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31 points

Native Mandarin speaker here. They all sound like your typical Westerners who have lived in China for a number of years. It’s more interesting that the AI were able to give them that realistic Western accent than a proper regional Chinese accent.

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11 points

how accurate is it, would you say?

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16 points
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Accurate with regards to which one?

Even without watching the clip, any native speaker will be able to immediately tell that they’re not native Mandarin speakers, as the sounds do not correspond to any regional accents in China or even Taiwanese and other Chinese diaspora accent (Malaysian, Singaporean, for example).

As others have said, there are some subtle finesse in the AI voice generation that are very interesting - like Will’s “yi dian er” (一点儿), but they still sound like foreigners who try to imitate Chinese speakers.

In other words, if the Chapo boys move to China and live there for 5-10 years, they’d probably sound like that. I am more impressed by how “realistic” the AI voice imitates Westerners speaking Mandarin as a foreign language than just transposing perfect native accent on to the input English sentences. I don’t know how the algorithm works but it’s very interesting.

Will sounded like he has lived in China for 5+ years, Matt’s accent is slightly worse, so probably 2-3 years. Felix sounded like he just arrived last week lol (just extrapolating from my own experience with foreigners, as we know everyone learns at a different rate).

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4 points
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I meant accurate not regarding their dialects but regarding the translation itself. As in was it accurately translating what they said? Sorry, I should have been more specific.

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14 points

Getting the “er” in there is quite northeastern, my grandfather speaks with 儿化. Adding a soft “er” sound at the end of syllables, basically.

But they also don’t have 100% correct tonal pronunciation, something like 80-90% correct.

This is actually extremely impressive.

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3 points

The ‘‘er’’ is not profound enough to be authentic, it is the exact mistake that Dongbei people would pick up on people who are from the south for example

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