Accent Guesser

A friend of mine just sent the link to this AI-powered accent guesser from Bold Voice. After trying it out for a few times, it guessed me as either Romanian or Bulgarian, but always with a low confidence. However, a few friends of mine from certain countries got more than 95% confidence on their country, even when trying to fake an accent from somewhere else.

First Attempt

• Bulgarian: 28%
• Czech: 25%
• Dutch: 15% (funny, considering I live in the Netherlands)

Second Attempt

• Romanian: 48%
• Portuguese: 37%
• Czech: 7%

An hypothesis is that I’ve improved my Portuguese accent to the point where it’s still clear that I’m not native, but it’s not clear that it comes from a specific country. Something I’ve tried to improve over the years has been the pronunciation of the letter ‘H’, which is silent in Portugese. Portuguese speakers tend to add a ‘H’ sound to words that don’t have it (‘hadd’ instead of ‘add’), and not say it when it needs to be said (‘as’ instead of ‘has’).

I hope that the fact that the confidence in a Portuguese accent was always low means that I’ve been able to correct some errors over the time. I can still hear a lot of Portuguese people speaking English and I know they’re Portuguese before they tell me. I wonder if they’d say the same about me.

Another interesting point: many people say that European Portuguese sounds like Slavic languages. I think this just accentuates the point.

Another hypothesis I had was: maybe they trained this with Brazilians. But I don’t think that’d make the difference: I can tell someone’s native language is Portuguese from their English, but I can’t distinguish further than that.

And you? Did you try? Does it correctly guess your accent?