Amazon Creates Accent Translator to aid AI Language Development

Evolution shows that social mimicry is a major component of our survival mechanism, pushing us to belong to groups. We're all subject to the chameleon effect, this tendency to unconsciously mirror what "others" do, and one of its most apparent manifestations is language and accents. Members of the same social group tend to mimic the speech patterns of others, leading to the rise of different regional accents within the same language. In the Southern United States, for example, English has developed in contact with Spanish, leading speakers on the two sides of the borders to pick up dialectal elements Like in Puerto Rico, the mix was so deep that "Spanglish" appeared. On both sides of the pond, in the United States and Britain, people speak English, yet with very distinctive accents that, in some cases, could be mutually unintelligible.