Have you ever had difficulty understanding what someone was saying because of their accent?
Do you have an accent that others don't understand, or hold biases against?
As a speaker of many foreign languages, I've always found it to be a very fascinating process. Ask any foreigner in your country about their relationship with the local language, and you'll realise how the topic is packed with various emotions.
But as it turns out, AI can help us communicate perfectly with each other in spite of thick accents.
My guest Ganna Tymko is the CEO of SaySo, which uses AI (specifically deep learning) to transform heavily accented speech into standard English (i.e an accent from Britain, America, etc) — in REAL TIME, as you speak!
Just imagine how it would transform cross-cultural and cross-border communications! We dive into the technology and business aspects:
00:23 - Why Aman is getting desensitized to accents
04:53 - Why we struggle with accents
13:59 - AI projects: research VS design
23:13 - How Sayso's tech works
33:23 - How our mouth muscles get trained to produce accents
41:48 - Taking accent transformation tech to the market
47:06 - When training ML models for humans, use human metrics
51:05 - Closing