AI Text-to-Speech models have accents too
While playing around with the Web Speech API I discovered something interesting: if you let the Dutch voice speak English text, it sounds remarkably like the typical "Dungrish" accent (Dutch person speaking English).
I didn't expect this. Obviously the AI was not trained on reproducing foreign accents, but it still does!
Very interesting to see what happens if you let the voice speak a language it was not trained on
You can play around with it here if your browser supports it, or try the examples below:
Or try these ready made examples:
- English text spoken by Dutch voice
- English text spoken by Hindi voice
- English text spoken by Italian voice
- English text spoken by French voice
- English text spoken by German voice
- English text spoken by Japanese voice
- Dutch text spoken by English voice
- Dutch text spoken by German voice
- German text spoken by Dutch voice
- German text spoken by English voice
Once you're done playing around, discuss this on HN
This unexpected discovery about Dutch AI Voice Generator voices mimicking the natural 'Dungrish' accent when speaking English highlights how AI speech synthesis unintentionally captures human linguistic patterns, offering fascinating insights into cross-language phonetic adaptation.
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