alt Hacker NewsWow this is really cool. AAVE and Southern lexes have been underserved linguistically for a long time.
That said, my hunch is your Africa speicifc datasets might lossy, as entire regions of Africa are very linguistically diverse and someone who speaks Bambara and French will affect a different English accent than someone who speaks Maninka and English.
Yes, exactly. This version focuses on giving the ability to consistently represent those voices well. The future versions will be even more fine-grained where you can scope it even more detailed if you wanted.
For example, right now if you say you want a Southern American accent, you might get a voice that is a Black person from Atlanta or Rural Georgia in future versions you will be able to specify Atlanta or rural, etc.. same with the regional African accents.