables will always be more helpful, won't they?

At this point, those are also places where we should not be sharing our voices.

Or, given similar concerns about image and video generation, our faces.

Jokes on them. I only tried impressions. It's going to make for some pretty funny programmatic scams!

I have often wondered how much of someone's actual voice leaks through into their impersonations in a way that can be detected.

I just saw an incredible Facebook reel of a voice actor, Shelby Young, saying the same thing in a striking range of theatrical voices, and I still wonder. How much of her true vocal fingerprint is unavoidably there?

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

(As a fan of old movies, "Vintage" was particularly impressive to me -- she is impersonating not just voices but also the choice of tonality those actors made in light of recording technology)

I'm usually able to identify most of the big VAs regardless of the disguise they're putting into their voice. Dan Castellenta, Jon Lovitz, Maurice LaMarche, Rob Paulsen, Jim Cummings all come to mind as ones I've correctly identified in various productions. The list is larger I'm sure.

An AI might be able to gain a higher success rate than me.

It reminds me of the old Mr T Name Generator (http://brunching.com/mrtname.html)

You enter your First Name, Last Name, Gender, Date of Birth, Pet's Name and Mother's Maiden Name and press the button to find out what your Mr T Name is...

... Mr T says your name is FOOL

Ha ha now it prints the CGI source

   #!/usr/bin/perl

   use CGI;
   $section = "toys";
   $author = "steveb";
   $title = "Your Mr. T Name";
   $s_title = "mrtname";
   $cat1 = "moviestv";
   print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
   require "makehead.pl";
   print &MakeHead;
   print <<EOFILE;
   <P>Your Mr. T name is:</P>
   <CENTER><P CLASS="head1">Fool</P></CENTER>
   EOFILE
   print &MakeFoot;

Why is this on the front page of HN?

BoldVoice isn't a scam. Its a decent company that creates a tool to help people loose their accent.

https://www.boldvoice.com

Now all they need to do is somehow work out who you are from only your IP - no email, name, location or anything - then simply get a voice cloning model to work perfectly from this small sample, then either somehow hack all the other information needed to get into your bank account or chase down your family to get them to send them crypto and they've got you dead to rights. Simple as that, which is why I also never take phone calls, pay for anything with a credit card or go outside.

we should go on HN to discuss how we did on the accent determination to help it with the working out who we are part!

Better not publish anything on youtube either.

Or use a phone. Who knows what they could be doing on their end?

Seems like a modern take on Sneakers.

"My. Voice. Is. My. Pass. Port... Verify. Me."

> Don't do this.

No. Its fine. go ahead and do this ( if you want).

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].

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.

[1] https://www.boldvoice.com/frequently-asked-questions

> The app this is advertising helps non-native speakers with their accent, I assume to sound more American.

Do people want to learn to speak English like a twangy guitar on purpose?

I could absolutely see people be willing to pay for this. I am from the Midwest in the United States and I happened to be at an airport in some foreign country. Someone else heard me talking and they came up and asked me where I learned to speak English because it was so smooth. They were looking to get lessons to make their English better or at least more smooth. I thought their English was fine and they were a bit disappointed when I mentioned I was from the United States.

I would pay for an equivalent app that helped my German pronunciation

I would be interested in an equivalent app for Japanese.

It's kind of annoying when services like this provide a free trial that you have to give a credit card number to even try, capitalizing on people forgetting to unsubscribe after trying.

Also, I'm very suspicious when a credit card form is on $site.com rather than $financial-institution.com

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%).

I tried it and it said English 93% (left same age as you).

Then I did my best Russian accent and on the first time it gave me Hindi/Urdu at 80+%. I tried it a second time rolling my r's a bit more and it settled on Russian at 70%.

I think it's very sensitive to specific tells and I suspect the dataset for Russian accents may not account for all the variations in regional pronunciation and dialects.

I left Russia around the same age and got 100% English. I can easily do a fake accent and get Russian though. Also some other accents like German, French and so on are pretty easy to get too.

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.

It thought my native language was Hindi/Urdu which was amused me if only because whenever I try to do a foreign accent it eventually morphs into a Hindi accent no matter where it started.

Out of curiosity what is your accent?

Chicago (West-side Czech, to be more specific).

I’d be interested in a version of this that guesses regional American accent backgrounds. I’d like to think it would have a hard time with me.

Nice suggestion! BoldVoice focuses on helping non-native English speakers to learn the American accent, so we tailored the accent oracle to non-native accents specifically.

I’m not suggesting you change your product. I’m simply explaining what I personally would be interested in.

