
Is Your English Accent British or American? - xbmcuser
https://myaccent.cambridgeconsultants.com/
======
tbabb
It's hard to tell if the speech recognition is working, or even if the
microphone is on. If I hum the star spangled banner, it rates me as 79%
British.

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forinti
I said the sentence in Spanish and it gave me 62% British. I tried Portuguese,
and it gave me 55% British.

~~~
coldtea
The NN (I guess) checks the accent, so it doesn't care about the content of
the words. One could speak Spanish in a more or less British accent.

~~~
mcgarnagle
Yes, it would break your words into phonetics, and analyzes whether it's
"american" or "british" phonetics which occur more frequently in the dialog.
Unless well practiced, your phonetics likely cary over into other languages
that you speak.

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hyper_reality
I'm from Britain and it rated my accent as 99-100% British the few times that
I tried it. So not bad from my point of view.

Meanwhile, I wonder what Cambridge Consultants are going to do with a dataset
of thousands of Hacker News users reading out the sentence "Please call Stella
and ask her to meet Bob the frog at the store with three small red plastic
bags".

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burnte
"My voice is my passport, verify me."

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praulv
*password I believe. Upvoted.

~~~
jsnell
No, "passport". It was clearly a reference to the voice authentication hack in
_Sneakers_.

~~~
burnte
Indeed. They took a bunch of smaller words and spliced them together to fake
his voice print. Cambridge Consultants are clearly harvesting our voice prints
for the CIA. ;)

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timonoko
I have two accents: the "Finnish Rally Driver" (55-45) and "Monty Python"
(7-93). I was ashamed of my regular Rally-Driver until Dame July Dench said
"What a delightful accent, are you from Hungary?".

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Ambroos
I have so many questions for you right now.

\- what does Finnish rally driver sound like \- how did you meet Dame Judy
Dench \- where are you actually from?

It's pretty funny how language roots show. Finnish and Hungarian are the same
family of languages and apparently Dame Judy picked up on it!

~~~
timonoko
\- what does Finnish rally driver sound like:
[https://youtu.be/fZfxJ7BST8E](https://youtu.be/fZfxJ7BST8E)

\- how did you meet Dame Judy Dench: At Heathrow Tesco. All Britons look the
same, but she was quite "posh". Dame of that age and looks, but did not
confirm the exact identity.

\- where are you actually from? Finland, github.com/timonoko

~~~
Proof
Torilla tavataan!!

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asveikau
Born in Washington DC and that is the southernmost point of my childhood.
Father born in England to Eastern European immigrants. Mother is Italian
American from Pennsylvania. West coasters semi-frequently think my accent is
European, but nobody from back east or from Europe says that.

I got 84% British.

My wife was born in Russia and spent most of her life on the US west coast.
She got 91% American.

Fun little app but given my results and some comments here I see it as a west
coast accent detector.

~~~
sndean
> Born in Washington DC and that is the southernmost point of my childhood.
> Father born in England to Eastern European immigrants. Mother is Italian
> American from Pennsylvania. West coasters semi-frequently think my accent is
> European, but nobody from back east or from Europe says that. I got 84%
> British.

That's really interesting. I have a very similar background (and from
Washington DC) and I got 84% British, too. It rated my pronunciation of the
word "call" as ~100% British. That's pretty interesting if it can regionally
categorize people.

~~~
tankenmate
I suspect that is because a typical mid west or west coast accent has a moving
pitch with the word "call", typically down then up within the one syllable.
The usual British accent has a monotone or a slight drop in pitch for the word
"call".

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crispinb
A Kiwi accent would almost certainly result in a server explosion.

~~~
mkl
No obvious explosions, but it doesn't know what to make of it. First
submission: 18% American, 82% British, second submission: 68% American, 32%
British.

I tried putting on American and British accents and could easily get it over
90% either direction, so at least it's working for those.

~~~
lostlogin
Mine gets relatively consistently British. Wonder if it’s regional accents in
any way?

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lottin
This could be very useful for English language learners if it told you the
pronunciation mistakes that you make.

As it is now, it's a little disappointing. I got 98% British but I have no
idea why it came to this conclusion. It could be that my British accent is
good, or that my accent is rubbish but doesn't sound American, or anything
else really.

~~~
spuz
It tells you which words you said it considers british and which it considered
american by their red / blue colour.

It is also a binary choice. Like the hotdog/not hotdog app, you can't expect
an AI to tell you much if it only has two options to chose from.

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Digit-Al
I got 97% British, which is reasonable as I am British. However, I then tried
a couple of time putting on an atrociously bad faux Australian nasal twang,
and it still rated me 97% and 84% British - so I'm not so sure on it's
accuracy... or maybe it can tell a British person putting on a rubbish foreign
accent :-)

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juskrey
Saying nothing qualifies for British. Legit.

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labster
English is British by default, that's just geography.

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sudosteph
This is kind of fun for practicing accents. Even with my "best" attempt at a
British accent I never got below 80% American.

Would be cool to see if it had any data for identifying some more specific
American accents though.

