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How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters
- ccheever 11mo agoVery interesting
- dereknelson 11mo agoreally fun discovery clicking a dot and hearing the accent. neat visualization, lots to think about!
- tmshapland 11mo agoFascinating! How did you decouple the speaker-specific vocal characteristics (timbre, pitch range) from the accent-defining phonetic and prosodic features in the latent space?
- oscarfree 11mo agoWe didn't explicitly. Because we finetuned this model for accent classification, the later transformer layers appear to ignore non-accent vocal characteristics. I verified this for gender for example.
- JakeLester 11mo agoThank you for sharing! the 3d visual was an interesting application of the UMAP technique. Is there a way to subscribe to these blog posts for auto-notification?
- nosrepa 11mo agoYeah, if only there was a protocol for that.
- bheadmaster 11mo agoIt would have taken you a second more to type out "RSS", and turn a sarcastic comment into an informative one. Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- JakeLester 11mo ago1: me <- 1/10k 2: also thnx for the laugh
- ahstilde 11mo agowhy is spanish so distributed?
- ilyausorov 11mo agoGood question! It's likely because there are lots of different accents of Spanish that are distinct from each other. Our labels only capture the native language of the speaker right now, so they're all grouped together but it's definitely on our to-do list to go deeper into the sub accents of each language family!
- bikeshaving 11mo agoSpanish is one of those languages I would love to see as a breakdown by country. I’m sure Chilean Spanish looks very different from Catalonian Spanish.
- rkomorn 11mo agoDid you mean Catalan (which is not Spanish) or Castilian Spanish?
- bikeshaving 11mo agoYes the Spanish spoken in Spain, especially the one that’s like /ˈɡɾaθjas/ and /baɾθeˈlona/.
- djmips 11mo agoBut Spanish sounds very different in Spain depending on what region of the country you are talking about.
- david-gpu 11mo agoYeah, and not all Spaniards have a distinct pronunciation for "c" and "s". For those curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Spanish_coronal_fricatives#Distinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Spanis...
- zaouiamine 11mo agoThis is a fascinating look at how AI interprets accents! It reminds me of some recent advancements in speech recognition tech, like Google's Dialect Recognition feature, which also attempts to adapt to different accents. I wonder how these models could be improved further to not just recognize but also appreciate the nuances of regional
- afiodorov 11mo agoApparently Persian and Russian are close. Which is surprising to say the least. I know people keep getting confused about how Portuguese from Portugal and Russian sound close yet the Persian is new to me.
- zman0225 11mo agoGoing mono-tonal to that of an expressive ebook increased my "American English" score from a 52% to 92%. I'd suggest training a little less on audio books.
- djmips 11mo agoWhat does it mean mono-tonal and what is an expressive ebook? I assume you are not American born? I had been of the understanding that rythm was more important than the exact sounds in comprehension.
- fkyoureadthedoc 11mo agoHe's saying to read it like Jeff Hays not Travis Baldree
- djmips 11mo agoWhy do I get downvoted for asking an innocent question? That's weird
- bikeshaving 11mo agoThe source code for this is unminified and very readable if you’re one of the rare few who has interesting latent spaces to visualize. https://accent-explorer.boldvoice.com/script.js?v=5 https://accent-explorer.boldvoice.com/script.js?v=5
- ilyausorov 11mo agoNothing too secret in there! We anonymized everything and anyway it's just a basic Plotly plot. Feel free to check it out.
- 3abiton 11mo agoGood catch. I really hate javascript so i never got into d3js, so plptly was such a life saver.
- ilyausorov 11mo agoPlotly is great! Much love.
