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I love the idea of LLMs being super-efficient language tutors. And you have a good point; coming soon: "We've been getting a lot of these tourists here lately, they're eerily fluent, but all seem to have the same minor speech impediment" (read: messed-up weights in a commonly used speech model).


I've been using ChatGPT 4 to translate and explain various texts in Mandarin and it's been very on point (checking with native speakers from time to time, or internet searches). As expected, it has trouble with slang and cross-language loanwords from time to time. However for languages with much lower information online, it hallucinates like crazy.

> coming soon: "We've been getting a lot of these tourists here lately, they're eerily fluent, but all seem to have the same minor speech impediment"

Haha, if that were to pass, that would still be a far better outcome than our current situation of completely blind machine translation (this is especially for various Asian languages that are very sensitive to phrasing) and mispronunciation by non-native speakers.


> all seem to have the same minor speech impediment

Ah, that is called an accent.


Kind of, Accents are typically derived from the intersection of natural languages, specifically which ones you learned the phonetics of first. (With the exception of the Mid-Atlantic accent...)

This would be something quite novel as the speech irregularities would not have their origin in people

I don't know what you would call it but it needs at least some adjective before accent to differentiate it IMO




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