if AI ever gets good enough to do this accurately and in real time, we’d be looking at an actual babelfish
i would finally, at long last, have to hand it to them
Sentence structure means that it kind of can’t happen in real-time as such, because you would need to wait until potentially the end of the sentence to get words that appear early in the sentence in an accurate and natural-ish translation. If “20 seconds later” is real time, barring run-on sentences, which are much more common in speech than in writing, then I guess.
I think most people are okay with a reasonable delay if the live interpretation is accurate.
Here’s the funny part: their American accent totally made it believable.
It’s very clear that even with the AI generated voice, they are not native Mandarin speakers. They sound like your typical foreigners who learned Chinese for a number of years lol. I don’t know if it’s the dataset they’re trained on or just how the algorithm works, but it’s very interesting.
Makes me think about what it would be like if Chinese ever becomes an international language, in the way English has and Latin did before it. It makes me giggle to think about Mandarin with a backwoods Tennessee drawl.
The best comparison for me is Montreal french. Deadass sounds like your uncle from up north getting a little parlez vous on.
Even with the phonemes of any two given language varieties that are considered to be “the same sound”, there are going to be differences in what the average pronunciation is, so I assume that’s a lot of what’s going on here. The other thing is that English and Chinese have a lot of phonemes that barely or don’t at all overlap in possible pronunciations, so the algorithm is picking the closest match.
Felix in the replies: “I’m crying at how beautiful this is. I support AI now. all I have ever wanted is for the show to be credibly portrayed as a Chinese podcast”
Importing Liberal propaganda into the PRC
Whenever you see things like this, or just how many pages Stalin read in a day, I’m just blown away. I’m such a lazy motherfucker, goddamn
On the one hand it’s very lib to be reading Piketty; but on the other Ninety-Three is Hugo’s best and most revolutionary novel and dosen’t get a lot of attention becuase of it. So I guess it’s a wash.
I can speak enough Chinese to know the AI is trying to give them all Beijing accents and that’s funny as hell
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.
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).
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.
Old beijing accent is more piraty.
I’ll suppose the old one is comparable to the New one, like how Irish and Scottish english sounds like to Londoners…
Speaking of which, what’s funny with THEIR Beijing accent, as far as I’m concerned?