That said, if you want to teach people to speak with an “American accent”, you should probably be aware that there is no “American accent”, only regional accents.

Thanks - we're aware! There's also a concept of a general American accent. Since the app is for non-native English speakers, a general American accent is the goal more so than a regional accent. We built the app together with professional accent coaches -- if you're interested in our methodology, you can learn more on boldvoice.com.

Have you thought of expanding to native American English speakers who want to learn a more "standard" accent? There are many Americans who feel that their strong regional accent (think e.g. Chicago, Mississippi, Baltimore, and different black accents) can be career-limiting.

I honestly thought that's what this was about lol

I was hoping too. I'm curious if I sound like everyone around me or not, I don't have an objective enough ear to tell.

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.

I had the same thing happen! 83% English, 3% Spanish, 2% Chinese.

I am super midwestern, lived here all my life. I didn't realize I was saying "ope" until I saw a meme about it.

As they explain, it is mostly meant for non-native speakers, so your "bad" experience is expected.

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.

Very interesting, I also got Spanish, Chinese, and english. Lifelong midwesterner here as well. Maybe there's something to the midwest.

Whenever time permits, I have a (bad) habit of viewing source code of new website. In this case, I found this on this website: (haven't read the js yet to see what's the true intent but surely a sign of horrible engineering)

edit- seems like remix customizations.

              "remove-watch-video-requirement": {
                            "defaultValue": false,
                            "rules": [{
                                "condition": {
                                    "env": "prod",
                                    "email": {
                                        "$in": ["<redacted>@gmail.com", "redacted"]
                                    }
                                },
                                "force": true
                            }]
                        },
                        "score-only-lesson-phoneme": {
                            "defaultValue": true
                        },
                        "auto-stop-recording-for-all-practice": {
                            "defaultValue": true,
                            "rules": [{
                                "condition": {
                                    "env": "prod",
                                    "email": {
                                        "$in": ["redacted", "redacted", "redacted@live.com"]
                                    }
                                },
                                "force": false
                            }]
                        },
                        "use-speechace-v9": {
                            "defaultValue": true
                        },
                        "april-2022-price-increase-experiment": {
                            "defaultValue": false,
                            "rules": [{
                                "condition": {
                                    "env": "prod",
                                    "email": {
                                        "$in": ["redacted@usorov.com", "redacted@gmail.com", "redacted@gmail.com", "redacted@boldvoice.com", "redacted@gmail.com"]
                                    }
                                },
                                "force": false

It might be a kindness to redact those emails before you can no longer edit your post.

valid point, removed.

Why bother? It's already harvested.

just in case; I don't want to make it worse.

Remove the email addresses from your post!

done!

My guess is that it's from their SSR framework (ie. remix), which serialized way too many things and sent it to the client. That, and they're using the same feature flag project/config as their main app, because looking at the feature flags it's clearly to do with their main app (ie. AI voice training) rather than this AI voice guesser app.

> "successEnterReferralCodeDuringOnboardingBody": "You've just unlocked 10% off your BoldVoice subscription, thanks to [firstName]'s referral!",

Between typescript and all the front-end frameworks, reading web code nowadays is worse than reading disassembled native code.

Fell for it. 90% czech, 10% polish. Nothing further from the reality. I guess it just geolocates by IP?

Don't think so, couldn't pick my Australian accent from here in Australia.

I'll go back and lay it on real thick and see if it does better.

I think we both misunderstood.

> 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.

Doubt it. I'm traveling in Hawaii right now and am Chinese-American who can speak Spanish, but it labeled me as Hindi/Urdu.

So I picked up the Czech accent but not the language, dang.

guessed 100% czech for me as well, wrongly

I'm in Japan, it correctly detected French. Can't be much further away geolocation wise.

worked 100% identifying my accent

AI fingerprints your voice and sells it to ad companies

What does this mean - could you elaborate on what you mean by ad companies and how they would use voice data?

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.

Okay, that’s pretty different from ad companies. I’ve worked in the ads space and what the poster mentioned doesn’t apply in any manner, AFAIK.

it's a joke, but it's not inconceivable that chatbots which support voice like chatgpt will use voice fingerprinting for ads

Not true - from the makers :)

do you store the recordings on your server?

Probably on someone else’s servers.

sorry, could not help myself :)

I'm not sure about that, but it is a good way to collect data on different accents.

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.

A part of my family is from rural southern Illinois. There is certainly an accent, and not a pretty one.

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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB8vHRH9A6M

So, I'm Ukrainian, and it says I have 100% russian accent. It can go fuck itself to be honest.

Same here.

