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jonsofttoday at 2:36 AM1 replyview on HN

I asked the Spanish tutor if he/it was familiar with the terms seseo[0] and ceceo[1] and he said it wasn't, which surprised me. Ideally it would be possible to choose which Spanish dialect to practise as mainland Spain pronunciation is very different to Latin America. In general it didn't convince me it was really hearing how I was pronouncing words, an important part of learning a language. I would say the tutor is useful for intermediate and advanced speakers but not beginners due to this and the speed at which he speaks.

At one point subtitles written in pseudo Chinese characters were shown; I can send a screenshot if this is useful.

The latency was slightly distracting, and as others have commented the NVIDIA Personaplex demos [2] are very impressive in this regard.

In general, a very positive experience, thank you.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Spanis... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Spanis... [2] https://research.nvidia.com/labs/adlr/personaplex/


Replies

andrew-wtoday at 3:28 AM

Thanks for the feedback. The current avatars use a STT-LLM-TTS pipeline (rather than true speech-to-speech), which limits nuanced understanding of pronunciations. Speech-to-speech models should solve this problem. (The ones we've tried so far have counterintuitively not been fast enough.)