[HN Gopher] Voicebox: Generative AI model for speech that genera...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Voicebox: Generative AI model for speech that generalizes across
       tasks
        
       Author : OkGoDoIt
       Score  : 177 points
       Date   : 2023-06-19 16:49 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (ai.facebook.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (ai.facebook.com)
        
       | poisonarena wrote:
       | > introduces state of the art AI Model for speech
       | 
       | > narrator for the presentation is indian woman with lisp
       | 
       | every time
        
         | insickness wrote:
         | The narration was bad. I was thinking maybe it was the head
         | developer of the project and they wanted her to narrate or
         | something. Why would you choose that narration?
        
       | stan_kirdey wrote:
       | seem to be already in the process of reproduction by the
       | community - https://github.com/SpeechifyInc/Meta-voicebox
        
       | aketchum wrote:
       | I think that the "star trek" use case of a live translation is
       | super exciting. I think that this also will force people to have
       | pass phrases that they use to authenticate phone calls with. I
       | normally downplay when people bring up everyone signing
       | everything with a public/private key (impractical for normal
       | users) but clearly there will be a need for authentication
       | protocols as AI proliferates
        
         | bool3max wrote:
         | How "live" can translation ever really be? Properly translating
         | anything from one language to another requires context.
        
           | bugglebeetle wrote:
           | While I'm not necessarily in favor of this, a multimodal AI
           | that has access to your location, vision inputs, etc could
           | obtain much of this context. People already explore foreign
           | countries by hobbling together these services.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | canadianwriter wrote:
         | like... a pin?
        
           | madsbuch wrote:
           | In the US some phone companies have been using voice
           | recognition to authenticate when their customers call. This
           | will definitely have to see its end.
        
             | zimpenfish wrote:
             | HMRC in the UK also use it. Has never worked once for me
             | and I don't even have any kind of accent.
        
         | michaelmrose wrote:
         | Coming to an android and iphone near you voice authentication.
         | Audio streams have inaudible data produced by encrypting a
         | mutually known but changeable token like the current time with
         | your private key embedded in the stream for example in
         | frequencies you can't hear. Your phone app queries the service
         | with the time of call and the data received and if they are
         | also a subscriber it is able to discern their identity with
         | certainty.
         | 
         | If this feature is standardized and built in it could be paired
         | with a token like a yubikey which is on users keychain and
         | authenticated even if they were using someone else's phone.
         | 
         | All these details can be completely opaque to the user who just
         | needs to see a blue check by calls made with a device
         | verifiably logged in as name@provider and a red exclamation
         | beside calls made with no info at all.
         | 
         | Think fake kidnapping scams, industrial espionage, recent
         | attacks involved in pretending to be in HR to redirect corp
         | transfers to attacker.
         | 
         | Just a little doubt is liable to blow up such scams.
        
           | TeMPOraL wrote:
           | > _If this feature is standardized and built in it could be
           | paired with a token like a yubikey which is on users keychain
           | and authenticated even if they were using someone else 's
           | phone._
           | 
           | Remember the standard tech bait-and-switch: if this feature
           | is built in, it'll not be good enough to function for
           | purposes you describe, but it _will_ be good enough to track
           | you by your voice for advertising purposes.
        
           | bee_rider wrote:
           | In a fake kidnapping scheme, it doesn't seem like that much
           | of a stretch to say "I've been kidnapped, and they took my
           | keys, so I don't have my yubikey" or something along those
           | lines.
        
       | ChatGTP wrote:
       | Is Meta just operating in hope and AI moonshots now ?
       | 
       | Everyone one of their products is just garbage to me and becoming
       | less relevant by the day. When do they actually starting building
       | something useful again ?
       | 
       | Honestly Apple seems to be using "AI" much more successfully and
       | actually seamlessly integrating it into their existing products
       | to improve them.
       | 
       | My theory is Mark is hoping the meta verse will pop out if Yan's
       | bottom at some stage. Maybe he is right? I just can't for the
       | life of my understand why the current products are just so so
       | neglected?
        
