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Comment by jld | Hacker News Reader

In the case where the person on the other end isn't a native english speaker, (the calling a restaurant clip) why doesn't Google figure out what language they speak and speak it to them?

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I would imagine that a lot of the work that goes into making the speaking so natural would be very specific to English. As in, they would need to repeat 50% of the work for each language.

Do Scots count as native English speakers? What about the Irish? English has a very large number of accents and dialects that all count as 'English', but typically speech recognition software only works one variety.

Scots are definitely native english speakers, reluctant ones at that, but english nonetheless

I think the person you are responding to might have been talking about those who speak the language Scots, not just Scottish people.

Many consider Scots to be an actual language separate from English. There's a good amount of debate about this among linguists, I think.

For anyone curious, I recommend reading these pages from the recent Scots translation of the first Harry Potter book to get a feel for how it differs from English.

https://imgur.com/gallery/wjkDp#gSO4FRW

oh wow I thought scots was a joke language mocking the scottish accent

oops!

Currently I'm working on a similar project. Building a GAN (generative adversarial network) for voice is a lot of work and testing, you need a big dataset for labeled voices. Wavenet currently support English[0]. Also you need a neural NLP model for this language.

[0]https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/voices

That's actually a brilliant idea.

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