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Comment by Laaas | Hacker News Reader

What is wrong with the example? Although I am not a Spanish speaker, naively it looks fine. The pronunciations written in English are very impressive and do indeed sound somewhat like the corresponding Spanish words (albeit of course incorrect! But most people don't know IPA).

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No, it's absolutely terrible on every single one. For some reason it's telling you how to pronouce them with an English accent, or rather how an English-speaking person would pronounce it if they didn't speak Spanish at all.

> Adiós: "Adiós, my toes" - rhymes with "toes"

In this example "toss" would be much closer than "toes".

But yeah, this is awful. I don't know how this happened.

I disagree that Spanish's /o̞/ is closer to General American's /ɔ/ than to its /ou/.

But that's fundamentally a question of perception that people are going to disagree about

you must pronounce “toss” differently than most english speakers

Like many current LLM results, they're impressive considering the SOTA of ML until recently, but not very good in comparison to a good human baseline.

What example English words would you give as a guide for pronouncing the words?

Good question, it's not that easy to find existing words that match that well. If you asked me to do this I'd probably try making up fake words that in my mind, at least would sound closer (and that is also non-trivial given the weirdness of English pronunciation).

Also, I'm no linguist, my only credentials here are being bilingual, albeit with an accent (lived in the US from 0 to 8 years old and the past ten years, and a south-american country from 8 up to my 20s). So I lack the terminology to describe what things sound like.

That said - Cola, I think is fine. The "o" in toes is pretty different from the one in adios. I'd say that maybe it rhymes with "adipose" or "lactose", except the accent goes on the last syllable. Gracias, isn't too bad, but maybe I'd say "fascias" (admittedly a relatively obscure word). Manana is obviously wrong - here I'd just make up something like "man-nyah-nah" (accent on the nyah part). For uno, I guess I'd just say it sounds like "boo-no" without the b. Tres is close enough (the T and the D are different, but it still rhymes to my ear).

That is the way language learning books were written before the days they could provide audio recordings. Now with modern technology it is much better to learn the sound system of your target language then try to find comparisons with your native language.

I feel like the words it gave only work for _spanish with an american english accent_. But then again it maybe depends on how you would pronounce the words for comparison like banana.

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