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This is a great argument. I particularly agree with your point regarding English - my German accent sounds jarring to probably most native English speakers, bu

This is a great argument. I particularly agree with your point regarding English - my German accent sounds jarring to probably most native English speakers, but it should still be understood. To add to your argument, I have sometimes tried to turn on subtitles for Youtube videos in some accent of English that I haven't had much contact with (such as Nigerian English), but the auto-generated closed captions turned out to be even more useless than my own comprehension. However, one should keep in mind that Mozilla's main goal here is accessibility, with the implication that they mean accessibility for blind and deaf people in particular - as opposed to accessibility for stunted multilinguals like us. For these purposes, being able to transcribe mainly mainstream uses of the language is fine, and so is being able to generate speech in a hodge-podge averaged dialect. I highly doubt most blind people care about whether their TTS engine speaks The Queen's English or not, as long as it is clear and understandable.

vidarh 3y ago
What is "clear and understandable" varies greatly, though. E.g. Nigerian English is often subtitled in the UK, but fairly often so is Scottish English... Both often to the great dismay of speakers of the two who sometimes are very annoyed at the expectation that people might not understand them. Nigerian English is actually fascinating in that there's a whole spectrum from Nigerian Pidgin, which ranges from nearly unintelligible to English speakers, to "mostly British English" in terms of orthography and grammar, but which still tends to incorporate words from several differences Nigerian languages and pidgin. (e.g. abeg, don't give me any wahala; Please, don't give me any trouble) Now consider Nigeria is about to become the country with the second largest number of English speakers worldwide (it's close to tied with India, depending which sources and level of proficiency you consider, and Nigeria's population is growing far faster than India's), and while it's still quite far behind the UK for people speaking it as their first language, with current population growth and increasing use of English (e.g. my ex wife's first language is English because her parents first languages were Igbo and Yoruba, and that kind of situation is driving adoption) likely to cause Nigeria to become the second largest on that measure as well. So handling a broader range of dialects will matter, at least in terms of recognition - I do agree that there's more flexibility for generation, though even there if you try feed a broader Nigerian English pidgin to a TTS engine and it doesn't know what to do with the words it might well end up being unintelligible both to eg. American or British English speakers and Nigerian English speakers.

vidarh 3y ago

What is "clear and understandable" varies greatly, though. E.g. Nigerian English is often subtitled in the UK, but fairly often so is Scottish English... Both often to the great dismay of speakers of the two who sometimes are very annoyed at the expectation that people might not understand them. Nigerian English is actually fascinating in that there's a whole spectrum from Nigerian Pidgin, which ranges from nearly unintelligible to English speakers, to "mostly British English" in terms of orthography and grammar, but which still tends to incorporate words from several differences Nigerian languages and pidgin. (e.g. abeg, don't give me any wahala; Please, don't give me any trouble) Now consider Nigeria is about to become the country with the second largest number of English speakers worldwide (it's close to tied with India, depending which sources and level of proficiency you consider, and Nigeria's population is growing far faster than India's), and while it's still quite far behind the UK for people speaking it as their first language, with current population growth and increasing use of English (e.g. my ex wife's first language is English because her parents first languages were Igbo and Yoruba, and that kind of situation is driving adoption) likely to cause Nigeria to become the second largest on that measure as well. So handling a broader range of dialects will matter, at least in terms of recognition - I do agree that there's more flexibility for generation, though even there if you try feed a broader Nigerian English pidgin to a TTS engine and it doesn't know what to do with the words it might well end up being unintelligible both to eg. American or British English speakers and Nigerian English speakers.