         | ChuckNorris89 wrote:
         | [flagged]
        
           | ChatGTP wrote:
           | Do you use an iPhone ? They do pretty amazing things with
           | images now. Even the search for a photo by text is quite
           | amazing. I used it the other day for work for the first time
           | and I found what I needed in my tens of thousands of photos.
           | It almost truly felt like an extension of my memory, it was
           | actually a pretty cool feeling.
           | 
           | So sorry I don't buy the Siri attack as being proof of
           | anything. I have found Siri has improved a lot. Even the
           | speed at which Siri works is much faster. The other day I was
           | driving in a really loud old car and used my Apple watch to
           | change the music, I said to myself "there's no way Siri will
           | get it", and it did.
           | 
           | I also trust Apple with my data, at least for now. I don't
           | even slightly trust Meta at all. I found Zuckerbergs
           | interview on Lex Friedman more scary than before as he said
           | all the same freaky stuff disguised by a more "cool" and
           | polished facade. The same dystopian ideas are still there.
        
             | ChuckNorris89 wrote:
             | Sent from my iPhone
        
             | [deleted]
        
           | twobitshifter wrote:
           | I think he's talking about the new iOS feature that allows
           | your text to be read in your own voice model.
        
           | tyrfing wrote:
           | Voice commands being usable is the one thing I miss from
           | having an Android phone.
        
         | mvdtnz wrote:
         | I'm no fan of Meta but I'm glad there are companies investing
         | in big moonshots like AI and yes, even Metaverse.
        
         | polyomino wrote:
         | Meta products have more users than ever
        
           | ChatGTP wrote:
           | Doesn't prove much honestly. How do you even know those users
           | are real ? What value are the products providing ?
           | 
           | My Apple products continue to improve my day to day
           | immensely. The meta products are just rubbish on the whole.
           | How has Instagram improved in the last 5 years ?
        
             | [deleted]
        
         | HasanYousef wrote:
         | The anecdotal fallacy
        
       | cvhashim04 wrote:
       | Any available open source APIs?
        
       | schappim wrote:
       | > we are not making the Voicebox model or code publicly available
       | at this time
       | 
       | Hopefully it'll do a LLaMA.
        
       | treprinum wrote:
       | So are they releasing it or not? It's a nice PR statement but "we
       | are not making the Voicebox model or code publicly available at
       | this time". Phantom release?
        
         | fnordpiglet wrote:
         | They are holding it closed for the safety of the children and
         | their future profit margins.
        
       | swader999 wrote:
       | So where can we try this out?
        
         | theptip wrote:
         | > See voicebox.metademolab.com for a demo of the model
         | 
         | They are not releasing the model (yet?) but demo samples are
         | available across many tasks
        
       | paul7986 wrote:
       | Anyone know what tool is being used to create AI singing
       | voices/renditions of Mariah Carey singing Whitney Houston to
       | other popular songs?
       | 
       | Here's a bunch of results on YouTube and some are really good
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mariah+carey+ai...
        
       | jansan wrote:
       | Pretty impressive, but I had the video running in the background
       | and it sounded a bit too sterile for my taste. Also, the narrator
       | sounds a bit like she once gave a foot massage to Marsellus
       | Wallace's bride.
        
       | moneywoes wrote:
       | Is this really better than eleven labs?
        
         | gamegoblin wrote:
         | Just listening to it, it's subjectively not better, but if it's
         | > 10x faster/cheaper, I would use it anyway -- it's good enough
         | to be listenable.
         | 
         | Eleven Labs is the first voice synthesis that is good enough
         | that I'd listen to an audiobook generated from it, but pricing
         | is such that it would cost $100 to synthesize a 10 hour
         | audiobook. A little too expensive. If they could get it down to
         | $10 I'd cancel my Audible subscription and just synthesize
         | audio from ebook text.
         | 
         | So if I can get a locally running voicebox model and just leave
         | it running on my laptop over night transcribing an audiobook,
         | that's even better.
        
