Show HN: I Built an Accent Changer App

by wbemaker • 7 days ago

6 21 7 days ago

smalltorch2• 6 days ago

Interesting, what's the purpose? Maybe, host a podcast without revealing your real voice?

I tried a few, I think the British American was maybe the best one. I didn't really notice a huge difference on Italian or Indian accent.

British - American https://pastewaves.com/player/25cacf64-461a-4eef-9b02-9bc0da...

A little shaky, but no doubt hints of a British Accent.

wbemaker8• 6 days ago

Cool. Thank you for testing it. It can have multiple purposes. For people that want to do video presentations for instance and have a more native accent. Or yes, for a podcast. What do you think I should improve?

gumby2• 6 days ago

I went to a lot of work to adopt a “neutral” American accent, with some success. Perfectly adequate for casual conversations.

Why? You run across many people with accents every day, right? Well, it’s a problem; people definitely treat you differently.

This issue isn’t specific to the USA btw, it’s just I’ve been working in the USA for a long time.

smalltorch2• 6 days ago

The only accent I treat differently is the unsolicited spam call.

Face to face, I work with Indians, Ukrainians, Vietnamese, Mexicans, Brazilians, Russians, Guatemalans, Cubans, Italians and I love to hear the twang each person has.

Curious what you mean by treated differently or why you needed to put so much effort into hiding your accent? Are you sure it wasn't just general English? Because of course you may get treated differently if you can't speak English...but I think the accent is not really a problem.

jrickert• 6 days ago

Training someone to change the perceived gender of their own voice is a similar process to training them to speak with a new accent. I recently prototyped a gender-affirming voice therapy app for transgender women: https://own-voice-dev.netlify.app/

So now I’m curious if our two applications use the same approach under the hood! I have a detailed tech stack rundown on this page: https://own-voice-dev.netlify.app/#/info but in brief I use OpenVoice v2 to convert someone’s voice toward a differently-gendered reference voice, but leave it at only like 30%-60% transformed so it still sounds like them and not the reference. This transformed voice then becomes a practice reference for drilling.

wbemaker8• 6 days ago

I am mostly using elevanlabs for this

gumby2• 6 days ago

I’m surprised this comment was downvoted.

I know it’s bad form to discuss that, but this is a completely normative comment, with no opinion given so far from being a flame. And it adds to the technical discussion!

wbemaker8• 5 days ago

people do not like spam I guess

KomoD• 5 days ago

The linked site has that typical "AI look".

tamimio2• 6 days ago

It looks cool, but how do I know this is not a front to capture people’s voice fingerprints for other sinister usage?

wbemaker8• 6 days ago

hmmm... What type of sinister usage?

tamimio2• 6 days ago

Well not giving you ideas but voice signatures or prints are used in the wild, in wars or even civil cases, even in the US https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/31/137633/us-prison...

nmstoker• 6 days ago

This is good, although it left a fairly antipodean tone with a nerdy style when I selected British English. The source was a fairly heavy french accent, with the outcome being quite amusing.

The token limits seem to have kicked in now (my first go was a few hours back and this is just my second attempt)

librasteve• 6 days ago

can it do brummie?

wbemaker8• 6 days ago

what is brummie?

gnabgib• 5 days ago

Check with eleven*labs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48935334

nucleative• 6 days ago

Voice cloning failed (403): {"detail":{"type":"authorization_error","code":"forbidden","message":"You have reached your monthly limit of voice add/edit operations (95). Please consider upgrading your subscription to increase your limit.","status":"voice_add_edit_limit_reached","request_id":"zzz"}}

I think we burned up your tokens

wbemaker8• 6 days ago

haha. was not expecting this amount of traction. Should be working now

Void_Null• 6 days ago

Probably should make sure you're thinking about your actual UX when your third party voice cloning service cuts you off. Not a great sign when I can't even go through the demo without hitting a back end error from a third party.

I got ``` Voice cloning failed (403): {"detail":{"type":"authorization_error","code":"forbidden","message":"You have reached your monthly limit of voice add/edit operations (95). Please consider upgrading your subscription to increase your ```

Definitely something that you should have made sure doesn't leak into the front end UI.

wbemaker8• 6 days ago

shit. it should be fixed now. Can you try again? Will fix the leak too

Show HN: I Built an Accent Changer App

Related Stories