~~~
corndoge
I'm American and it put me at 66% British...

Edit: and now 99% British every time. Methinks the site is broken.

~~~
_delirium
I'm also an American and get consistently 80-90% British. It seems to think I
pronounce "Bob" in an especially British way. I pronounce it in a way that
sounds like "Bahb" to me, same sound as in not and cot (I don't have the cot-
caught merger). I believe it's the vowel <ä> in IPA that I use. To my ears
that's not the way most UK speakers would pronounce it, which I think is more
<ɔ> or <ɒ> for all of Bob/not/cot.

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IncRnd
When I said, "bleep da doop de blah bleep nah," this classified me as 80%
American.

Then, I clapped my hands twice (and didn't speak), which classified me as 72%
British.

As a final test, I did both at the same time: 90% American.

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robjan
Sound legit. Noisy: American. Subtle and understated: British

~~~
IncRnd
Hmmm. Some statements, by their existence, contradict themselves.

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interfixus
I noticed the URL, and stayed away. They want my data for stats, profiling, or
building an automated Henry Higgins, they can contact me and quote a price.

Not a native speaker (raised on Danish), but lived for a while in Australia,
and also spent a lot of time in the UK. And it shows. The British invariably
take me for an antipodean, the Aussies usually for a Pommie bastard, and then
every once in a while for a Kiwi. Nobody _ever_ thought me North American.

~~~
timthorn
Cambridge Consultants is a /very/ different firm to Cambridge Analytica, if
that's what you were thinking? It's a well regarded contract engineering
consultancy rather than a data analysis company.

~~~
interfixus
Letting my general paranoia overrule my inclination, I assumed some sort of
connection. A [very] quick looup didn't disabuse me of that assumption. I
probably stand corrected.

Mind you, I am _always_ sceptical of these 'tests' all over the web. Somebody
clearly is after my info for free.

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hliyan
This is really hit-or-miss. My initial test gave me a 93% British (rather
accurate considering I'm from a former British colony), but subsequently the
results varied a lot, including a few cases where it claimed my accent is 74%
American.

The way I pronounce "ask", "plastic" and "Bob" should be dead giveaways that
my accent is not American...

~~~
115100
I've lived in London my entire life and the result flips between very American
(~80%) or slightly British.

I pronounce "ask" with a long "a" so I'm not sure why it keeps flagging that
pronunciation as American either.

~~~
emodendroket
This may well not be the answer but some of the accents you'll hear around
Boston do use the vowel from "father" to pronounce "ask."

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mmcnl
I'm from neither the US nor Britain and I got 90% British (I don't hear any
British in the way I speak though).

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baxtr
Side question. I’ve been always wondering: how has the American accent
evolved? Where does it come from? Is there any region in Britain that sounds
American? Or did just evolve independently as a mix of British and something
else?

And: since when is it that different? Did Lincoln had an American accent?!

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antirez
It's somewhat the contrary if I remember correctly. It's the British accent
that changed after the split.

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EGreg
How did Received Pronunciation catch on? It seems that Britain is chock-full
of different accents, especially from the north, but all the English ones sort
of contain elements of RP, like the unpronounced R's (Irish and Scottish
don't.)

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yardie
The split came about through formalised education. The British you hear today
is upper middle class, noble English.

Similar happened in France and French Quebec. Modern French is formalised
Parisian french. While Canadian French is country French, according to a very
posh friend, the most educated quebecois still sounds like a country hick the
first time he hears them.

~~~
linguist_1
> Similar happened in France and French Quebec. Modern French is formalized
> Parisian french. While Canadian French is country French, according to a
> very posh friend, the most educated québécois still sounds like a country
> hick the first time he hears them.

You got it backward. Modern French is bourgeois Parisian French. It was
standardized more than a century after the French revolution (in the 1880's
when public education became mandatory).

When Québec was colonized in the 1600's, only a handful of territories in
France spoke French, mostly around Paris. This was the language of the court,
the nobility and a minority of peasants. The rest of the country spoke various
languages, such as Caló, Catalan, Corsican, Franco-Provençal, Ligurian,
Occitan, Flemish, Luxembourgish, Alsatian, Breton, and Basque [1].
Furthermore, Parisian French was only one of the d'Oïl languages spoken at the
time [2].

The colonists that settled and explored Québec were mostly from northern
France, the region where an Oïl language was spoken. The language spoken in
the colony was standardized to match the one of the royal administration
(Parisian French).

Due to not being a French Territory when the revolution happened, Québec kept
a fork of Royal French. Reading written french from the 1600's and 1700's out
loud is striking, as it's almost identical the pronunciation of modern
Québécois French. An example of this is the term "Moi", spelled Moé in the
1700's and pronounced Mo-a (Moi) by modern continental French and Mo-Hey (Moé)
in Québécois French.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_France#Mino...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_France#Minority_languages_and_endangered_languages)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langues_d%27o%C3%AFl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langues_d%27o%C3%AFl)

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no1youknowz
LMAO. I am British and I managed to fool this by doing an American accent.
Well more concisely, by sounding like a Texan. Or at least thats what I think
it is.. very fun!

[https://i.imgur.com/dWkBnXF.png](https://i.imgur.com/dWkBnXF.png)