           | bavell wrote:
           | > So if I can get a locally running voicebox model and just
           | leave it running on my laptop over night transcribing an
           | audiobook, that's even better.
           | 
           | This is basically my dream for local AI... locals models
           | trained on my own data/code/styles. Even if they're slow, as
           | long as they work (V/RAM) and are of high enough quality then
           | I'm happy to wait!
        
           | siwakotisaurav wrote:
           | Have you tried tortoisetts? I believe eleven labs basically
           | forked that and made improvements on voice quality and speed
           | there
        
             | nannal wrote:
             | tortoisetts is good to takes a long time to render audio
             | even on it's fastest setting with the fast fork.
             | 
             | Although it wasn't clear to me how voicebox compares.
        
             | theLiminator wrote:
             | How does it compare to Voicebox in quality?
        
               | pksebben wrote:
               | I would say that properly configured Tortoise is better,
               | but that comes with the massive caveat that Tortoise:
               | 
               | 1 - Is a real pain to get 'working right' - it's not even
               | remotely batteries included
               | 
               | and, more importantly:
               | 
               | 2 - Is _incredibly slow_. I 've been turning Heart Of
               | Darkness into an audiobook as a unit test and it takes
               | ~30m per paragraph, on average. Add to that the
               | occasional hiccup where a block gets transcribed badly
               | (Tortoise occasionally 'drops out' of it's selected
               | voice) and Tortoise only really works if you have a ton
               | of compute and you still don't mind waiting forever.
        
         | bdcravens wrote:
         | I'm not sure. Eleven Labs requires some tweaking of the
         | parameters, but I've created samples that friends and family
         | are certain is me.
        
         | nickolas_t wrote:
         | Came here to find out myself, still not sure.
        
       | ogsalman wrote:
       | oh okay, so this is what they were recording me for...
       | 
       | hehe, fun world we live in.
        
       | cnlwsu wrote:
       | I am mostly excited for cheaper audiobooks with consistent voices
       | for different characters.
        
         | dsign wrote:
         | I've been working on that for my hobby writing project. I'm
         | using Elevenlabs' API and homegrown scripts to automate audio-
         | generation and synchronization between text and audio. I have
         | separate voices for the characters (and the narrator, when the
         | narrator is third-person speaker). Below, there are some links
         | to a section of a chapter that you can download and judge for
         | yourself.
         | 
         | This is a huge boon for independent authors, until AIs replace
         | us as well :-) .
         | 
         | Things I have learned:
         | 
         | * A good human narrator could do much, much better, but the
         | quality obtained this way is not totally terrible.
         | 
         | * The possibility to produce a section in a matter of minutes
         | is a huge plus. The thing with a book is that it's never
         | _totally_ finished. If you discover a problem after you have
         | submitted your text to a human narrator and paid $ XXXX, there
         | is nothing you can do.
         | 
         | * Currently, there is no platform that I know of distributing
         | and selling books like this. Audible only accepts audiobooks
         | narrated by humans. To my knowledge, platforms that accept
         | ebooks don't handle epub with media overlays. Well, Apple Books
         | say they do but I haven't gotten it to work. There are no
         | alternative platforms for audiobooks that I know of, but I
         | haven't done a ton of research there.
         | 
         | * The possibility to have more control over emotions expressed
         | in the speech could be a bonus, particularly for small, overly
         | dramatic parts of the narration. Coqui TTS new editor is a step
         | in the right direction, but their TTS doesn't sound yet as good
         | as Elevenlabs. Voicebox seems promising, but there is no way to
         | use it at least for now.
         | 
         | * Cost is a big deal 1/3. With my scripts, I pay almost nothing
         | when I fix a typo, since most of the audio is stored in little
         | bits in the database, and only what changes is submitted to the
         | API. But the human time of a narrator costs much more, as it
         | should.
         | 
         | * Cost is a big deal 2/3. As a reader, I have learned that how
         | much a book sells tells me nothing about how much I will like
         | it. But only books that have a potential to sell can afford
         | audiobooks. If I want to listen to a story too quirky to be
         | mainstream, or from an independent author that I follow in
         | Twitter, the chances I'll find it as audiobook are next to
         | none.
         | 
         | * Cost is a big deal 3/3. Voice narration is not the only
         | aspect one needs to pay for. A good story needs an army of
         | editors, proofreaders, and designers. Generally, the more an
         | author or a publisher needs to disburse on those, the more
         | bland and mainstream the book must become to sell and justify
         | the investment.
         | 
         | -----------------------------------
         | 
         | Note that this is a WIP. Book chapter with automatic narration:
         | 
         | An epub with media overlays. It requires an epub reader that
         | supports that standard feature of the epub 3 specification.
         | Currently, and that I know of, there is Thorium and BookFusion
         | for iOS.
         | 
         | https://drive.google.com/file/d/1U8XUB9xhu86JuketGH5WchM0obN...
         | 
         | An MP3 track from the epub above:
         | 
         | https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-u89ee52VZzGZ0oTGC_az5Uqbfs...
        
