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Comment by SwiftyBug | Hacker News Reader

I speak Brazilian Portuguese natively. I chose to record my voice saying a specific sentence and to "translate" it to Brazilian Portuguese using the exact same sentence. I was very pleased to find out that I became a Mineiro from the countryside, one of the coolest accents in Brazil!

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The Brazilian Portuguese model is a bit of an extreme showcase (and thus really cool!), as it was trained on a single speaker (entirely recorded by the main author of the paper, Edresson Casanova, who's Brazilian).

The fact that it can do multi-lingual voice cloning at all in that case is already surprising. You can find more details in the project page [0] and paper [1]. And here's the corpus. [2]

[0] https://edresson.github.io/YourTTS/

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.02418

[2] https://edresson.github.io/TTS-Portuguese-Corpus/

This is very cool. I recorded myself in Portuguese -> Portuguese and got the same result.

I also did Pt -> En and sounded like... me speaking English, though with some artifacts. VERY cool.

There was a thread a while back about the need for "accent correction," meaning that native speakers with one accent could more easily consume content in the same accent. It looks like the technology exists now! This is worth money. If you find an accent that many people really dislike, the odds are that's it's also very difficult for people to understand that accent (until they are accustomed to it).

You spoke Portuguese into it and it just changed your accent? That's kinda cool.

I can speak just enough to know how I sound, and was surprised to hear that accent too :D

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