Unnatural audibles

I'm so far behind the times with gadgets and trinkets and services that I have never listened to a single audiobook, and I had never even heard of Audible until yesterday when Gene Hill told me that his wife, Marri, listens to tons of Audibles because she writes reviews, and as a result they give her lots of free stories to read. Of late, the publishers of Audibles are using narration by AI.

No way to overemphasize the importance of the quality of narration in an Audible. Marri most often prefers to have the author do the narration. Only the author knows how to express the precise emotional quality to a line. Or deliver the right touch of sarcasm.

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English allophonies of the day

My original interest in the conversation behind yesterday's post "Our digital god is a CSV file?" was a sociophonetic one. As often noted, spontaneous speech often strays far from dictionary pronunciations, and Elon Musk's side of that conversation is full of interesting examples. A few are documented below.

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"Our digital god is a CSV file?"

Barry Collins, "The 5 Weirdest Things Elon Musk Told Britain’s Prime Minister About AI", Forbes 11/3/2023:

5. Our New Digital Gods Are Giant Spreadsheets

Musk and Sunak spent some time discussing the difficulties of regulating AI and how it differs from other branches of technology. And that led to a rather strange discussion about the nature of large language models and what they actually are.

Musk described AI models as a “gigantic data file” with “billions of weights and parameters.”

“You can’t just read it and see what it’s going to do. It’s a gigantic file of inscrutable numbers,” he said.

“It sort of ends up being a giant comma-separated value file,” Musk added, describing the kind of file you might open with Microsoft Excel. “Our digital god is a CSV file? Really? OK.”

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Pinyin resurgent

Hopefully.

Some exciting news.

A member of the PRC's National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (the yearly meeting of which is taking place in Beijing right now) is urging schools to increase the time spent teaching Pinyin (currently 4-6 weeks) to a semester or even longer to help ensure more students have a solid foundation in this skill. Intriguingly, there's also a mention of using more "texts."

Here's an account of what's happening:

"Schools should spend more time teaching Pinyin: PRC politician", Pinyin News (3/7/24)

Xu Xudong (徐旭東/徐旭东), a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and a professor at Central China Normal University in Wuhan, is advocating that public schools in China allocate substantially more time to the teaching of Hanyu Pinyin.

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Auto-translated subtitles from auto-generated subtitles

Mark Metcalf learned something new this Monday morning: YouTube not only provides subtitles, but if the subtitles haven't been created in English, it can generate/translate them on the fly – at least for German. Doesn't seem to be available for Chinese yet.

Select 'CC' at the bottom left of the right side of the video window menu bar to auto-generate the German subtitles. Then click on the gear icon and select auto-translate, from which pick English. You should see English subtitles in near real-time.
 
The results are mind-boggling:  fast as greased lightning and impressively accurate.
Mark tried it out on this interview with the Latvian mezzo-soprano Elīna Garanča at the Wiener Staatsoper about her role as Kundry in Wagner's »Parsifal«.  Mark noted that the auto-subtitle generator / translator seems to render the character name "Kundry" as "customer".  He's right.

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Past Futures

From "Lost Futures: A 19th-Century Vision of the Year 2000", The Public Domain Review, 6/30/2012:

What did the year 2000 look like in 1900? Originally commissioned by Armand Gervais, a French toy manufacturer in Lyon, for the 1900 World exhibition in Paris, the first fifty of these paper cards were produced by Jean-Marc Côté, designed to be enclosed in cigarette boxes and, later, sent as postcards. All in all, at least seventy-eight cards were made by Côté and other artists, although the exact number is not known, and some may still remain undiscovered. Each tries to imagine what it would be like to live in the then-distant year of 2000.

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Unknown language #17

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Concoction and elaboration

Notice in a men's room at National Central University (NCU) in Taoyuan, Taiwan:


(source)

First of all, let me say that I don't believe this notice gives a true account of something that really happened at NCU, namely, that the male students were peeing upward toward the ceiling.  Below I'll explain what I think really happened.

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Unknown language #16

From Beverly Kahn:

Here's a puzzle that I hope you (or fellow linguists) might solve. My neighbor showed me a wood carving of what is likely an American Indian. It is dated 1907. On the back one finds markings that are like a language. Can you determine what the language is and perhaps what it says?

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The valence of husky voices

"Vocal Fry" has been in the media yet again, thanks to the recent flurry of interest over "TikTalk" (2/16/2024). As mentioned there, and in my 2011 post "Vocal fry: 'creeping in' or 'still here'?", this speaking style (and media interest in it) has always been with us, with a famous fry influencer from olden days being Mae West, as featured in the 1933 film She Done Him Wrong.

But there's a lexicographic aspect to this as well. According to Mae West's Wikipedia page, "Considered a sex symbol, she was known for her breezy sexual independence and her lighthearted bawdy double entendres, often delivered in a husky contralto voice." However, the OED's gloss for the relevant sense of husky is "Of persons and their voice: Dry in the throat, so that the timbre of the voice is lost, and its sound approaches more or less a hoarse whisper. (An effect of continued speaking, laryngeal inflammation, or violent emotion.)".

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Major romanization change coming in Japan

From Pinyin News (3/4/24):  

"Japan to switch official romanization from Kunrei-shiki to Hepburn"

Japanese newspapers are reporting that Japan will officially switch from Kunrei-shiki romanization to Hepburn romanization.

In a front-page column last week, the Asahi Shimbun said, “A draft report recently published by the Council of Cultural Affairs pointed out that the Hepburn system is more widely used than the Kunrei system, and it is expected that the notation will be adjusted to reflect this. It is surprising because the writing system has not changed for about 70 years, but if confusion can be avoided, the change is to be welcomed.”

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Boroughing into our subconscious

From "Why Does Everyone Hate Nickelback?", Medium 4/15/2021:

This was before Netflix, or even taping shows to watch later, so people were being repeatedly told that Nickelback is awful for three years, which boroughed its way into many people’s subconscious.

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Artificially unintelligent phishing?

I have something to add to The Economist's list of "How businesses are actually using generative AI", namely creating phishing messages that are even more implausible than those generated by rooms full of non-native hirelings.

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