         | hartator wrote:
         | The best we can do is more robot spam.
        
         | gcoakes wrote:
         | I'm excited about them making it faster to produce. I finished
         | the most recently published audiobook in a series this weekend.
         | The author posts unpublished chapters to a site called Royal
         | Road. I listen to books while running and driving, so it's a
         | non-starter to visually read them. It would be nice to have
         | that pipeline accelerated.
         | 
         | Now, I just want to talk about my little weekend project... I
         | spent a couple of hours scraping Royal Road and trying to get
         | TTS working. Eventually, I settled on:
         | 
         | 1. `wget --recursive` filtering only the chapters 2. A python
         | script to strip extraneous html like advertisements and the
         | headers. 3. Pipe into pandoc emitting plain text. 4. Copy it to
         | my phone for TTS:
         | https://f-droid.org/packages/com.danefinlay.ttsutil/
         | 
         | I really wanted to use all local tools, but I just couldn't get
         | any of the Linux tools to sound as good or work as fast as
         | Google TTS services. Also, the TTS paid services I found were
         | just too expensive to justify (20hr book for ~$70).
         | 
         |  _I 'm more than happy to additionally purchase the audiobook
         | when it is published. I just don't want to wait._
        
           | bee_rider wrote:
           | Yeah, it isn't so much that I want publishers to have a
           | cheaper way of making an audiobook that avoids the
           | (apparently minimal) cost of employing a voice actor.
           | 
           | I don't want to wait for the publisher to decide they want to
           | do an audiobook.
        
         | mjamesaustin wrote:
         | Oh that is an amazing use case!
        
         | geuis wrote:
         | This is a huge issue in the voice acting community. Been
         | frequent recent discussions over at
         | https://www.reddit.com/r/VoiceActing/.
         | 
         | For what its worth, most of the cost of audiobooks doesn't come
         | from paying talent. For intermediate level actors, the going
         | rate is around $50-$100 per finished hour (PFH) and experienced
         | actors it can be around $250-$300. This page does a decent job
         | of laying out pay structures for audiobooks:
         | https://speechify.com/blog/whats-the-meaning-of-per-finished...
         | 
         | An 8 hour audio book might cost the author/producer about
         | $1800-$2k.
         | 
         | Just talking about Audible exclusively, they take about %50 of
         | sales. But it's kinda wishy washy about exactly how much an
         | author will earn in royalties. It's not as much as you might
         | think. Good article from an author here that lays out some
         | sales numbers: https://selfpublishingadvice.org/how-audiobook-
         | authors-are-p...
         | 
         | The other way that a narrator can get paid is called royalty
         | share. That means the author/producer doesn't pay the narrator
         | anything up front and the voice actor then relies on a small
         | percent of each book sale to get paid. Theoretically, if an
         | audiobook ends up _really_ taking off then the narrator
         | potentially could make a lot of money. But that rarely happens.
         | Most audiobooks that you find on Audible have very, very low
         | sales volumes.
         | 
         | To sum it up, it doesn't occur to lost of audiobook fans but
         | voice acting is a very competitive industry. It takes a _lot_
         | of work to make a name for yourself, and even then the most
         | successful actors probably aren 't making much more than a
         | highly paid software engineer. For most wannabe voice actors
         | (including myself), its something you do more for love than
         | necessarily to make a career out of it. Though of course, lots
         | of people do but not the majority.
         | 
         | This is all why I'm personally not a fan of these voice
         | generation models. It's going to eventually make this niche
         | industry non-competitive for real humans except for the talent
         | that is already established. People keep blaming the actors as
         | being too expensive when most are barely making it without
         | secondary jobs.
        
