top | item 42392088

AI Guesses Your Accent

222 points| mikpanko | 1 year ago |start.boldvoice.com

262 comments

order

belval|1 year ago

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.

idatum|1 year ago

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.

insane_dreamer|1 year ago

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

interloxia|1 year ago

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.

anadalakra|1 year ago

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 :)

benreesman|1 year ago

That’s all we need: FarmVille but trickier.

gtirloni|1 year ago

How does this website know who you are?

jackdawed|1 year ago

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.

corpMaverick|1 year ago

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".

create-username|1 year ago

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!"

shusaku|1 year ago

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

hellohihello135|1 year ago

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

m463|1 year ago

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

jampa|1 year ago

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)

bossyTeacher|1 year ago

> 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

DonaldFisk|1 year ago

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.

wheybags|1 year ago

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?

throw646577|1 year ago

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

Don't do this.

sebzim4500|1 year ago

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?

joegibbs|1 year ago

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.

adverbly|1 year ago

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

amiga386|1 year ago

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

_carbyau_|1 year ago

Seems like a modern take on Sneakers.

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

apwell23|1 year ago

> Don't do this.

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

sixothree|1 year ago

Why is this on the front page of HN?

itsadok|1 year ago

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

elmerfud|1 year ago

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.

keybored|1 year ago

> 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?

glandium|1 year ago

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

psb|1 year ago

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

lopatin|1 year ago

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%).

throwup238|1 year ago

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.

zeroonetwothree|1 year ago

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.

hyperbovine|1 year ago

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.

dhosek|1 year ago

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.

binary132|1 year ago

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.

anadalakra|1 year ago

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.

imbnwa|1 year ago

I honestly thought that's what this was about lol

nu11ptr|1 year ago

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.

RajT88|1 year ago

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.

ookblah|1 year ago

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

gauravphoenix|1 year ago

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

gruez|1 year ago

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!",

maxmcd|1 year ago

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

77pt77|1 year ago

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

echelon|1 year ago

Remove the email addresses from your post!

imalerba|1 year ago

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

markerz|1 year ago

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

glandium|1 year ago

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

jay_kyburz|1 year ago

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.

guytv|1 year ago

worked 100% identifying my accent

WithinReason|1 year ago

guessed 100% czech for me as well, wrongly

rougka|1 year ago

AI fingerprints your voice and sells it to ad companies

anadalakra|1 year ago

Not true - from the makers :)

DAGdug|1 year ago

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

ks2048|1 year ago

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

evan_|1 year ago

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.

M3L0NM4N|1 year ago

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

kyleblarson|1 year ago

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

Svoka|1 year ago

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

kimkira|1 year ago

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

mudil|1 year ago

Same here.

sndlr|1 year ago

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.

Svoka|1 year ago

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

areoform|1 year ago

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

tristor|1 year ago

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).

trashchomper|1 year ago

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

laurentlb|1 year ago

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).

brap|1 year ago

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.

3836293648|1 year ago

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?

dom96|1 year ago

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.

personalityson|1 year ago

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.

ltbarcly3|1 year ago

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.

goshx|1 year ago

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.

xeckr|1 year ago

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

leo3567|1 year ago

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.

DonaldFisk|1 year ago

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.

rcruzeiro|1 year ago

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

tartoran|1 year ago

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.

davidgay|1 year ago

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]

dboreham|1 year ago

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

adverbly|1 year ago

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.

jart|1 year ago

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

muhammadusman|1 year ago

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.

dec0dedab0de|1 year ago

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.

cblum|1 year ago

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 :)

felipelalli|1 year ago

<<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.

waffletower|1 year ago

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.

halostatue|1 year ago

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.

bhouston|1 year ago

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.

bossyTeacher|1 year ago

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

gobins|1 year ago

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.

amelius|1 year ago

Maybe the GPS signal was slightly off ;)

cryptozeus|1 year ago

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

Pet_Ant|1 year ago

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.

anadalakra|1 year ago

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.

77pt77|1 year ago

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

bkovacev|1 year ago

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.

jcmp|1 year ago

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

wsintra2022|1 year ago

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

pixelpoet|1 year ago

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

wkoszek|1 year ago

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?

eqvinox|1 year ago

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)

chamanbuga|1 year ago

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.

indianmouse|1 year ago

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....

belfalas|1 year ago

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

Oarch|1 year ago

Or Moira Rose

PaulDavisThe1st|1 year ago

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!

jojobas|1 year ago

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.

kwakubiney|1 year ago

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

_k5mx|1 year ago

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

iammjm|1 year ago

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

yandie|1 year ago

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

neom|1 year ago

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

jmdelatorre|1 year ago

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

joshuamcginnis|1 year ago

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

xyst|1 year ago

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

stop feeding these companies your data.

noncoml|1 year ago

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

fallinghawks|1 year ago

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

bromuro|1 year ago

What is your mother language then?

oytis|1 year ago

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

tail_exchange|1 year ago

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

stuckkeys|1 year ago

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

sergiotapia|1 year ago

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

joeamroo|1 year ago

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

mudil|1 year ago

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

chungy|1 year ago

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

satoqz|1 year ago

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

loevborg|1 year ago

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

aquir|1 year ago

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

donohoe|1 year ago

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

0xE1337DAD|1 year ago

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

0xE1337DAD|1 year ago

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

delduca|1 year ago

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

hughdbrown|1 year ago

Canadian-born, 26 years in US:

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

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

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

sneeze-slayer|1 year ago

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

egberts1|1 year ago

Deaf, me, here.

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

glitchc|1 year ago

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

world2vec|1 year ago

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

user453|1 year ago

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

OptionOfT|1 year ago

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

pjmlp|1 year ago

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

stavros|1 year ago

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

bmitc|1 year ago

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

a13n|1 year ago

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

stuaxo|1 year ago

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

keybored|1 year ago

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

andoando|1 year ago

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.

3nwf248|1 year ago

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

tommoor|1 year ago

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

harel|1 year ago

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

douae_puchaina|1 year ago

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

douae013_hii|1 year ago

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

epolanski|1 year ago

Romanian/Albanian, couldn't fail more

00deadbeef|1 year ago

I’m British. It guessed I was Turkish.

davidw|1 year ago

My wife is Italian. It guessed Greek.

nikolay|1 year ago

Wow! It guessed my Bulgarian accent!

msoad|1 year ago

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

MisterBastahrd|1 year ago

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.

layer8|1 year ago

…or so you think. ;)

specproc|1 year ago

Didn't get my farm-Brummie.

mp3il|1 year ago

Awesome growth move, love it

dzonga|1 year ago

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

wigster|1 year ago

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

corpMaverick|1 year ago

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

sunshinerag|1 year ago

what a great way to farm voice data.

ddmf|1 year ago

Nae Scottish.

rahimnathwani|1 year ago

For me:

English: 91%

Nigerian: 4%

Spanish: 3%

jaylane|1 year ago

wow… incredible

1317|1 year ago

quite disappointing, it just said English and nothing else

well yes, but tell me what region!

or something other than just stating the obvious

vidarh|1 year ago

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.