Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

This is great, and the voices apparently only know how to speak English, and their own language!

That is, typing

    say -v Milena "Здравствуйте, меня зовут Milena.

Actually says, "Zdravstvuyte...", while typing

    say -v Bruce "Здравствуйте, меня зовут Milena.

Results in "Cyrillic capital letter 'Z'. Cyrillic small leter 'd'.", etc.

View on HN

They don't actually know how to speak English. If you listen carefully, what they are doing is sounding out English using the pronunciation rules of their "native" language. It's not an accent at all, just a literal parsing using different rules.

That's precisely what ends up causing an accent, no? Using the sounds and pronunciation of your native language in another one, with different rules.

I don't think that Apple has created the World's Best Accent Impersonator here, but it's good for a few laughs.

An accent is when you do it occasionally and accidentally, not pervasively, the wrong way, every single time for every single sound. That's something else.

Two-part response.

1, the pedantic: technically none of them know how to speak English, or any other language - there's just a rule set for making phonemes based on characters out of waveforms.

2. Ignoring the pedantic response, I still don't think that's true - if that were the case, then Milena wouldn't be able to speak an English sentence!

    say -v Milena "Hello, I am Milena"

If they only speak their own language, then Milena should be saying "Прописная буква Х, строчная буква и", etc.

It's even more complicated than that: Some voices DO speak multiple languages, e.g. the German voice "Anna" (downloaded from System Preferences) speaks excellent German, English, Spanish, Italian, and French:

   say -v Anna 'über allen Wipfeln ist Ruh'
   say -v Anna '[[lang fr_FR]] que restet-il de nos amours'
   say -v Anna '[[lang it_IT]] chi nasce asino non muore cavallo'
   say -v Anna '[[lang es_SP]] nosotros tenemos mas influencia  con sus hijos que su tiene'
   say -v Anna '[[lang en_UK]] are we having fun yet?'

Hm, do you know how many speak languages that aren't "ascii"?

No, it doesn't speak Italian, for one 'chi' is pronounced like 'she' and not like 'ki'.

They actually do, but only if you also download the entire language packs for them.

It's not a question of handling languages but of handling scripts. I believe all voices can handle Latin, in addition to their native script (So Russian voices can handle Latin & Cyrillic, but English voices handle only Latin).

"Bruce" triggered the English response? That's a weird ML algorithm.

No, "-v Bruce" did (forcing the use of the "Bruce" voice, which is in English).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com