           | justapassenger wrote:
           | There's also a different possible take on this.
           | 
           | Voice acting seems to be really bad career, so eliminating
           | that job is desired, if you can deliver same quality/better
           | product for cheaper to customers, without requiring employees
           | to be underpaid.
           | 
           | I know it sucks for people in that industry, but technical
           | progress always eliminates jobs. Calculator used to be a job,
           | now it's a device.
        
             | TeMPOraL wrote:
             | Caveat though:
             | 
             | > _if you can deliver same quality /better product for
             | cheaper to customers, without requiring employees to be
             | underpaid._
             | 
             | This almost never happens. Cheaper? Yes. Same or better
             | quality? Not a chance. Automated solutions tend to allow
             | reducing quality way below what humans workers would want
             | to do, or even could cheaply and reliably (i.e. doing worse
             | job than a careless one takes actual effort/skill). Like
             | with every other case of automation replacing humans,
             | expect the quality to be pushed down to minimum tolerable
             | levels, as this is the point that maximizes revenue.
        
               | theptip wrote:
               | Perhaps it's not the bar the GP was applying, but I think
               | "good enough at 1/10 the price" is quite empowering for
               | consumers. Consider all of the people that can't
               | currently afford Audible, but who would like to listen to
               | audio books while they commute to work, for example.
               | 
               | And of course, nothing stops you from paying what we pay
               | now for human voice actors if there continues to be a
               | quality differential that customers care about. (Though
               | perhaps Baumol's Cost Disease would push the price up for
               | today's human-generated quality.)
               | 
               | Extrapolating further -- if the commoditized version of
               | audio books is AI generated voice, perhaps the new job
               | for voice actors is human narrating/acting of AI-
               | generated content for personalized stories ('Ractives
               | from Stephenson's book "The Diamond Age"). Who knows,
               | human voice actors could become more in demand, not less.
               | To be clear I wouldn't forecast this as the most likely
               | outcome, just pointing out that there are many possible
               | outcomes.
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | > _I think "good enough at 1/10 the price" is quite
               | empowering for consumers._
               | 
               | That's the thing though - it's not as empowering as it
               | seems longer-term, because the "good enough" quickly
               | drops to "barely fit for purpose"/"if it were any worse,
               | it would be illegal to market or sell". This has been the
               | case with most established classes of products I can
               | think of, including pretty much anything that's been
               | fully commoditized.
               | 
               | And so
               | 
               | > _nothing stops you from paying what we pay now for
               | human voice actors if there continues to be a quality
               | differential that customers care about. (Though perhaps
               | Baumol 's Cost Disease would push the price up for
               | today's human-generated quality.)_
               | 
               | Nothing stops me today. But even if the quality
               | differential exists, the dropping price on the low-
               | quality version will reduce demand on the moderate-
               | quality version, pushing its prices up and reducing
               | number of suppliers (here, voice actors). The end result
               | seems to always be a bifurcation: there is not enough
               | demand to sustain a business doing decent quality work
               | for a reasonable price, so all companies move to
               | providing either low quality work cheaply, or high
               | quality work at a hefty premium. The middle disappears.
               | 
               | In the specific context of this thread, the middle in
               | question is the current quality of audiobooks with voice
               | acting. The quality level available to most consumers
               | will be _below_ that, and the next step up will be niche
               | recordings at high cost.
        
         | benabbottnz wrote:
         | Why would they make it cheaper when they can make even more
         | profit by not having to pay a voice actor?
        