~~~
fbonetti
I’m American but I scored 83% British with a crappy Cockney accent ;)

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Netch
I am from Kiev, Ukraine, initially studied English at classic Soviet school
with explicit orientation to British style. Nevertheless, it suggests 93%
American. Initially I guessed this is due to r-coloring, but words like
"plastic bags" have no R ;)

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desas
I'd be interested to see if any broad scousers, Geordies or weegies have tried
this.

~~~
concerto
I am from Liverpool and got 98% British using my normal accent

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ilamont
I am from the Boston area (without a Boston accent) and I rated 90% US. My
teen daughter who is also from this area and to me sounds like she has an even
"flatter" American accent rated 64% US, with the words "call" and "small"
flagged as moderately British. My teen son (who sounds identical to her) was
95% U.S.

I lived in London when I was younger and can imitate some local accents; my
"upper crust" accent was rated about 65% U.S. on the first try and 86% British
on the second. My "Norf London" was 50/50 on the first try, 65% U.S. on the
second.

~~~
kpil
I doubt it's that nuanced actually. My best RP gives 99% although all my
British friends would classify that as 'evil nazi overlord' owing to my
Swedish accent.

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IkmoIkmo
Haha, that was fun. First time around I was 55% American. Then 49% American.
Then I did my best British accent (49% American, guess I can't ever become a
spy in Britain) and my best American accent (88%, hah!).

I'm English as a second language, continental western-europe.

edit: tried British accent one more time and thought about it for a sec before
doing it, changed the call and ask to do a British 'a' and got 99% British. It
seems I'm destined for a life of spying after all!

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megaman22
This seems like it'd be hard to do reliably - if I recall, there were
significant variations in the regional makeup of the various thirteen colonies
to start with, and some of those linguistic peculiarities have outlived their
originators, besides England having it's own subdialects and variations over
time too.

Get a Mainer, a New Yorker, a Virginian, and a Georgian together, and they're
hardly mutually intelligble, and that's just on the east coast.

~~~
nerdponx
Other than some slang, I wouldn't call any of these accents mutually
unintelligible.

~~~
emodendroket
Yeah, I can't think of any American accent that I just altogether can't
understand.

~~~
emodendroket
My wife, who is not a native speaker of English, initially had trouble
understanding AAVE and people with heavy Latin American accents when she moved
to the US, for what it's worth, so maybe we could consider those particularly
challenging, but I doubt any native-born American would struggle with those
really.

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GarvielLoken
Swede here, got 92% Brittish, i'm happy with the results. The English
education back in school has apparently won over my media consumption :p.

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dgsb
My awful french accent rated me as 98% british accent.

~~~
Avamander
My awful Estonian accent rated me 99% british.

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wingerlang
98% British but it only highlighted "the" and "Bob" each time. I guess the
rest of the words were unknown.

My accent would be Swedish.

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eropple
Things like this are fun as a New Englander who doesn't have the "pahk the
cah" accent of Boston. Our vowels are flat, and mine get flatter when I'm
drinking--when I visited Ireland with my family the landlady at a little bed-
and-breakfast took me aside and inquired if I had been educated in England.
Nope--I just don't say "baaaaaaaag".

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neeleshs
It's funny that my south indian accent was 90% match to American and my
"normal" Indian accent was split 50-50.

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stillworks
Not hotdog ? [https://youtu.be/ACmydtFDTGs](https://youtu.be/ACmydtFDTGs)

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Agentlien
I'm Swedish, learned British English in school but basically all tv shows here
are American, my English- speaking friends are all either American or Canadian
but at work we have a lot of British people. This rated me as 98-99% American.

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laurieg
I'm from Britain but I've lived in a non-English speaking country for 7 years
so my accent seems to have tended towards American English. I got 90% British.

Also, this is measuring my "reading accent" which is much more British than my
normal speaking voice.

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s_dev
I'm Irish. Was curious to see how it would interpret my accent.

41% US, 59% British -- did a few times an the ratios reversed.

Doing impressions of British or American people got me close to 100% of their
respective values. I'd say there is some merit there alright.