- agrnet 11mo agocould you explain what it means for someone to “have interesting latent spaces”? curious how you’re using that metaphor here
- bikeshaving 11mo agoI don’t think I’m using it as a metaphor? To “have interesting latent spaces” just means you have access to the actual weights and biases, the artifact produced by fine-tuning/training models, or you can somehow “see” activations as you feed input through the model. This can be turned into interesting 3D visualizations and reveal “latent” connections in the data which often align with and allow us to articulate similarities in the actual phenomena which these “spaces” classify. Not many people have the privilege of access to these artifacts, or the skill to interpret these abstract, multi-dimensional spaces. I want more of these visualizations, with more spaces which encode different modalities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_space
- dcreater 11mo agowhats the dimensionality of the latent space? How were the 3 dimensions visualized selected?
- oscarfree 11mo ago12 layers of 768-dim each. The 3 dimensions visualized are chosen by UMAP.
- lynchdt 11mo agoIrish accent appears to break it.
- oscarfree 11mo agoWe are working on this - we don't have quite enough Irish speech data.
- diegolas 11mo agoit would've been nice to be able to visualize the differences between the different accents in the spanish language, really cool tho
- ilyausorov 11mo agoYeh, we would've loved to see that too. It's on our roadmap for sure. Same for some of the other languages with a large amount of unique accents like e.g. French, Chinese, Arabic, etc...
- johnwatson11218 11mo agoI just got a project running whereby I used python + pdfplumber to read in 1100 pdf files, most of my humble bundle collection. I extracted the text and dumped it into a 'documents' table in postgresql. Then I used sentence transformers to reduce each 1K chunk to a single 384D vector which I wrote back to the db. Then I averaged these to produce a document level embedding as a single vector. Then I was able to apply UMAP + HDBSCAN to this dataset and it produced a 2D plot of all my books. Later I put the discovered topic back in the db and used that to compute tf-idf for my clusters from which I could pick the top 5 terms to serve as a crude cluster label. It took about 20 to 30 hours to finish all these steps and I was very impressed with the results. I could see my cookbooks clearly separated from my programming and math books. I could drill in and see subclusters for baking, bbq, salads etc. Currently I'm putting it into a 2 container docker compose file, base postgresql + a python container I'm working on.
- kallistisoft 11mo agoThis sounds like an interesting project. Do you have any plans to publish a tutorial/journal article + source code?
- mertbozkir 11mo agoi love boldvoice
- ilyausorov 11mo agoThanks, we love you too
- double_espresso 11mo agothis is super cool!
- AprilArcus 11mo agoThe Australian-Vietnamese continuum is well-explained by Australia being the geographically nearest region which can supply native English language teachers to English language learners in Vietnam, rather than by any intrinsic phonetic resemblance between Vietnamese and Australian English.
- oscar120 11mo ago+1
- gmurphy 11mo agoSince our own accents generally sound neutral to ourselves, I would love someone to make an accent-doubler - take the differences between two accents and expand them, so an Australian can hear what they sound like to an American, or vice-versa
- jclulow 11mo agoIf we assume this model is accurate, I sound to Americans like I'm South African!
- ema 11mo agoI've found that when I'm listening to recordings of me my accent really sticks out to me in a way that's completely inaudible when listening to myself live. This happens with both English and my native German.
- wkjagt 11mo agoMy own accent doesn't sound neutral to myself at all. It sounds incredibly Dutch (which makes sense, since I'm Dutch).
- nmeofthestate 11mo agoI agree. I think there are places in the world where people consider their accent to be 'neutral', but I'm pretty sure no-one from my neck of the woods would think that.
- efskap 11mo agoBERT still making headlines in 2025, you love to see it.
- pinkmuffinere 11mo agoWhy do the voices all sound so similar? I'm not talking about accent, I'm talking about the pitch, timbre, and other qualities of the voice themselves. For instance, all the phrases I heard sounded like they were said by a medium-set 45 year old man. Nothing from kids, the elderly, or people with lower / higher-pitch voices. I assume this expected from the dataset for some reason, but am really curious about that reason. Did they just get many people with similar vocal qualities but wide ranges of accents?
