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Accents in latent spaces: How AI hears accent strength in English


We work with accents a lot at BoldVoice, the AI-powered accent coaching app for non-native English speakers. Accents are subtle patterns in speech—vowel shape, timing, pitch, and more.

This is a good sanity check that our latent space is working correctly—the recording quality and level background noise are not relevant to accent strength. If Victor wanted to move beyond this point, the sound-by-sound phonetic analysis available in the BoldVoice app would allow him to understand the patterns in pronunciation and stress that contribute to Eliza’s accent and teach him how to apply them in his own speech. This same quantitative approach can be applied to rigorously evaluate automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for performance variations across different accent strengths.

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