           | madsbuch wrote:
           | Because it would be extremely easy to produce it cheaper or
           | record it independently.
           | 
           | This opens up for non-signed authors to release audio books.
        
             | waboremo wrote:
             | Yes, but they're not going to pass on costs from not using
             | a voice actor. They're just going to charge what they
             | normally would have, and not worry about having to give so
             | and so a cut.
        
               | ericd wrote:
               | Sure, and then we'll get more audiobook options, as it
               | becomes economically viable to make more niche stuff into
               | audiobooks.
        
               | waboremo wrote:
               | Niche stuff has always been economically viable. Niche
               | stuff also tends to get publisher support. Realistically
               | these days the only reason why books don't have an
               | audiobook format is due to not wanting to support
               | Amazon/Apple, or because they just don't want it. Voice
               | actors literally are not expensive for audiobooks. You
               | can absolutely afford one if your tiny $9 book hits more
               | than 200 copies.
               | 
               | Unless you're talking about illegal niche, in which fair
               | but I highly doubt stores are going to accept those. All
               | generation helps with is content that will be free.
        
           | bee_rider wrote:
           | Get a text copy of the book and then pass it through the tool
           | yourself, right? Who cares how much the publisher wants.
        
           | trts wrote:
           | If they make it better for the reader, they can potentially
           | raise the price. If they can make it cheaper to produce, they
           | can potentially increase their profit without raising the
           | price.
           | 
           | Usually on balance this falls somewhere in between -- more
           | value for less money for the consumer, and more profit on
           | each marginal unit of production for the producer, which is
           | how technology progresses across most consumer goods.
        
         | aleksiy123 wrote:
         | I was wondering if it would be possible to build something like
         | this right now.
         | 
         | Use text to speech and chatgpt to tag the character text and
         | timestamps.
         | 
         | Then use a speech to speech to change the character voices or
         | even the whole reader.
         | 
         | But as a product I feel like theres some legal hurdles to
         | figure out.
        
       | theptip wrote:
       | > As with other powerful new AI innovations, we recognize that
       | this technology brings the potential for misuse and unintended
       | harm. In our paper, we detail how we built a highly effective
       | classifier that can distinguish between authentic speech and
       | audio generated with Voicebox to mitigate these possible future
       | risks. We believe it is important to be open about our work so
       | the research community can build on it and to continue the
       | important conversations we're having about how to build AI
       | responsibly, which is why we are sharing our approach and results
       | in a research paper
       | 
       | Learning from the pushback on releasing LLaMA it seems. I wonder
       | how hard this will be to replicate. (Trained on "60K hours of
       | English audiobooks and 50K hours of multilingual audiobooks in 6
       | languages for the mono and multilingual setups", this doesn't
       | sound intractable.)
        
         | fbdab103 wrote:
         | Assuming 10 hours a piece, 6k books feels a very achievable
         | dataset. Even Librivox claims 18k books (with many duplicates
         | and hugely varying quality levels). If you wanted to get
         | expansive, you could dig into the podcast archives of BBC, NPR,
         | etc which could potentially yield millions of hours.
         | 
         | [0] https://librivox.org/
        
           | tudorw wrote:
           | older BBC material when the 'standard bbc' voice reigned
           | supreme might make a great training set and could/should be
           | publicly accessible?
        
       | rvz wrote:
       | And the source code for this one has....
       | 
       | ...not been open sourced and cannot be found.
       | 
       | Sorry AI bros. Better read the paper this time.
        
         | IshKebab wrote:
         | > There are many exciting use cases for generative speech
         | models, but because of the risks of misuse, we are not making
         | the Voicebox model or code publicly available at this time.
         | While we believe it is important to be open with the AI
         | community and to share our research to advance the state of the
         | art in AI, it's also necessary to strike the right balance
         | between openness with responsibility.
         | 
         | Yeah... I mean there definitely _are_ ways to misuse this
         | (especially the style transfer!) I don 't think you're going to
         | do anything except delay the inevitable Facebook.
        
