[HN Gopher] Show HN: Speech Meter - Improve Your English Pronunc...
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Show HN: Speech Meter - Improve Your English Pronunciation
Hey HN! We built Speech Meter as a tool to practice and improve
English pronunciation. It uses AI to analyze your accent and score
your pronunciation accuracy. It's great for anyone who wants to
practice their pronunciation in English. I'd love to hear your
thoughts and suggestions for improvements. I really appreciate any
feedback you could have (:
Author : jeanmayer
Score : 37 points
Date : 2023-10-11 12:32 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (speechmeter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (speechmeter.com)
| jackconsidine wrote:
| Very cool tool. It looks like the browser base encodes a
| recording and sends it to a server. I'm aware that some browsers
| support different type of recording mimeTypes (webm, wav) - did
| you have any cross-browser difficulties? Or anything of interest
| when solving this problem?
| [deleted]
| rafamvc wrote:
| I wish I could have this on something like superpowered.me, so
|
| I could log what I say, and give me ongoing feedback on my
| dictation.
|
| When I read prompts I am being more deliberate about my speech,
| and my results will be better than they actually should be.
|
| This, combined with a spoken grammar feedback, would be
| meaningful to help non native speakers to improve their English.
| ibdf wrote:
| This is really interesting. I like the scoring system for each
| word. But if I can't pronounce one word correctly, shouldn't
| there be a way to listen to the right pronunciation?
| vinc wrote:
| As a French native who learned English by reading books and later
| spent a couple of years in English speaking countries, I'd really
| like to have a tool to help me fix my pronunciation.
|
| So with that in mind I tried your tool and I was enthusiastic
| about seeing a score for each words, but then what? I tried a few
| sentences manually (the random button doesn't work) and for
| example it seems that I have an issue with the pronunciation of
| "to" where I always get around 50%, but there's no way to know
| what's wrong. As it is I'd stop using the tool after about a
| minute.
|
| I'd suggest adding something to hear the correct US/UK
| pronunciation of the words.
| yunwal wrote:
| It doesn't seem to work for long bits of text. I copied the first
| paragraph from Wiki:Random[0], and it submitted successfully on
| the website, but didn't receive analysis back. No error was shown
| either.
|
| [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leport-Toupin_House
| chankstein38 wrote:
| This is completely non-functional. I read something completely
| different than the phrase given but it still gives me what seem
| to be high marks. I can't really tell because nothing is
| explained at all in the interface. The numbers seem completely
| random but always weighted towards US even if I mumble or say
| nothing at all.
| timetraveller26 wrote:
| That proves my theory that people don't really understand
| English, they only get the message through intuition and
| context
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Also the random string generation seems to only output "the cat
| is sleeping on me" did someone accidentally publish this with
| mock data in it or something?
| MajimasEyepatch wrote:
| This is fun to test as a native English speaker from New England.
| It doesn't seem to be a fan of my accent on certain words.
| anoy8888 wrote:
| Is it open source ?
| plastic_bag wrote:
| I like this! I am surprised to find out my accent heavily leans
| towards the US's despite me being an Indian. Then again I grew up
| watching a lot of American movies, it's not really a surprise.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| I would guess that's because the numbers this thing spits out
| are crap. It seems to just output random crap every time.
| Always 70+ percent US regardless of any attempts at accents or
| even saying absolutely nothing. Try just mumbling into it
| arrowsmith wrote:
| I asked ChatGPT for a list of words that Brits and Americans
| pronounce very differently, combined them into some silly
| sentences ("my aunt gave vitamins and herbs to the zebra in
| the bathroom"), and tested them in the app with my native
| British accent. It consistently told me that my accent was
| 80%+ U.S..
|
| This app is, as we say in Britain, complete rubbish.
| plastic_bag wrote:
| That must be it. It's almost always 70+ percent US.
| westernpopular wrote:
| Well that's probably because Indian accents are not present as
| a category and everyone is forced into the US/UK/AU categories?
| plastic_bag wrote:
| Could be. But still one would expect the Indian accent to
| lean towards the UK's because of the colonial past.
| tuukkah wrote:
| It's showing me someone else's scores or hallucinating, because I
| got good scores even before I said anything! I tried multiple
| times and the numbers varied somewhat.
