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Is Your English Accent British or American?
- juskrey 9y agoSaying nothing qualifies for British. Legit.
- hliyan 9y agoThis 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 9y agoI'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 9y agoThis 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."
- rotred 9y agoThis isn't very accurate. I'm Canadian (I sound American) but this thing is claiming my accent is 80% British.
- hyper_reality 9y agoI'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".
- thaumasiotes 9y agoProbably just make refinements to the model they're using to classify samples. The sentence is obviously taken (with some modifications) from the sample used by the speech accent archive ( http://accent.gmu.edu/howto.php http://accent.gmu.edu/howto.php ), which was constructed specifically to include every relevant phonological context in American English. (Not that this was necessarily achieved, but it was the goal.)
- cornyNetHandle 9y agoLeave them on random people's voicemail, probably.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- burnte 9y ago"My voice is my passport, verify me."
- booleandilemma 9y agoWhen 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 9y agoHow? I tried it in my best city accent, my native suburban accent, and my best Rochester accent, and got >95% American each time.
- eropple 9y agoDepending 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).
- eropple 9y agoThings 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".
- siquick 9y agoLived in England and Scotland for 31 years, lived in Australia for 6 years. 67% American 33% British
- QAPereo 9y agoHave you seen the voice controlled elevator sketch on Burnistoun? Give the poor algorithm a break! ;)
- gfredtech 9y agoEven though I grew up in a Commonwealth country, it says I've got 85% British accent which is totally not correct
- thomasfoster96 9y agoHuh? Why would you expect your accent to be more American if you grew up in a Commonwealth county?
- gfredtech 9y agoLet's just say that I'm used to pronouncing words the American way
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mmmBacon 9y agoI’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.
- asveikau 9y agoBorn 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 9y ago> 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 9y agoI 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".
- emodendroket 9y agoI grew up in Connecticut and it finds my pronunciation of "call" and "to" British, but still manages to find the right answer overall. For another datapoint, I guess.
- megaman22 9y agoThis 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 9y agoOther than some slang, I wouldn't call any of these accents mutually unintelligible.
- emodendroket 9y agoYeah, I can't think of any American accent that I just altogether can't understand.
- emodendroket 9y agoMy 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.
- IncRnd 9y agoWhen 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.
- crispinb 9y agoA Kiwi accent would almost certainly result in a server explosion.
- mkl 9y agoNo 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 9y agoMine gets relatively consistently British. Wonder if it’s regional accents in any way?
- neeleshs 9y agoIt's funny that my south indian accent was 90% match to American and my "normal" Indian accent was split 50-50.
- stillworks 9y agoNot hotdog ? https://youtu.be/ACmydtFDTGs https://youtu.be/ACmydtFDTGs
- sudosteph 9y agoThis 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 9y agoI'm American and it put me at 66% British... Edit: and now 99% British every time. Methinks the site is broken.
- _delirium 9y agoI'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.
- asveikau 9y agoI was able to get 90% in either direction at will. American: over-pronounce your Rs and try to get the æ sound wherever "ah" is called for. (I guess this is a great lakes accent) British: imitate the intonation of BBC broadcasts I occasionally hear syndicated on npr stations.
- barsonme 9y agoHeh. In my regular accent (American) I got 90% American (although, I got 99% American when I spoke normally and didn't purposefully enunciate). But my God-awful British accent got 98% British. It picked up on the parts of the generic British accent (London accent?) that us Americans think about and exaggerate when mimicking a British accent—tall vowels, especially the "O"s and "A"s.
- laurieg 9y agoMy normal accent is British but I affected a crappy American accent and got 98% first try. I think this will classify you as American if you just put in rhotic Rs and ham up the vowel sounds.
- metaobject 9y agoOn iPhone this site requires iOS 11 and up. :(
- akhatri_aus 9y agoso update your iPhone.
- DanBC 9y agoHow are people saying "Plastic"?
- gumby 9y agoI was insulted that it rated my Aussie lingo as "British".
- baxtr 9y ago:-) I must say though, that for a non-native English speaker, Aussie sounds indeed much more British than American.
- shangxiao 9y agoI was rated as 71% US ;) I wonder if the various accents of Australia rate differently or whether I'm influenced too much by foreign media.
- lostlogin 9y agoMy Kiwi accent is 96% British. Is that more of less British and an Aussie accent?
- Exuma 9y agoApparently my british accent is fail
- codewritinfool 9y agoI'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.
- pducks32 9y agoBorn 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.
- kiallmacinnes 9y agoBorn 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 ;)
- desas 9y agoI'd be interested to see if any broad scousers, Geordies or weegies have tried this.
- concerto 9y agoI am from Liverpool and got 98% British using my normal accent
- rzzzwilson 9y agoWanted 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 9y agoUse Safari.
- laurieg 9y agoI'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.
- GarvielLoken 9y agoSwede here, got 92% Brittish, i'm happy with the results. The English education back in school has apparently won over my media consumption :p.
- dgsb 9y agoMy awful french accent rated me as 98% british accent.
- Avamander 9y agoMy awful Estonian accent rated me 99% british.
- interfixus 9y agoI 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 9y agoCambridge 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 9y agoLetting 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.
