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Comment by iagooar | Hacker News Reader

In English it is pretty good. But talk to it in Polish, and suddenly it thinks you speak Russian? Ukranian? Belarus? I would understand if an American company launched this, but for a company being so proud about their European roots, I think it should have better support for major European languages.

I tried English + Polish:

> All right, I'm not really sure if transcribing this makes a lot of sense. Maybe not. A цьому nie mówisz po polsku. A цьому nie mówisz po polsku, nie po ukrańsku.

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They don't claim to support Polish, but they do support Russian.

> The model is natively multilingual, achieving strong transcription performance in 13 languages, including English, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, French, Portuguese, Russian, German, Japanese, Korean, Italian, and Dutch. With a 4B parameter footprint, it runs efficiently on edge devices, ensuring privacy and security for sensitive deployments.

I wonder how much having languages with the same roots (e.g. the romance languages in the list above or multiple Slavic languages) affects the parameter count and the training set. Do you need more training data to differentiate between multiple similar languages? How would swapping, for example, Hindi (fairly distinct from the other 12 supported languages) for Ukrainian and Polish (both share some roots with Russian) affect the parameter count?

Nobody ever supports Polish. It's the worst. They'll support like, ̵Swahili, but not Polish.

edit: I stand corrected lol. I'll go with "Gaelic" instead.

200 million people speak Swahili.

39 million people speak Polish, and most of those also speak English or another more common language.

You could say the same about Dutch to be fair. 90-95% speak English - I bet that's way higher than in Poland.

As an American, my perspective is that Dutch people speak better English than a large percentage of English people and Americans.

Heh, based on my incorrect and probably wrong experience Dutch and Swedes are the best non-native english speakers in term of both the accent and fluency.

Those and Icelandic people. But there's a fun correlation - see how much the US media content is played compared to local one per country. And which countries use subs rather than dubs or voiceovers in cinemas and TV. https://publications.europa.eu/resource/cellar/e4d5cbf4-a839...

If you have exposure to English media from young age and don't get a translation, you learn pretty quickly.

As a Dutch person, I'm very doubtful that's the case, but I'm willing to bet a good ESL speaker is more aware of common grammatical errors than some native speakers. For example, the your/you're mixup makes no sense if you've had to explicitly learn about English contractions in the first place.

Swahili is subcontinental lingua franca spoken by 200M people and growing quickly. Polish is spoken by a shrinking population in one country where English is understood anyways.

> where English is understood anyways.

It's popular. But not that popular - you couldn't assume a random person over 30yo on the street would be able to have a chat.

Just a side note to remember that this is a mini model. It's very small and yet 12 languages.

I guess a European version can be created but now it's aimed at a world wide distribution.

I guess I will check Korean. OpenAI audio mini is not bad but I always have to make gpt to check and fix transcription.

Try sticking to the supported languages

Yeah, it's too bad. Apparently it only performs well in certain languages: "The model is natively multilingual, achieving strong transcription performance in 13 languages, including English, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, French, Portuguese, Russian, German, Japanese, Korean, Italian, and Dutch"

It did great English and Spanish, it didn't switch to Portuguese, french nor German, maybe struggle with my accent.

Try to warn it you are going to switch language to Portugese. Worked for me.

That's a mix of Polish and Ukrainian in the transcript. Now, if I try speaking Ukrainian, I'm getting transcript in Russian every time. That's upsetting.

Oh no! The model won't translate to an unsupported language, and incorrectly reverts to one that it was explicitly trained on.

The base likely was pretrained on days that included Polish and Ukrainian. You shouldn't be surprised to learn it doesn't perform great on languages it wasn't trained on, or perhaps had the highest share of training data.

Tell it you are going to speak Polish now. It helps.

Cracking non-English or accented / mispronounced English is the white whale of text-to-speech I think; I don't know about you, but in our day to day chats there's a lot of jargon, randomly inserted English words, etc. And when they speak in English it's often what I call expat-English which is what you get when non-native speakers only speak the language with other non-native speakers.

Add poor microphone quality (using a laptop to broadcast a presentation to a room audience isn't very good) and you get a perfect storm of untranscribeable presentations or meetings.

All I want from e.g. Teams is a good transcript and, more importantly, a clever summary. Because when you think about it, imagine all the words spoken in a meeting and write them down - that's pages and pages of content that nobody would want to read in full.

I'm not sure why but their multilingual performance in general has usually been below average. For a French company, their models are not even close to being best in French, even outdone by the likes of Qwen. I don't think they're focusing on anything but English, the rest is just marketing.

TBH ChatGPT does the same, when I mix Polish and English. Generally getting some cyrillic characters and it gets super confused.

polish logically should be rendered in cyrillic as the cyrillic orthography more closely matches the sounds and consonant structure of slavic languages like polish and russian, although this has never been done for church reasons . maybe this is confusing ai

Polish has been written with Latin alphabet since the 13th century. And before it simply wasn't written.

Polish works with the Latin alphabet just fine.

"Do kraju tego, gdzie kruszynę chleba podnoszą z ziemi przez uszanowanie dla darów Nieba.... Tęskno mi, Panie..."

"Mimozami jesień się zaczyna, złotawa, krucha i miła. To ty, to ty jesteś ta dziewczyna, która do mnie na ulicę wychodziła."

> although this has never been done for church reasons

That's not the case. Polish uses Latin-like alphabet due to Czech influence and German printers.

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