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this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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chapotraphouse
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I can speak enough Chinese to know the AI is trying to give them all Beijing accents and that's funny as hell
Native Mandarin speaker here. They all sound like your typical Westerners who have lived in China for a number of years. It’s more interesting that the AI were able to give them that realistic Western accent than a proper regional Chinese accent.
how accurate is it, would you say?
Accurate with regards to which one?
Even without watching the clip, any native speaker will be able to immediately tell that they’re not native Mandarin speakers, as the sounds do not correspond to any regional accents in China or even Taiwanese and other Chinese diaspora accent (Malaysian, Singaporean, for example).
As others have said, there are some subtle finesse in the AI voice generation that are very interesting - like Will’s “yi dian er” (一点儿), but they still sound like foreigners who try to imitate Chinese speakers.
In other words, if the Chapo boys move to China and live there for 5-10 years, they’d probably sound like that. I am more impressed by how “realistic” the AI voice imitates Westerners speaking Mandarin as a foreign language than just transposing perfect native accent on to the input English sentences. I don’t know how the algorithm works but it’s very interesting.
Will sounded like he has lived in China for 5+ years, Matt’s accent is slightly worse, so probably 2-3 years. Felix sounded like he just arrived last week lol (just extrapolating from my own experience with foreigners, as we know everyone learns at a different rate).
I meant accurate not regarding their dialects but regarding the translation itself. As in was it accurately translating what they said? Sorry, I should have been more specific.
Getting the "er" in there is quite northeastern, my grandfather speaks with 儿化. Adding a soft "er" sound at the end of syllables, basically.
But they also don't have 100% correct tonal pronunciation, something like 80-90% correct.
This is actually extremely impressive.
The ''er'' is not profound enough to be authentic, it is the exact mistake that Dongbei people would pick up on people who are from the south for example
What's their Beijing accent like? More casual or formal, so to speak?
New bejing accent is more formal. Old beijing accent is more piraty.
I'll suppose the old one is comparable to the New one, like how Irish and Scottish english sounds like to Londoners....
Speaking of which, what's funny with THEIR Beijing accent, as far as I'm concerned?
it's just funny to me that the AI voice has any regional bias at all, but I suppose it would have to. They sound like Americans trying to talk with very textbook Beijing/northeast area Chinese.
Nothing too interesting to me... I mean come on, it'll be like if a person from Guangdong or Beijing spoke in standard Californian or New York English...
Will: "会有一点儿奇怪吗？"
Me: oh my god they added the 儿 to "一点", Skynet is real
Will actually sounds like a mango that picked up some beijing accents because he worked at a dongbei style restaurant for 1 year.
Matt sounds like someone from Guangxi