- perfectstorm 9y agoBorn in India -> living in the U.S for 10+yrs. Got 89% U.S.
- z0ltan 9y ago58% 'Murrican 42% British. So, like Irish?
- fishnchips 9y agoI got 70% British for an Irish accent.
- Stratoscope 9y agoI 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.
- tbabb 9y agoIt'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.
- forinti 9y agoI said the sentence in Spanish and it gave me 62% British. I tried Portuguese, and it gave me 55% British.
- coldtea 9y agoThe 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 9y agoYes, 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.
- gilleain 9y agoReminds me of the analogy games described by Hofstader in one of his books. Like "New Zealand is the Scotland of Australia". If i remember correctly, the idea was to take two pairs of countries and construct an analogous mapping between them. So Spain::Portugal -> UK::USA in this case.
- zmk_ 9y agoThere should be a third mapping there---"neither". I got 99% British with my normal (more or less foreign-accent-free) speach and a whooping 88% British with the heaviest Polish accent I could produce.
- emodendroket 9y agoIf it's machine learning-based it probably just doesn't know how to handle weird invalid input like that.`
- s_dev 9y agoI'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.
- JCole 9y agoHaha I am Irish too, 94% British, 6% American...can I ask where you're from? I am from Dublin.
- s_dev 9y agoI would have a midlands accent (and a US mother).
- CalRobert 9y agoCalifornian who has lived in Dublin for 5 years. 82% American, though attempting a south Dublin accent gave me 52/48.
- Netch 9y agoI 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 ;)
- lottin 9y agoThis 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 9y agoIt 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.
- wingerlang 9y ago98% British but it only highlighted "the" and "Bob" each time. I guess the rest of the words were unknown. My accent would be Swedish.
- yodsanklai 9y agoMy French accent gave me random results, going from 80% British to 80% American.
- loblollyboy 9y agoI got 50/50
- ggm 9y agoCrap ui.
- Digit-Al 9y agoI 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 :-)
- timonoko 9y agoI 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?".
- Ambroos 9y agoI 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 9y ago- 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 9y agoTorilla tavataan!!
- leemailll 9y agoLike Ari Vatanen?
- azernik 9y agoLived 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.
- bbcbasic 9y agoMore interesting: northern or southern
- mmcnl 9y agoI'm from neither the US nor Britain and I got 90% British (I don't hear any British in the way I speak though).
- Xunxi 9y agoi did not utter a word I just waited a few seconds and clicked submit and to 65 american 35 brit. i tried again much longer before i clicked submit and got different results.
- forinti 9y agoI'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.
- IkmoIkmo 9y agoHaha, 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!
- anon23452358734 9y agoIt'd be neat to see this sort of idea integrated into some of those automated phone menus with voice recognition at some point. Whenever I'm visiting the US and try to top up my data on my T-mobile account, it decides I want to do a plethora of things - from adding $100 to cancelling my account - never topping up my data. I always end up handing the phone to my American wife and making her do it...
- gpvos 9y ago93% British, and when I let my Dutch accent shine through more, it goes up to 98% British.
- no1youknowz 9y agoLMAO. 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 9y agoI’m American but I scored 83% British with a crappy Cockney accent ;)
- gpvos 9y agoMaybe this thing classifies all non-American accents as British.
- mcnamaratw 9y agoI'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.
- supermatt 9y agoThought I sounded 65% American, told it I was British and not to use me for retraining, then tried again and was 90% British...
- njloof 9y agoMy New England accent got me 50/50. I guess that makes sense?
- baxtr 9y agoSide 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?!
- jcranmer 9y agoThere's not really any such thing as an "American accent" or a "British accent," particularly when you're looking at the evolution of accents. Accents tend to evolve based on regional tendencies; what people refer to as "General American" (effectively the Midwestern US, but not including the Northern Cities Vowel Shift) and "Received Pronunciation" are accents that lack any recognized regionalism markers, such as the Southern drawl or the New England non-rhoticism. Accents tend to shift based on contact with other linguistic groups and mixing from different accents that levels out pronunciation. You'll note, for example, that Canadian has more in common with the US accents than it does with British accents. I don't know the historical development of accents very well, but some US accents (I believe the southern one in particular) are closer to 16th and 17th century English than modern British accents. This isn't necessarily atypical--modern Icelandic is the closest in pronunciation to Old Norse, while modern Norwegian is closer in pronunciation to older varieties of Danish. Small, isolated communities are going to be able to better preserve pronunciation in a dialect.
- gilleain 9y agoAs for a 'British' accent, there is huge diversity within the UK. Cornish, Northern Irish, Yorkshire, Aberdonian, etc. It used to be even more pronounced, with neighbouring villages in England having distinct accents. Nowadays, i suspect that the differences are disappearing - although perhaps some will always remain.
- antirez 9y agoIt's somewhat the contrary if I remember correctly. It's the British accent that changed after the split.
- 7ewis 9y ago99% accurate for me!
- ohnoesjmr 9y agoIt's quite poor. Two attempts as a non-english speaker in my normal voice, and 70% british first, then 70% american.
- omega3 9y agoSang Polish national anthem and got 72% American.
- ilamont 9y agoI 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 9y agoI 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.
- Agentlien 9y agoI'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.