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JCole
Haha I am Irish too, 94% British, 6% American...can I ask where you're from? I
am from Dublin.

~~~
s_dev
I would have a midlands accent (and a US mother).

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mmmBacon
I’m 100% American from the mid-Atlantic region. Rated my accent 53% American
and 47% UK. I tried on my best south London accent, which is fairly cartoony,
and got a 60% UK.

Edit: just tried my best Southern accent (kinda Georgia) and rated 72%
American.

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rzzzwilson
Wanted to try it but got an error:

\-------------------

Sorry, your browser doesn't support audio recording, which is required by our
site.

Why not try again using Chrome, Firefox, or Edge?

Note that iOS only supports in-browser audio from iOS 11 onwards.

\-------------------

This is in Chrome on iOS 11.2.2 with microphone access enabled.

~~~
mmcnl
Use Safari.

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yodsanklai
My French accent gave me random results, going from 80% British to 80%
American.

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Stratoscope
I got 62% British, which doesn't entirely surprise me. I grew up in Eugene,
Oregon, and people I talk with often say I have a Canadian accent. Apparently
this is quite common for Oregonians.

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pducks32
Born in London and lived there til I was 3 but I’m American and it rated me
once as 53% American and another time as 37% American. I know I say a few
words differently but not that differently.

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mcnamaratw
I'm American. I read it in what I think is my normal voice, and it came out
93% British.

Ok, maybe I enunciated and pronounced my 't' sounds out of self-consciousness.
Still.

I retried and got 90% American.

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codewritinfool
I'm from St. Louis and it guessed 65% American. I then tried a fake British
accent and it thought I was 63% British. I guess I need to work on my British
accent.

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azernik
Lived my whole life in the States, classified as 84% British. Maybe some
aspects of the Israeli undertones from my family, but more likely just a bad
model.

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booleandilemma
When I speak with my normal NY Northeastern accent it tells me British 80%.

When I speak with a poorly done, make-believe Southern accent it tells me
American 90%.

~~~
nerdponx
How? I tried it in my best city accent, my native suburban accent, and my best
Rochester accent, and got >95% American each time.

~~~
eropple
Depending where in northeast New York one is, one can end up with something
close to the Northwest New England accent (which shares a lot more with an
English accent than most of America).

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forinti
I'm South American, but I lived in Cambridge in the 80's (when I was still in
primary school). I got 92% and 99% British.

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supermatt
Thought I sounded 65% American, told it I was British and not to use me for
retraining, then tried again and was 90% British...

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kiallmacinnes
Born and bred in Dublin, Ireland. I've worked with Americans too long, and am
often mistaken for American.

This thing put me at 94% American ;)

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ohnoesjmr
It's quite poor. Two attempts as a non-english speaker in my normal voice, and
70% british first, then 70% american.

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rotred
This isn't very accurate. I'm Canadian (I sound American) but this thing is
claiming my accent is 80% British.

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gfredtech
Even though I grew up in a Commonwealth country, it says I've got 85% British
accent which is totally not correct

~~~
thomasfoster96
Huh? Why would you expect your accent to be more American if you grew up in a
Commonwealth county?

~~~
gfredtech
Let's just say that I'm used to pronouncing words the American way

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DanBC
How are people saying "Plastic"?

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gpvos
93% British, and when I let my Dutch accent shine through more, it goes up to
98% British.

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siquick
Lived in England and Scotland for 31 years, lived in Australia for 6 years.

67% American 33% British

~~~
QAPereo
Have you seen the voice controlled elevator sketch on Burnistoun? Give the
poor algorithm a break! ;)

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njloof
My New England accent got me 50/50\. I guess that makes sense?

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gpvos
Maybe this thing classifies all non-American accents as British.

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perfectstorm
Born in India -> living in the U.S for 10+yrs. Got 89% U.S.

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omega3
Sang Polish national anthem and got 72% American.

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Exuma
Apparently my british accent is fail

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7ewis
99% accurate for me!

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gumby
I was insulted that it rated my Aussie lingo as "British".

~~~
baxtr
:-) I must say though, that for a non-native English speaker, Aussie sounds
indeed much more British than American.

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adambard
To this Canadian as well!

~~~
sverige
I'm American and to me, Aussie sounds Aussie, not at all British. I reckon I'd
be insulted too.

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ithkuil
But I bet Aussie doesn't sound American either. It's a binary classification,
it will give spurios results if you feed it with input outside its domain.

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loblollyboy
I got 50/50

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ggm
Crap ui.

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z0ltan
58% 'Murrican 42% British. So, like Irish?

~~~
fishnchips
I got 70% British for an Irish accent.

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metaobject
On iPhone this site requires iOS 11 and up. :(

~~~
akhatri_aus
so update your iPhone.

