
Stupid Alexa Trick: Speaking French with a Horrible American Accent - pavel_lishin
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190902-01/?p=102831
======
okhan
My dad is a native English speaker living in Italy. When he uses Google maps
navigation while driving, the robo-voice absolutely butchers the pronunciation
of street names, towns, everything. You'd think the software would be smart
enough to use the local language instead of the phone's locale for such
things. More than half of the world's population speaks more than one language
- we need to get better at building software that accounts for that.

~~~
mc32
Does it do the same for people visiting the US? I can imagine tons of
butchering especially with placenames which have Native American derivation.
Arkansas, Puyallup, Potowomut, or even idiosyncratic places like Peabody
\’pee’bdee\

~~~
AnimalMuppet
There is a city in Texas named Amarillo. What is the "correct" pronunciation
of that city name - the Spanish way of pronouncing the word, or the way the
locals say it?

~~~
tyingq
Worcester, Massachusetts is also interesting, in a different way. The locals
say it right, but anyone not familiar gets it wrong.

Or maybe UK folks get it right?

~~~
barneygale
UK pronunciation is two syllables "WUSS-tar", and most people here get it
right because Worcester Sauce is a big thing.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Worcestershire sauce ("wiss-ta-shirr") is a thing in the US too, though not
Worcester sauce.

~~~
adrianN
Do you mean Warchestersauce? Sponsored by Blizzard?

~~~
thaumasiotes
No?

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tareqak
I’ve mentioned the idea of using the Phonetic alphabet for proper names to
people around me. I think having an alphabet where human beings can
communicate sounds in an exact form irrespective of any underlying associated
meaning is valuable.

~~~
Gaelan
I’m not sure this would work. If you’re an American named Peter, should your
British friends call you “Pete-uhh” or “Pete-ur”? I guess you could just
decide that it should be the latter, but that’s a fairly big change from
what’s done now.

~~~
lloeki
Either one ought to be much better than a french robot pronouncing it “péter”
(to fart)...

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TazeTSchnitzel
Try pasting some English into Japanese Google Translate and clicking the
listen button on the Japanese side. Or indeed for Swedish, or some other
language that comes into frequent contact with English…

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z2
I'm conditioned to do this trick in reverse, say to look for a recipe or song
in French. Speaking the title in a horrible American English accent gives at
least a 20% chance that Alexa would understand the query, as opposed to 0%.
I'm not familiar with the problem domain at all, but it seems speech
recognition is just as bad as TTS or worse at recognizing what language is
being processed. Or maybe the problem for both directions is that there is
simply no effort to even classify the language first.

~~~
visarga
I think the problem is that you have only used mass-grade TTS. Google can't
deploy the latest and greatest for the billions because it would be 10x more
expensive for them, while a small local TTS doesn't have the power to cover
every situation. In demo situations it would be a whole different thing. I
have followed the papers on TTS and listened to the demos.

For example my MacOS system voice Alex often confuses 'live' (to live
somewhere) with 'live' (as in live concert). That's because they have a simple
model that can run on a laptop and not use too much space. This sample phrase
tested on Google cloud TTS is perfect.

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kwoff
Finally my obscure experience may be relevant! I'm an American who lived in
Geneva (French-speaking side of Switzerland) for a while. One night I was
watching a talk show on France 2 (TV channel):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tout_le_monde_en_parle_(French...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tout_le_monde_en_parle_\(French_talk_show\))
After the Iraq invasion they had an American diplomat on, not sure which one.
He spoke French fluently, but with a no-fucks-given American accent. But the
thing is, I was able to understand him so well! After that, I tried speaking
French (in private) without regard to accent, and found I also could do it
much more fluently than before!

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fossuser
You can do this with google translate also.

Set the language to translate from French to English then type English in the
French box and it'll say the English words with a french accent if you click
the speak button.

It's neat to hear all of the different accents and they sound reasonably
accurate.

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farisjarrah
I wish I learned about Raymond Chen's blog a long time ago. Finding about his
work and experiences via his blog has been a joy ever since I read the Floppy
Disk story that was posted here last week.

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KaiserPro
I have a few of these:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabaztag](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabaztag)

Which is the first IoT assistant thing, first released in 2006. Its a french
system, (which had very good localisations though). What I loved the best was
getting it to talk in a french accent.

So I set the TTS to french, but sent english. It would say the time like:

"Eet Iz Deece Hure" (from it is 10 hours)

Which is way more loveable than in american english (back then TTS in british
was rare. )

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mgkimsal
A few years back I discovered the Siri interface would not only talk to you in
a different accent of your choosing, but it would also understand you
differently based the chosen language. I did a quick video based on American
English vs Australian English:
[https://vimeo.com/207295417](https://vimeo.com/207295417) (you can probably
skip the first 10 seconds or so - it's just me demoing the choice of
language).

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curiousgal
Shouldn't this be about Cortana since it's Microsoft's devblog?