Guess what - russsian developer. Who knew.

are u kidding? lol Russian and Ukrainian are the same thing. It’s slavic

Like Spanish and Italian are the same thing.

Because they're both Latin.

First, they are not same thing. If they would be same thing, russians could speak or understand Ukrainian language (they can't).

Second - I don't have russian accent. I don't even speak russian. I could agree that it can be 'slavic accent' but why attribute it to russia, majority of which is non-slavic literally Asia?

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.

Haha. Developer of app is russian. It seems that in best russian imperialistic tradition he thinks that anything repotely Slavic is russian.

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.

The app also crashed towards the end.

   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)

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territor...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-speaking_world

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).

Sounds like others tried and had similar results (not identifying Australian or Irish accents).

Yep, as a New Zealander/Australian (spent half my life in both) I was curious what it would give me. Turns out "native english speaker" is all you get. Even if I really put it on thick

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

It guessed Hebrew. My native language is Portuguese.

It guessed Hebrew for me too when I was going for a German accent do caralho.

I think it's trained on Brazilian Portuguese. Although I have lived in the UK for the last 10 years, it got it right every single time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Have we tested the same website? You don’t get asked anything. You just read a text.

A couple of comments implied this. If you just read some text, security is much less of an issue.

So I tried it. It guessed (correctly) that I'm a native English speaker. It only tells you which foreign accent you have.

"native English speaker" - is many different accents

The app this is kind of a PR for does phoneme-level analysis, so for all we know, this AI could be doing that as well. See https://youtu.be/j6z2WHAvqEs?t=100

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.

Well my regular accent just confuses it, though it did think it was French when I put on my "fake" French accent at least...

This is arguably somewhat aligned with the usual reaction which goes 50/50 between "English accent" and "I have no idea" ;)

[English-from-England is my native language, but I did live in Switzerland from age 4, and USA from age 27]

Hmm. I was expecting something that can differentiate between Stirling and Dunblane. Based on the comments it seems no.

I tried my best Arnold Schwarzenegger accent.

It had me as English, French and Spanish. I'm not very good at accents to be fair.

97% English? Boring. It should be able to detect regional English dialects. I want to know what kind of English.

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%

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.

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.

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).

I feel so validated right now :)

<<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.

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.

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.)

It only does non-English accents I guess. That wasn't clear.

Sounds a bit too much to ask. Getting enough labelled training data for each English speaking country (why would you even class the UK as one when England alone has dozens of accents?) in the world is likely a challenge

> Sounds a bit too much to ask. Getting enough labelled training data for each English speaking country (why would you even class the UK as one when England alone has dozens of accents?) in the world is likely a challenge

I am not sure that is the case. There is an AI accent generator that can do different English accents, sort of what I was suggesting to identify:

https://www.narakeet.com/languages/british-accent-generator/...

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.

Maybe the GPS signal was slightly off ;)

Preety spot on, very catchy. Got me to download your app, congratulations.

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.

Doesn't work in Firefox.

Edit: Firefox 133.0. Console shows error giving url: https://react.dev/errors/418?invariant=418

It works in Firefox Nightly (135.0a1) for Android for me, although I have to accept the microphone prompt twice for some reason.

Works fine in Firefox 133 here.

What do you have to say about all the claims this is just a pretext to clone voices for nefarious ends?

Conspiracy theories are fun! But we're a language learning app (YC s21). We help non native English speakers to work on their accents so they can speak English confidently. The accent oracle is a marketing tool for us to get in front of new users.

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.

a lot of my international friends tried it form the same german wifi and it got all right :)

Try this one as well. It can distinguish between British and American accents.

https://accentguesser.ai/

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

I'm half South African and can do many of the different accents, notably Afrikaans, Cape Town (white and coloured) and black SA, they're all very different. I'm pretty sure most people think of Wickus v.d. Merwe from District 9, but that's not the only one!

I can also speak a bunch of other languages without accent so good luck for any AI to fit me in a box :P

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?

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...

(It guessed correctly after the 2nd round)

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 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....

For a really hard one give it audio of William F Buckley!

Or Moira Rose

"This reminds me of a tool I found recently:https://accentvoice.net

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.

Better luck next time!

https://start.boldvoice.com/accent-guesser

I was able to get it to classify me as spanish, hungarian, albanian and romanian. I think it mostly latches to intonations, not sounds as such.

I'm Ghanaian: English: 44% Ghanaian: 36% Nigerian: 17%

Not bad, as I have been accused of having a not-so-prominent English accent by people around me

Was rather surprised to see the language preferences. I wonder if availability of the training data has to do with the language bias.

