4 ms·

As a New Zealander, I'm not an Aussie but I am still disappointed she can't say "Strewth" properly! She gets 'arvo' and 'stone the crows' right though, so that

by SCdF 9y ago

As a New Zealander, I'm not an Aussie but I am still disappointed she can't say "Strewth" properly! She gets 'arvo' and 'stone the crows' right though, so that's something ;-)

jxramos 9y ago
You just answered a question I pondered earlier today as I watched the MacOS X demo I linked to above somewhere. And that is to the question if a native speaker would recognize the synthetic speech as unnatural. As the video progresses it lands on international languages such as Arabic and Chinese among other things. To my ear and my best memory of how those languages sound the synthetic versions came out pretty convincing. It made me think about a concept I've had about a test to language recognition: if a native speaker were to speak gibberish in their native tongue would an outsider to the language recognize it as gibberish or assume it was vocabulary in that language.
- tehmaco 9y ago
  There's a short film on YouTube that explores that idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt4Dfa4fOEY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt4Dfa4fOEY It's a very strange experience hearing it!
  - wallflower 9y ago
    This is a video of Saara who is not a native speaker but who has an extraordinary ability to mimic accents. https://youtu.be/ybcvlxivscw https://youtu.be/ybcvlxivscw
mrmondo 9y ago
Hahaha yeah, I’m a kiwi living in Melbourne and at first before Apple had added New Zealand to Siri’s input localisation I had it set to Australian and it’d get everything wrong, I found that instead setting it to British English it worked a lot better and then better again when New Zealand was added, regardless I keep Siri’s voice set to British Female as it sounds the most natural to me. For those that aren’t familiar with Australian vs New Zealand ascents - they’re /very/ different despite how close the countries are physically located to each other. When spoken New Zealand English has more of a British / South African - ‘rounder’ sound, where Australian is generally (especially as you move north or west up the country) more nasal and closer to American English with more emphasis on E rather than O if that makes sense.

by SCdF 9y ago

As a New Zealander, I'm not an Aussie but I am still disappointed she can't say "Strewth" properly! She gets 'arvo' and 'stone the crows' right though, so that's something ;-)

jxramos 9y ago

You just answered a question I pondered earlier today as I watched the MacOS X demo I linked to above somewhere. And that is to the question if a native speaker would recognize the synthetic speech as unnatural. As the video progresses it lands on international languages such as Arabic and Chinese among other things. To my ear and my best memory of how those languages sound the synthetic versions came out pretty convincing. It made me think about a concept I've had about a test to language recognition: if a native speaker were to speak gibberish in their native tongue would an outsider to the language recognize it as gibberish or assume it was vocabulary in that language.

tehmaco 9y ago
There's a short film on YouTube that explores that idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt4Dfa4fOEY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt4Dfa4fOEY It's a very strange experience hearing it!
- wallflower 9y ago
  This is a video of Saara who is not a native speaker but who has an extraordinary ability to mimic accents. https://youtu.be/ybcvlxivscw https://youtu.be/ybcvlxivscw

mrmondo 9y ago

Hahaha yeah, I’m a kiwi living in Melbourne and at first before Apple had added New Zealand to Siri’s input localisation I had it set to Australian and it’d get everything wrong, I found that instead setting it to British English it worked a lot better and then better again when New Zealand was added, regardless I keep Siri’s voice set to British Female as it sounds the most natural to me. For those that aren’t familiar with Australian vs New Zealand ascents - they’re /very/ different despite how close the countries are physically located to each other. When spoken New Zealand English has more of a British / South African - ‘rounder’ sound, where Australian is generally (especially as you move north or west up the country) more nasal and closer to American English with more emphasis on E rather than O if that makes sense.