|
| Also: I wonder what the scoring is based on because not all
| imperfections are equally important. Further, what's important
| depends on the context as well.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Oh yeah. I hadn't even tried that but this seems to have no
| basis in reality in any way. My phrase was "the cat is sleeping
| on me" and I read "taco bell is delicious" and I got a score of
| 33 with what seem like decent results (still no idea what these
| even mean)
| soyasis wrote:
| Accents are political. Its not only a great way to challenge the
| norm but it can also be inspirational for others with a similar
| cultural migration background. As long as people can understand
| you, I believe one should embrace their accent.
| DrinkWater wrote:
| Does that really work? I tried my best Oxford English accent, and
| i slurred like a total drunk: almost no change in the results,
| which for some reason are not explained anywhere?
| chankstein38 wrote:
| This has been what I've found in testing as well. Zero change
| in anything. Seems completely non-functional. Even the "random
| string generation" only outputs the same string over and over.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I'd like something like that for French. I've extreme difficulty
| to differentiate between "deux", "de" and "des" among other very
| similar phonemes that are so common in the French language.
| morkalork wrote:
| Check out this channel:
| https://www.youtube.com/@MasterYourFrench
|
| They have lots of videos that go into the different
| pronunciations of specific phonemes, and will for example teach
| you when to use the open or closed variation for a word.
|
| As for OP, the site just gives a score? How does one know how
| to improve with that? I was expecting something like "you
| pronounced this vowel like _this_ when it should be like _that_
| "
| Reventlov wrote:
| To be fair, between french from different regions, people will
| pronounce those differently or not, and not pronounce it the
| same way...
| impyamin wrote:
| exactly, in the context of "de" and "deux" depending on the
| person (native or not) , you won't be able to differentiate
| the pronunciation without context
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > I've extreme difficulty to differentiate between "deux", "de"
| and "des"
|
| French here, a few tips:
|
| _<<deux>>_ and _<<de>>_ are pronounced the same (almost
| everywhere at least). The only thing that change is the
| _<<liaison>>_ : if you have _<<deux>>_ in from of a word that
| starts with a vowel, then you 'll need to add a "Z" sound in
| between: ex. _<<deux animaux>>_ is being pronounced as if it
| was spelled <<deux Zanimaux>>.
|
| _<<des>>_ sounds different, it pronounces like _<<de>>_ with
| an _<<e>>_ sound like in _<<the>>_ or _<<cafe>>_ , and since it
| finishes with a "s", you have a _<<liaison>>_ as well: _<<des
| animaux>>_ = > _<<des Zanimaux>>_.
| User23 wrote:
| It's been a long time, but I feel like "de" is just a tad
| shorter than "deux." Might that be on account of my youthful
| exposure to French was in the Alsace? It was mostly older
| speakers.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| There may be some slight inter-regional variations in
| pronunciation (I haven't been in Alsace in ten years so I
| don't remember about that) but pronouncing both the same
| way is at least perfectly acceptable, so no foreign speaker
| should ever bother about that.
| mynameisash wrote:
| Moi aussi. I was just speaking with one of my friends on Sunday
| at my local French meetup, and she said there are tools for
| correcting/verifying one's pronunciation, but she couldn't name
| any specific tools for French. I have a good accent and
| generally decent pronunciation, but I still make many errors in
| my French. I'd love something that would help me improve.
| User23 wrote:
| I have about enough French to read the menu and order properly
| at a restaurant. Nevertheless these are really obvious to me.
| I'm not sure why that is, but I suppose it's probably due to
| having had some exposure to the language at a young age thanks
| to having some French family.
|
| I feel like anyone with children and the opportunity to do so
| should try to expose them to as broad a set of phonemes as
| possible from an early age.
| rafamvc wrote:
| It would be nice to have a specific set of prompts that are good
| to evaluate speech. For example, I am a native Portuguese speaker
| so I might struggle with Th's and R's.
|
| Also the random phrase generator always generate the same phrase.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| This feels to me like someone published this with demo data or
| they didn't train the model at all and this is like a 0.0.2
| beta or something.
| herodotus wrote:
| Could you show a key for the numbers? I did not know what they
| meant.
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(page generated 2023-10-11 16:00 UTC)