Very cool, it got me right even though I am not an easy case, as I speak several languages and not use my mother tongue much anymore

I've a very mixed accent and it just pretty much throw a random country in SE Asia (correct region) with different tries.

I have a particularly flat affect, apparently due to my autism, this thing could only tell I'm a native english speaker.

It guessed Spanish but I was expecting Chilean Spanish which is very different from your other Spanishes around the world.

Did I just train a spam bot to use my voice?

this is the gen z/gen alpha equivalent of those "useless" personality surveys.

stop feeding these companies your data.

Bold voice is an app for improving your accent. This makes a case for a legitimate publicity stunt.

Apparently my "accent" is 36% Russian, 16% Korean, and 13% Albanian, none of which are remotely correct.

What is your mother language then?

American English

Not quite, but pretty close, I am impressed. I'd say it's doing better than most people at least for me

Kind of hit-or-miss, apparently. It was extremely off with mine, and with my friends it was a 50/50 split.

Tried it. You know for science. Told me 99% Russian. WRONG! I guess, "Good luck" to you Bryan Mills.

That's amazing, I always thought I had no accent but there you go right on the money it guessed Spanish!

It guessed me as a native speaker, I actually moved to the US at 17 so I'm proud of myself i guess :)

I am from Ukraine but it labeled me Russian. I guess, we'll have to fight for recognition some more.

Well, I spoke normally and it said it was unable to guess. Native speaker here from Washington state. :)

Well, as a German native speaker I’m quite satisfied that I can trick it into thinking I’m English :)

Not me, I came out as 98% German. Oh well, I just need to own it!

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?

I don't know any articles about it, but as a native English speaker that learned German and participated in a German exchange student program...

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".

Whoa, guessed it correctly! And it was 100% sure about it. This is a nice ad for and app, well done

It told me my accent was Spanish. I'm a native English speaker from Ireland living in NYC :)

This could be a fun party game where you have to fake a given accent and see how well it sounds.

This could be a fun party game where you are given a country and have to do your best accent.

In my case, it said twice that it was Portuguese, but it’s wrong, it should be Brazilian. :-)

Canadian-born, 26 years in US:

- 65% English, 10% Dutch, 9% Russian

- 90% English, 3% Spanish, 2% German

- 89% English, 5% Spanish, 3% Russian

Seems pretty bad. I tried it and got 99% Dutch but have never lived in the Netherlands.

Deaf, me, here.

They couldn't guess my accent (they were all over the world, each time I tried it).

I can do different accents and it's pretty bad at figuring out my mother tongue.

Not even close, top 3 are geographically all on the other side of Europe. Nice try.

My whole life has been a lie, thought I was danish but apparently I'm burmese

Welp, time to start practicing in front of the mirror to get rid of that accent.

So I am special, and what he guessed has nothing to do with Portuguese.

I got 89% Danish the first time, then 83% Hindi. I'm Greek.

Wasn't even close. It suggested a language I do not speak.

Did my best Borat voice and got Italian → Russian → Bulgarian.

This is just so they can steal everyone's voice, avoid.

I did a sing-songy Swedish impression and it got that right.

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.

I don't know, I'm Parska-Hye and came here when I was 9. I got 43% German, 23% English, 22% Hindu.

To be fair, parka-hye dialect is even more esoteric. I am guessing this was trained on eastern armniean

I just get "English" - that's not an accent

"English (US, UK, or AU)". There are dozens of regional accents lumped in that, come on, try harder. See https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/dialect-quiz...

Got my accent wrong twice in a row. Was not even close.

Hello, i like football and my team is so talented.

Romanian/Albanian, couldn't fail more

I’m British. It guessed I was Turkish.

My wife is Italian. It guessed Greek.

Wow! It guessed my Bulgarian accent!

I don't think anyone else in Europe rolls their Rs as much as Bulgarians. It's a give away!

It recognizes my accent correctly too btw

Well, that's a terrible way to market a product. Not only do I not speak Hindi, but I also don't sound like I speak Hindi.

…or so you think. ;)

Didn't get my farm-Brummie.

Awesome growth move, love it

i wonder if people from liverpool speak - what do they get ?

i'm english - it gave me 99% danish, 1% swedish. hmmm

May be you are Danish but you don't know. Time to ask your parents.

100% russian, sad.

what a great way to farm voice data.

Nae Scottish.

For me:

English: 91%

Nigerian: 4%

Spanish: 3%

wow… incredible

quite disappointing, it just said English and nothing else

well yes, but tell me what region!

or something other than just stating the obvious

hello

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.

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