           | sgift wrote:
           | They don't really care about misuse. They just don't want to
           | say openly that they like to keep their shiny new tech and
           | make money with it. No idea why, most people wouldn't bat an
           | eye if you stated from the get go: We built it, we'll use it.
        
             | IshKebab wrote:
             | I agree. Though in fairness they have opened other models
             | e.g. for speech recognition.
        
         | gwern wrote:
         | It won't be a big barrier. Voice stuff is not as
         | computationally intense as video or LLMs, so it's still an area
         | where small teams or hobbyists can make a dent.
        
       | yewenjie wrote:
       | Pretty interesting. IIUC they haven't released the model weights,
       | but I think most TTS papers in the upcoming months will release
       | the weights since OpenAI Whisper.
        
       | canadianwriter wrote:
       | That little stinger at the end was not as surprising as they
       | thought it was :P
       | 
       | It's very cool tech, but it's far from transparent. It has a very
       | obvious "autotune" like sound to it that jumps right out. when
       | they edited that one word it was obvious it had been edited.
       | 
       | Again, super cool tech, just not going to replace voice actors or
       | anything.
        
         | TacticalCoder wrote:
         | > It has a very obvious "autotune"
         | 
         | To me it has a very obvious "Hindi is my native language"
         | accent. I mean after literally the first sentence: _" The
         | research team at Meta is excited to share our work..."_. Ouch.
         | The "our work": just ouch. I was wondering why it wasn't a
         | native english speaker presenting the video when the video is
         | _precisely_ about generating speech.
         | 
         | The first seven seconds are particularly bad.
         | 
         | Don't get me wrong: I've got a lovely french accent when I
         | speak english.
         | 
         | This has either been trained on too many audiobooks spoken by
         | non-natives _or_ they 've used their own tech, where the
         | "reference audio" given as input was from a non-native.
         | 
         | In any case something is seriously off.
         | 
         | At 1:59, the "Hi guys, thanks you for tuning in! Today we are
         | going to show you..."... That is obviously an Hindi speaker
         | speaking (it's an example of fixing a real voice by removing
         | background sounds).
         | 
         | I _think_ that the main voice of the video was done by the same
         | person who did the example at 1:59. And I think that they used
         | their example of using a  "reference audio".
         | 
         | And that person ain't a native english speaker.
         | 
         | To compare: when the reference audio uses a proper english
         | accent (the example with the "diverse ecosystem" at 0:52), then
         | the output from the text-to-speech sounds native.
         | 
         | I think they just fucked the demo video and it may already be
         | ready for prime time.
        
           | bee_rider wrote:
           | The accent was obvious enough that I wonder if they might
           | have not been trying to hide it at all? Maybe they just
           | happened to pick somebody from the team with a very mild
           | accent.
        
           | alach11 wrote:
           | I'm surprised you had such a negative reaction to the Hindi
           | accent! To me, it was no more difficult to understand than my
           | colleagues who speak English as a second language.
           | 
           | To me, this is a style choice for the demo. Not evidence that
           | they "fucked" it up. Accents are common - everyone has one!
           | It's nice to see the model can support your personal voice
           | even if it's not completely neutral English.
        
           | kybernetikos wrote:
           | Maybe they deliberately chose an accent that wasn't native
           | English to demonstrate the style transfer capability. I think
           | the ability of the system to output accented voices is a
           | strength not a weakness, so long as it can do other accents
           | too.
        
         | Kiro wrote:
         | What stinger at the end?
        
           | az226 wrote:
           | Not releasing code or weights under the false pretense of
           | misuse.
        
             | JimDabell wrote:
             | No, they are referring to the end of the video, where they
             | have a "surprise twist" that the video narration was
             | autogenerated and not a real person.
        
         | twelfthnight wrote:
         | _SPOILER ALERT_ :p
         | 
         | Its more surprising nowadays if an article about AI doesn't
         | have a "twist" that what you read/heard/saw was AI.
        
