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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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".
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
(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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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)
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!",
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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:
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.
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'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).
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.
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
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
<<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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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]
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.
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.
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
Indeed. I learned Quebecois in school and when I started speaking it in Paris I got confused looks and "... do you speak English?"
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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".
What do you think helped you the most to eliminate your accent?
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?
Congratulations: you gave someone a standardised sample of your voice they can use in a programmatic scam.
Don't do this.
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.
BoldVoice isn't a scam. Its a decent company that creates a tool to help people loose their accent.
https://www.boldvoice.com
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?
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?
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.
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.
Maybe IP correlation?
That too I guess. And it sets a few cookies.
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
Why is this on the front page of HN?
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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!",
It might be a kindness to redact those emails before you can no longer edit your post.
valid point, removed.
Remove the email addresses from your post!
done!
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 :)
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 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.
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.
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?
Isn't it like 68 degrees today in Minnesota? I guess no one can accuse you of being snowed in and bored ;)
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.
Fell for it. 90% czech, 10% polish. Nothing further from the reality. I guess it just geolocates by IP?
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.
I'm in Japan, it correctly detected French. Can't be much further away geolocation wise.
worked 100% identifying my accent
guessed 100% czech for me as well, wrongly
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.
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.
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
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
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.
> 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?
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/...
AI fingerprints your voice and sells it to ad companies
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.
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
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'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).
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
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.
Kind of hit-or-miss, apparently. It was extremely off with mine, and with my friends it was a 50/50 split.
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?
"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...
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?
97% English? Boring. It should be able to detect regional English dialects. I want to know what kind of English.
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
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.
Apparently my "accent" is 36% Russian, 16% Korean, and 13% Albanian, none of which are remotely correct.
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.
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.
Well, I spoke normally and it said it was unable to guess. Native speaker here from Washington state. :)
Preety spot on, very catchy. Got me to download your app, congratulations.
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 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.
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 ;)
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.
Welp, time to start practicing in front of the mirror to get rid of that accent.
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
Hmm. I was expecting something that can differentiate between Stirling and Dunblane. Based on the comments it seems no.
This could be a fun party game where you have to fake a given accent and see how well it sounds.
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.
This could be a fun party game where you are given a country and have to do your best accent.
For a really hard one give it audio of William F Buckley!
Or Moira Rose
It guessed me as a native speaker, I actually moved to the US at 17 so I'm proud of myself i guess :)
<<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.
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.
I’m British. It guessed I was Turkish.
I can do different accents and it's pretty bad at figuring out my mother tongue.
I got 89% Danish the first time, then 83% Hindi. I'm Greek.
I just get "English" - that's not an accent
I have a particularly flat affect, apparently due to my autism, this thing could only tell I'm a native english speaker.
Not quite, but pretty close, I am impressed. I'd say it's doing better than most people at least for me
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 :)
So, I'm Ukrainian, and it says I have 100% russian accent. It can go fuck itself to be honest.
Romanian/Albanian, couldn't fail more
I've a very mixed accent and it just pretty much throw a random country in SE Asia (correct region) with different tries.
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?
Did my best Borat voice and got Italian → Russian → Bulgarian.
Got my accent wrong twice in a row. Was not even close.
It told me my accent was Spanish. I'm a native English speaker from Ireland living in NYC :)
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?
In my case, it said twice that it was Portuguese, but it’s wrong, it should be Brazilian. :-)
Seems pretty bad. I tried it and got 99% Dutch but have never lived in the Netherlands.
Not even close, top 3 are geographically all on the other side of Europe. Nice try.
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.
My wife is Italian. It guessed Greek.
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'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.
wow… incredible
Didn't get my farm-Brummie.
Awesome growth move, love it
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.
That's amazing, I always thought I had no accent but there you go right on the money it guessed Spanish!
100% russian, sad.
https://start.boldvoice.com/accent-guesser
For me:
English: 91%
Nigerian: 4%
Spanish: 3%
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. ;)
Wasn't even close. It suggested a language I do not speak.
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).
Tried it. You know for science. Told me 99% Russian. WRONG! I guess, "Good luck" to you Bryan Mills.
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.
I did a sing-songy Swedish impression and it got that right.
quite disappointing, it just said English and nothing else
well yes, but tell me what region!
or something other than just stating the obvious