- dwohnitmok 11mo agoFrom the article: > By clicking or tapping on a point, you will hear a standardized version of the corresponding recording. The reason for voice standardization is two-fold: first, it anonymizes the speaker in the original recordings in order to protect their privacy. Second, it allows us to hear each accent projected onto a neutral voice, making it easier to hear the accent differences and ignore extraneous differences like gender, recording quality, and background noise. However, there is no free lunch: it does not perfectly preserve the source accent and introduces some audible phonetic artifacts. > This voice standardization model is an in-house accent-preserving voice conversion model.
- pinkmuffinere 11mo agoAh thanks, missed that somehow
- hencq 11mo agoI'm kind of curious if it would be possible for it to use my own voice but decoupled from accent. I.e. could it translate a recording from my voice to a different accent but still with my voice. If so, I wonder if that makes it easier for accent training if you can hear yourself say things in a different accent.
- glandium 11mo agoThat would be interesting for sure, but considering you don't hear yourself the same way someone else or a mic does, I'm not sure it would have the benefit you're expecting.
- crazygringo 11mo agoThis is fascinating in theory, but I'm confused in practice. When I play the different recordings, which I understand have the accent "re-applied" to a neutral voice, it's very difficult to hear any actual differences in vowels, let alone prosody. Like if I click on "French", there's something vaguely different, but it's quite... off. It certainly doesn't sound like any native French speaker I've ever heard. And after all, a huge part of accent is prosody. So I'm not sure what vocal features they're considering as "accent"? I'm also curious what the three dimensions are supposed to represent? Obviously there's no objective answer, but if they've listened to all the samples, surely they could explain the main constrasting features each dimension seems to encode?
- retrac 11mo agoI'm deaf. Something close to standard Canadian English is my native language. Most native English speakers claim my speech is unmarked but I think they're being polite; it's slightly marked as unusual and some with a good ear can easily tell it's because of hearing loss. Using the accent guesser, I have a Swedish accent. Danish and Australian English follow as a close tie. It's not just the AI. Non-native speakers of English often think I have a foreign accent, too. Often they guess at English or Australian. Like I must have been born there and moved here when I was younger, right? I've also been asked if I was Scandinavian. Interestingly I've noticed that native speakers never make this mistake. They sometimes recognize that I have a speech impediment but there's something about how I talk that is recognized with confidence as a native accent. That leads me to the (probably obvious) inference that whatever it is that non-native speakers use to judge accent and competency, it is different from what native speakers use. I'm guessing in my case, phrase-length tone contour. (Which I can sort of hear, and presumably reproduce well, even if I have trouble with the consonants.) AI also really has trouble with transcribing my speech. I noticed that as early as the '90s with early speech recognition software. It was completely unusable. Even now AI transcription has much more trouble with me than with most people. Yet aside from a habit of sometimes mumbling, I'm told I speak quite clearly, by humans. Hearing different things, as it were.
- chupchap 11mo agoTo judge local or not, I would consider use of phrases and word as well, and not just the accent. Perhaps, that's what is working for you?
- overfeed 11mo ago> AI also really has trouble with transcribing my speech. I noticed that as early as the '90s with early speech recognition software. It was completely unusable. I don't know what your transcription use cases are, but you may be able to get an improvement by fine-tuning Whisper. This would require about $4 in training costs[1], and a dataset with 5-10 hours of your labeled (transcribed) speech, which may be the bigger hurdle[2]. 1. 2000 steps took me 6 hours on an A100 on Collab, fine-tuning openai/whisper-large-v3 on 12 hours of data. I can shar my notebook/script with you if you'd like. 2. I am working on a PWA that makes it simple for humans to edit initial, automated transcriptions with mistakes for feeding the correct dataset back into the pipeline for fine-tuning, but its not ready yet
- dmevich1 11mo agoFascinating work — especially how geography and history influence accent clustering more than language families. Brilliant visualization!
