What do you think of the Google Duplex voice in language learning?

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Aozora
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Re: What do you think of the Google Duplex voice in language learning?

Postby Aozora » Sun May 13, 2018 7:17 pm

I hadn't heard of Google Duplex, but wow, that clip impressed me! I'd love to use something like that for text to speech in langauge learning. Sometimes I just need to hear a word or phrase, and I have to use whatever generic TTS is provided by Google/LingQ/Anki.
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Re: What do you think of the Google Duplex voice in language learning?

Postby leosmith » Sun May 13, 2018 11:02 pm

What do I think about it? The laugh track was annoying, but the voices were fine.
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Re: What do you think of the Google Duplex voice in language learning?

Postby PeterMollenburg » Sun May 13, 2018 11:03 pm

Well it makes me wonder about the possibilities of saving, reviving, reproducing dead, dying, extinct languages or languages at risk.

Still I have many reservations about google.... i’ll say no more.

edited for improved grammatical precision
Last edited by PeterMollenburg on Mon May 14, 2018 2:40 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: What do you think of the Google Duplex voice in language learning?

Postby zjones » Sun May 13, 2018 11:07 pm

This is definitely impressive. Personally, I think they need a few more years of development. And for my language learning, I would still prefer to have recorded native audio. I'm not saying that Google voice won't be able to get to a native speaking level, but that I'm not a huge fan of using TTS, especially because I don't get to listen to a myriad of beautiful voice types and speaking styles. Both the male and female voice are understandable, but bland.
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Re: What do you think of the Google Duplex voice in language learning?

Postby Cainntear » Mon May 14, 2018 7:38 am

PeterMollenburg wrote:Well it makes me wonder about the possibilities of saving, reviving, reproducing dead, dying, extinct languages or languages at risk.

I doubt Duplex will help here. All machine learning apps need a lot of data -- Google Translate is woefully inadequate in minority languages because it doesn't have enough data, and the same problem is likely to happen here.
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Re: What do you think of the Google Duplex voice in language learning?

Postby Cainntear » Tue May 15, 2018 8:50 am

Henkkles wrote:I think there are subconscious elements to speech, deeper than the intonational patterns that they already know how to imitate, things that you can't put your finger on that affect the process. As it appears to me, these products barely scratch the surface.

That's as may be, but computer interaction settings are generally highly formalised, and formal settings tend to lead to more explicit use of language -- not least because we may well be dealing with someone with a different dialect from us, and hence different subtleties.

Anyway, when applied to language learning, I don't think that's as much of an issue. Far too much of the material out there for any language is mangled and distorted in the process of making it "learner friendly" -- cheap voice actors delivering lines consciously, and in doing so, they leave out all the unconscious and subconscious things that make language feel natural. To get over this, we could find that vanishingly small set of people who are trained as both linguists and performers and pay more for our recordings, or we could use computers which are less natural than a native in spontaneous conversation, but more natural than someone who is consciously recording audio for learners.
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