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Comment by lucw | Hacker News Reader

one thing: language learning

When I meet people in VR who are ESL, I can tell based on their accent and mannerisms that they learned English by playing video games with westerners or watched a lot of YouTube.

Do we really want to dilute the uniqueness of language by making everyone sound like they came out of a lab in California?

Likewise will you be learning how to speak formally or informally.

Getting that wrong in some languages e.g. Korean can be offensive.

Why would that be? In Elevenlabs Reader I can already choose a bunch of different accents, including southern English, Australian and so on.

The people behind this demo already said their publishing different languages and accents soon along with open models you can run yourself.

Your post is the language learning equivalent of worrying that going to the gym will make you too bulky.

haha yeah it definitely comes off grand schemey and overly idealistic but it’s hard not to have emotional reactions to new applications in AI

>Do we really want to dilute the uniqueness of language

I can't speak to whether it's desirable or not, but this has been happening with the advent of radio, movies, and television for over a century. So, are we worse off now, linguistically-speaking, than then? Do we really even notice missing accents if we never grew up with them?

good points.

language learning also works fine without emotionality faking, and is depending more on authentic speech recognition (e.g. you want the model to notice if you mispronounce important words, not gloss over it and just continue babble as otherwise this will bite you in the ass in the real world) as well as the system's overall specific ability to generate a personal learning curriculum.

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