- TomNomNom 11mo agoI tried the oracle and got this: > Your accent is Dutch, my friend. I identified your accent based on subtle details in your pronunciation. Want to sound like a native English speaker? I'm British; from Yorkshire. When letting it know how it got it wrong there's no option more specific than "English - United Kingdom". That's kind of funny, if not absurd, to anyone who knows anything of the incredible range of accents across the UK. I also think the question "Do you have an accent when speaking English?" is an odd one. Everyone has an accent when speaking any language.
- david-gpu 11mo ago> I also think the question "Do you have an accent when speaking English?" is an odd one. Everyone has an accent when speaking any language. Sure, I agree. But look at it from the perspective of a foreigner living in an English-speaking country, which is probably their target demographic. We know that as soon as we open our mouth the locals will instantly pigeonhole us as "a foreigner". No matter how good we might be in other areas, we will never be one of "them". The degree of prejudice that may or may not exist against us doesn't matter as much as the ever present knowledge that the locals know that we are not one of them, and the fear of being dismissed because of that. Nobody likes to stand out like that, particularly when it so clearly puts you at a disadvantage. That sort of insecurity is what this product is aimed at.
- wizzwizz4 11mo agoIt's not ethical to lie to people about whether they need something you're selling, especially if you're playing on their fears of vulnerability to make the sale. Laundering the lies through an AI model doesn't make it any less bad. BoldVoice is very clear about being an American accent "training app", so that's not (necessarily) what's happening here, but the point remains.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- f7f3 11mo agoIt's quite offensive. English is my native tongue, I got a perfect IELTS score, and one of my parents was an English professor. But my accent makes me less than "native".
- sailingparrot 11mo ago> This voice standardization model is an in-house accent-preserving voice conversion model. Not sure this model works really well. As a french/spanish native speaker, I can immediately recognize an actual French or Spanish person speaking in english, but the examples here are completly foreign to me. If I had to guess where the "french" accent was from I would have guessed something like Nigeria. For example spanish have a very distinct way of pronouncing "r" in english that is just not present here. I would have been unable to correctly guess French or Spanish for the ~10 examples present in each language (mayyybe 1 for French).
- ilyausorov 11mo agoFor sure the voice standardization model is not perfect, but it was important for us to do especially for the voice privacy. It’s still pretty early tech.
- vintermann 11mo agoIt's probably an artifact of them lumping together all varieties/dialects of a given language. I don't speak Spanish, but I know that the R is one of the things that's different in e.g. Argentina.
- suddenlybananas 11mo agoI wonder if they have a large population of African French speakers in the dataset?
- kazinator 11mo ago"Audible visualization" is a visualization enhanced by auditorization. :)
- adeptima 11mo agoDid research on accent, pronunciation improvement, phoneme recognition, kaldi ecosystem, etc … nothing really changed in the public domain past few years. There’s no even accurate open source dataset. All self claimedccc manually labelled dataset with 10k+ hours was partly done with automation. Next issue, model models operates in different latent space often with 50ms chunks while pronunciation assessment requires much better accuracy. Just try to say B loud - silent part gathering energy in the lips, loud part, and everything what resonates after. Worst part there are too many ml papers from the last year students or junior phd folks claiming success or fake improvements, etc The article itself is just a vector projection in 3d space … the actual reality is much complex. Any comments on pronunciation assessment models are greatly appreciated
- oezi 11mo agoYou are right and I don't think incentives exist to solve the issues you describe, because currently many of the building blocks people are building are aligned to erase subtleaccent differences: the neural codecs, transcription systems such as whisper want to output clean/compressed representations of their inputs.
- adeptima 11mo ago100% agree
- sota_pop 11mo agoVery nice viz. it reminds me of the visualizations people used to do of the mnist data set in the days when the quintessential ML project was “training a hand writing digits classifier”: https://projector.tensorflow.org/ https://projector.tensorflow.org/
- glandium 11mo agoNote: this is related to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42392088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42392088 from a few months ago.
- bashtoni 11mo agoThe fact that they believe there to be a single 'British' accent means this can be quickly discounted as nonsense.
