multiaccent

Multiaccent refers to the concept in speech technology of building systems that can understand or generate speech across multiple accents.

In recognition, multiaccent models aim to accurately transcribe speech from speakers with diverse pronunciations; in synthesis, they aim to produce natural-sounding speech across accents.

Techniques include assembling multi-accent corpora, conditioning models on accent indices or embeddings, applying data augmentation to simulate accent variation, and using phonetic or articulatory representations to reduce pronunciation mismatch.

Applications include virtual assistants that are comfortable for users from different regions, call centers that deal with diverse customers, and accessibility tools for non-native speakers.

Challenges include collecting balanced data across accents, evaluating performance fairly across accents, and mitigating biases that could privilege some accents.

Further reading and related topics include accent diversity in speech processing, multilingual and multispeaker TTS, and robustness in ASR.