         | ethbr0 wrote:
         | For video narration elocution, I'd say it was most of the way
         | there.
         | 
         | When. Narrating. Videos. One. Tends. To. Speak. Differently.
         | 
         | Or, the more important case -- if I'm listening to audio-
         | version-of-X, is it sufficiently human-like that I can forget
         | that it's synthesized voice?
         | 
         | To me, yes.
         | 
         | Easy to tell if you're specifically listening for it, but to
         | use an analogy one doesn't typically read novels and parse
         | closely for grammar, does one? Your attention is elsewhere, on
         | the content and plot.
        
         | emehex wrote:
         | I agree with you that v1 isn't a suitable replacement... right
         | now. But what v2? v3?
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | graypegg wrote:
           | I don't think GP is saying it won't improve. The thread is
           | about the current state of it that meta wrote this article
           | on.
        
         | pixl97 wrote:
         | For me its more like I wake up and check if humans have been
         | replaced yet. Oh good, it's another day that I don't have to
         | share one time pads with my mother to ensure that I'm talking
         | to her and not a simulant performing fraud on a massive scale.
        
           | gremlinsinc wrote:
           | imagine when they have robots indistinguishable from humans,
           | with some sort of real skin face that can be morphed to any
           | existing or non existing face. I mean, it almost seems easy,
           | or inevitable at least.
        
           | ignoramous wrote:
           | _Cryptographic proof of personhood_ is going to be a thing,
           | is it not? Outside of BigTech, Signal is as poised as
           | WorldCoin to be just that.
        
             | waboremo wrote:
             | Yes and it's going to be done through digital IDs. Unless
             | something dramatic happens, we're poised to turn to digital
             | IDs linked to your real ID and in turn validating access to
             | apps/communication.
        
               | pixl97 wrote:
               | And authoritarians everywhere will rejoice (and they will
               | give out the means to duplicate these IDs to a select few
               | in case they need to generate evidence that 'you' have
               | offended the state).
        
               | kybernetikos wrote:
               | The only sensible approach to this problem (assuming it
               | is a real problem) is trusted individuals certifying
               | others as human.
               | 
               | There are alternatives to using the state for this, but
               | they are difficult and fraught with UX issues. Perhaps a
               | decentralised web of trust or some sort of blockchain
               | based registrar of trust that can trace trust routes
               | between mutually distrusting individuals.
               | 
               | Unless such a system is in place, international and
               | strong before states start playing in this space, there
               | isn't much chance of beating a state's approach to the
               | problem.
               | 
               | Just look at https certificates. The current system
               | involves browsers shipping configured to trust a whole
               | bunch of entities I don't really trust, and there has
               | been relatively little interest in trying to build a
               | working decentralised approach to site security.
        
               | waboremo wrote:
               | I'll also add that some of the state proposals are in
               | general quite nice in where their priorities are. Such as
               | prioritizing working in the open, both in sharing
               | research, working with standards groups, and open source
               | tooling.
               | 
               | It would be nice if we could come to a thorough solution
               | that actually does cover all bases, rather than all these
               | companies trying to create their own digital ID services
               | that just encourage us to instead do silly things like
               | photograph your ID front and back.
               | 
               | I mean hell it's taken like 20 years for privacy by
               | design to become an ISO standard? That sort of timeline
               | is not something we can really tolerate as more and more
               | people continue relying on online services and in turn
               | wind up trusting horribly outdated techniques/general
               | malaise about data.
        
             | woeirua wrote:
             | I'm just not convinced that anything not tied directly to a
             | government issued ID is going to be strong enough.
        
           | chrislikescode wrote:
           | [flagged]
        
             | bloqs wrote:
             | [flagged]
        
       | lucidrains wrote:
       | can an expert in the field comment on whether the results are
       | more or less impressive than Soundstorm?
        
       | ftth_finland wrote:
       | All I want is a podcast player that automatically cleans up the
       | crappy audio.
        
       | chromakode wrote:
       | I've been working on an open source audio editor which uses
       | Whisper to slice speech. Very exciting to see more capabilities
       | on the horizon!
        
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       (page generated 2023-06-19 23:01 UTC)