- tavavex 11mo agoWhen people mention a single "British accent", in 99% of the cases it's just a more widely understood shorthand for Received Pronunciation. I don't see how that's bad or wrong, considering how common it is in education.
- noja 11mo agoI would say in 99% of cases people mean Estuary English.
- CamouflagedKiwi 11mo agoIt's not common any more, very few people really speak RP these days. The more usual thing accent that people might think of is sometimes called "Standard Southern British" (I've heard "BBC English" as well).
- TurkTurkleton 11mo agoI mean, if you want to be like that, you could generalize that statement to "the fact that they believe there to be a single `$LANGUAGE_OR_REGION` accent means this can be quickly discounted as nonsense". Other languages, and other varieties of English, have regional variation as well, after all--although in the case of other languages, I'll grant that the accents of, say, two German speakers from different regions might not be as distinct from each other in English as they are in German. At any rate, I was looking forward to finding out what the accent oracle thought of my native US English accent, which sounds northern to southerners and southern to northerners, but I guess it'd probably just flag it as "American".
- fnands 11mo agoTry yourself here: https://start.boldvoice.com/accent-oracle https://start.boldvoice.com/accent-oracle It wrongly pegged me as Swedish. It's second choice was the place I live, and third place was where I'm from, so not too bad overall. I have been told I have a very ambiguous accent though.
- fnands 11mo agoTried again and this time it got me. Second place is still Swedish. Looking at the UMAP visualisation, there is a South African cluster overlapping with a Swedish cluster, so makes sense I guess.
- physicsguy 11mo agoIt got me, native English speaker with British accent. I was hoping it might drill down into regional accents though, there is a huge variety in the UK. I have a Midlands accent which can occasionally confuse non-native speakers.
- blixt 11mo agoIt would be interesting to do a wider test like this but instead of trying to clump people together into "American English" and "British English" it would be interesting if the data point was "in which city do people speak like you do?" and create a geographic map of accents. I'm from the south of Sweden and I've had my "accent" made fun of by people from Malmö just because I grew up outside of Helsingborg, because the accent changes that much in just 60 kilometers.
- tananan 11mo agoIt would be really cool if it could highlight the parts of the speech that gave you away your accent. It guesses mine correctly most of the time (though not the first time I tried), but also lets me know my accent is pretty light.
- stared 11mo agoI am curious - why UMAP not t-SNE? (See https://pair-code.github.io/understanding-umap/ https://pair-code.github.io/understanding-umap/) When I saw the vis, there is a a collection of lines, which look as an artifact. t-SNE (typically) gives more "organic" results of blobs, provided you set perplexity high enough. Also, while I admire examples of instances, it would be interesting to the map or original laguages - which is close to which, in terms of their English accents.
- alex-moon 11mo agoFascinated by the cluster of Australian, British and South African. As an Australian living in UK, I hear an enormous difference between these accents - even just in the British ones, the Yorkshireman and the Geordie stick out like a sore thumb to me - the narcissism of small differences perhaps. Interestingly, my partner, who is from England, often says, of various Australians we hear (either on TV or my friends), that they sound British to her. I, meanwhile, can pick an Australian from very few words. What are we hearing differently? It is a mystery to me.
- epolanski 11mo agoI'm a native italian speaker with polish ancestry. I've tried to do the accent oracle test few times and it catches me being Italian with a 90%+ confidence. The interesting thing is that if I try to fake a more english accent like American...it tells me I'm polish. Which is odd because I don't really have a polish accent and don't speak it that well. I sound Italian even in Polish. https://start.boldvoice.com/accent-oracle https://start.boldvoice.com/accent-oracle
- capestart 11mo ago[dead]
- ahoka 11mo agoApparently my accent is "Application Error".
- nmeofthestate 11mo agoAll the accents sound like somebody from... somewhere in the third world...? but with a small trace of the named accent. I don't know if that's intended - maybe the different recordings are not supposed to sound like their label but like a foreigner who learned English while around people with that accent?