Readit News.. unless they had access to a native speaker and/or vocal coach? While an automated Henry Higgins is nifty, it's not something humans haven't been able to do themselves.
I sometimes see content on social media encouraging people to sound more native or improve their accent. But IMO it's perfectly ok to have an accent, as long as the speech meets some baseline of intelligibility. (So Victor needs to work on "long" but not "days".) I've even come across people who are trying to mimick a native accent but lose intelligibility, where they'd sound better with their foreign accent. (An example I've seen is a native Spanish speaker trying to imitate the American accent's intervocalic T and D, and I don't understand them. A Spanish /t/ or /d/ would be different from most English language accents, but be way more understandable.)
Indeed Victor would likely receive a personalized lesson and practice on the NG sound on the app.
Yeah, I can opt out. By not using any voice-related feature in their voice training app.
But then I read their privacy policy. They want permission to save all of my audio interactions for all eternity. It's so sad that I will never try out their (admittedly super cool) AI tech.
It was meant more as a reflection on how, due to how fast threat models evolve, even the seemingly innocuous act of recording 2 sentences on a random website can now be used to break into my bank account.
If they recorded any of that they likely have enough to clone my voice somewhat faithfully.
Congratulations on labelling my French Canadian accent as French though, I'll have to work on my pronounciation more to fool the AI.
That said, if you want to teach people to speak with an “American accent”, you should probably be aware that there is no “American accent”, only regional accents.