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Wish we had seen this a few days ago before dropping funds on a human to record for us. I played with several different voices and ran it on a text corpus that

Wish we had seen this a few days ago before dropping funds on a human to record for us. I played with several different voices and ran it on a text corpus that we gave to the human, and in some cases I would say this even sounds better. Computer generated voices feel most robotic when their intonation of a word is abnormal or their pauses between words make the sentence feel choppy. The intonation and natural pauses between words is very good for all of the main voices. The Japanese voice Mizuki was the most comical addition, since I can't think of a real situation where she would ever actually be used. Mizuki speaks Engarish (the Japanese version of English) beautifully, but any Japanese person who can understand Engarish will also understand English. Also, Mizuki doesn't add the correct vowel ending to all words, e.g. she correctly says "cheezu" for "cheese", but says "steku" instead of "steki" for "steak".

aninhumer 10y ago
>any Japanese person who can understand Engarish will also understand English. My impression is that it's actually quite common for Japanese people to understand Japanese accented English more easily than a native English speaker. >she correctly says "cheezu" for "cheese", but says "steku" instead of "steki" for "steak". "Suteeku" sounds like what a Japanese person who knows English well but has a strong accent might say. "Suteeki" is more of a corrupted loanword.
- giovannibajo1 10y ago
  I would say it's true in general for us non native speakers to understand other non native speakers better than native speakers (unless their English is so garbled that becomes too hard...). But it's even more especially true for English pronounced by people born in our own country; that's the easiest by a far amount
- primitivesuave 10y ago
  > My impression is that it's actually quite common for Japanese people to understand Japanese accented English more easily than a native English speaker. This is actually very true, made me think back to many situations in Japan where adding a strong Japanese accent to my English words made it comprehensible to the listener (just as adding a Japanese accent to the generated speech makes it nearly incomprehensible to a non-Japanese speaker).

aninhumer 10y ago

>any Japanese person who can understand Engarish will also understand English. My impression is that it's actually quite common for Japanese people to understand Japanese accented English more easily than a native English speaker. >she correctly says "cheezu" for "cheese", but says "steku" instead of "steki" for "steak". "Suteeku" sounds like what a Japanese person who knows English well but has a strong accent might say. "Suteeki" is more of a corrupted loanword.

giovannibajo1 10y ago
I would say it's true in general for us non native speakers to understand other non native speakers better than native speakers (unless their English is so garbled that becomes too hard...). But it's even more especially true for English pronounced by people born in our own country; that's the easiest by a far amount
primitivesuave 10y ago
> My impression is that it's actually quite common for Japanese people to understand Japanese accented English more easily than a native English speaker. This is actually very true, made me think back to many situations in Japan where adding a strong Japanese accent to my English words made it comprehensible to the listener (just as adding a Japanese accent to the generated speech makes it nearly incomprehensible to a non-Japanese speaker).