[HN Gopher] "All your base are belong to us" intro to my 2004 MI...
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       "All your base are belong to us" intro to my 2004 MIT Spam
       Conference talk
        
       Author : jgrahamc
       Score  : 39 points
       Date   : 2024-12-08 17:25 UTC (5 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.jgc.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.jgc.org)
        
       | jgrahamc wrote:
       | I made one big mistake with that introduction when it was
       | recorded on to the video tape for playback at the conference: I
       | didn't realize how much people were going to laugh at the end and
       | went straight into my presentation. I got to hear the laughter
       | because the conference was live streamed using RealPlayer.
        
         | colechristensen wrote:
         | I would like to see more modern text-to-speech that sounds
         | good, but also inhuman. On one hand very easy to understand but
         | on the other obviously constructed and not something a living
         | person could generate. Like the scifi where robots always look
         | like robots and it's illegal/immoral/taboo to have a robot
         | that's indistinguishable from a person.
         | 
         | Maybe just an ordinary human sounding TTS that gets put through
         | a mild vocoder of some kind.
        
           | bitwize wrote:
           | It sounds like a guy recorded his own voice and ran it
           | through an LPC.
        
           | moffkalast wrote:
           | That's a real problem with the vast majority of current TTS.
           | Terrible in things like consistent intonation, proper
           | pronunciation, believable pauses, while sounding human all
           | the same and the result is super uncanny valley.
           | 
           | The gaming and movie industry understands this very well,
           | they use human voice actors that can nail all of that and
           | then make it sound more metallic or compressed or whatnot.
           | Otherwise it does not fit.
        
             | sandworm101 wrote:
             | And on the high end, making everyone sound like a
             | professional public speaker. The machine sees mistakes as
             | errors when in fact every non-hollywood speech contains
             | multiple mistakes.
        
             | Uehreka wrote:
             | This is why it pisses me off when a techy person makes a
             | YouTube video and just uses TTS instead of recording a
             | voiceover. I know some people don't have a good recording
             | situation, but I get the sense that a lot of people just do
             | it because they either think people can't tell or they
             | think it's a clever hack or "the way of the future" or
             | something.
             | 
             | It isn't. Instead I find myself watching videos and getting
             | a weird creepy feeling when I suddenly hear the voiceover
             | mispronounce a word or put an emphasis in the wrong place.
             | Part of it is the uncanny valley for sure, but the more
             | pernicious thing is this: once I realize that the voice is
             | AI-generated, I start to worry that the script might be
             | too. Now I'm trying to figure out "is this guy just an
             | amateur writer taking a while to get to his point, or is
             | this an LLM-authored script that is never going to go
             | beyond surface-level statements about the topic."
        
               | Cpoll wrote:
               | I think this undersells the difficulty of recording a
               | good voice-over, both technically and performatively.
        
         | martylamb wrote:
         | I was there and remember it well. The whole thing was
         | completely unexpected and people lost it. Well done. :)
        
       | metadat wrote:
       | This is cool, how did you make the voice? It's perfect for the
       | application :)
        
         | jgrahamc wrote:
         | I believe I used the Mac's 'say' command with one of the
         | default voices (perhaps with some parameter tweaks).
        
           | jmarcher wrote:
           | ``` say 'something' -v '?' | grep en_US Albert en_US # Hello!
           | My name is Albert. Bad News en_US # Hello! My name is Bad
           | News. Bahh en_US # Hello! My name is Bahh. Bells en_US #
           | Hello! My name is Bells. Boing en_US # Hello! My name is
           | Boing. Bubbles en_US # Hello! My name is Bubbles. Cellos
           | en_US # Hello! My name is Cellos. Wobble en_US # Hello! My
           | name is Wobble. Eddy (English (US)) en_US # Hello! My name is
           | Eddy. Flo (English (US)) en_US # Hello! My name is Flo. Fred
           | en_US # Hello! My name is Fred. Good News en_US # Hello! My
           | name is Good News. Grandma (English (US)) en_US # Hello! My
           | name is Grandma. Grandpa (English (US)) en_US # Hello! My
           | name is Grandpa. Jester en_US # Hello! My name is Jester.
           | Junior en_US # Hello! My name is Junior. Kathy en_US # Hello!
           | My name is Kathy. Organ en_US # Hello! My name is Organ.
           | Superstar en_US # Hello! My name is Superstar. Ralph en_US #
           | Hello! My name is Ralph. Reed (English (US)) en_US # Hello!
           | My name is Reed. Rocko (English (US)) en_US # Hello! My name
           | is Rocko. Samantha en_US # Hello! My name is Samantha. Sandy
           | (English (US)) en_US # Hello! My name is Sandy. Shelley
           | (English (US)) en_US # Hello! My name is Shelley. Trinoids
           | en_US # Hello! My name is Trinoids. Whisper en_US # Hello! My
           | name is Whisper. ```
        
       | bombcar wrote:
       | The main thing I realize is just how amazing we thought those
       | machine voices were and how good and realistic, and how bad they
       | sound now compared to what we have.
        
         | hvs wrote:
         | I don't think we ever thought they were particularly good or
         | realistic, just the best we could do with the limitations of
         | the time.
        
         | havblue wrote:
         | As a kid I thought the announcer voice for Blades of Steel was
         | excellent at the time. Despite it being distorted it gave the
         | feeling that you were watching an actual hockey game. Of
         | course, most of the games I played then didn't have much in the
         | way of human voice.
        
           | GiorgioG wrote:
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XJlTaBnlrI
        
       | asdfman123 wrote:
       | Elegant memes from a more civilized age
        
       | averageRoyalty wrote:
       | For great justice.
        
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