~~~
whoisjuan
It's a very benign/harmless post, but kind of weird that is posted on an
official Microsoft blog (even though it is a personal blog, it's also an
official blog from Microsoft by a Microsoft Employee).

Big companies are so paranoid about everything that I guarantee someone in
their legal team is frowning upon this.

~~~
mwyah
Raymond has always made it very clear that this is his personal blog and that
it's not official by any measure.

~~~
whoisjuan
And that’s probably frowned upon by some people because the blog has all the
Microsoft branding and such.

~~~
mwyah
I doubt Raymond cares, it's not like they are going to fire him.

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w-m
While living in France I mucked around with the voice of Siri on the iPhone a
bit, to find a setting that would allow the phone to understand both me
(speaking English) and the names of streets and places in Paris.

After switching between French and English a couple times I ended up with a
voice that spoke English but used the French voice synthesizer.

To me it sounded eerily like a French person with a very thick accent speaking
English, but it was still quite understandable. Sadly the setting didn't
survive moving to a new phone, it was a fun party trick.

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roywiggins
Fans of bilingual japes will probably enjoy this song: "y est-ce deux dés".

[https://youtu.be/x71PRL3IxYs](https://youtu.be/x71PRL3IxYs)

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nullbyte
Thank you Raymond Chen, very cool!

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dzhiurgis
Apple Maps do something like that when speaking lithuanian street names. It
pronounces special chars correctly but still does that in American accent.

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_bxg1
Wish there were a video; I don't use Alexa

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otras
This reminds me of one of my favorite books of all time, _Mots D 'Heures:
Gousses, Rames_, which plays with language and bad French pronunciation.
Highly, highly recommend.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mots_d'Heures](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mots_d'Heures)

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brownbat
I would love to have a speech synthesizer to play with where you could
programmatically replace all of one sound with another. Like replacing all 'r'
sounds with 'b' sounds, or swapping a few IPA vowels, but only when they
follow a certain other sound. You could invent and test out novel accents.

~~~
yorwba
You might be able to hack something like that with espeak (a formant-based
speech synthesizer):
[http://espeak.sourceforge.net/](http://espeak.sourceforge.net/)

Or like this HN submission on transliterating Esperanto to Polish to piggy-
back off an existing text-to-speech system:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20802326](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20802326)

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erikw
I don't have specific insight into the machine learning aspects of Alexa, but
based on my experience developing Alexa applications, I believe that the
individual voices are trained on specific ML models. Most voices are
unilingual, but there are bilingual voices as well, for example Hindi /
English for India.

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daveslash
This is the same for Google's & Bing's text translation service. Go to
translate.bing.com, type English into one of the boxes and select French (or
anything else) as the language -- then hit the 'speaker' icon to have the
service pronounce what you typed. Hilarity may ensue.

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kcolford
Seeing all these examples of mispronouciations in these comments, I realize
just how uncultured I am. Alternatively, these speech programs are really that
advanced.

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frequentnapper
i wonder at what point of trying this with languages/accents does it turn from
Stupid Alexa to Racist Alexa?

~~~
m0zg
Paraphrasing the common saying about dildos, anything is racist if you're woke
enough.

