(off topic)
Record a few things for her future self. E.g. favourite quotes, frequently used phrases.
Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?
11–20 of 229 posts
Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?
#12Record her reading the texts of a standardized text training corpus. That way, you can retrain an existing AI to do text to speech with her own voice. Edit: here's a link to the corpus that I believe Mozilla uses http://www.openslr.org/12/
Thanks!
Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?
#13For an open-source approach, the MaryTTS project has a guide on how to add new voices to their tool: https://github.com/marytts/marytts/wiki/VoiceImportToolsTuto...
Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?
#14We get quite a few requests for this at Resemble (https://resemble.ai). We can get her to record right on our website or you can upload an existing file (along with a video of her consent) on the platform. Feel free to shoot me a message and I'd be happy to help build a voice for her.
Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?
#15Consider investing in a good microphone for recording. A Blue Yeti is ~$200.
Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?
#16You are trying to do a beautiful thing. I don't have a knowledge of this subject, but I really wish you good luck on this project.
Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?
#17Learn sign language, instead of holding on to the past.
She's not losing her knowledge of English. The odds are overwhelming that she'll prefer to communicate by English text (where she'll have native fluency) than in a new language.
Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?
#18Record her reading the texts of a standardized text training corpus. That way, you can retrain an existing AI to do text to speech with her own voice. Edit: here's a link to the corpus that I believe Mozilla uses http://www.openslr.org/12/
And get a high quality mic to do it with!
Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?
#19You may want to look up what was done for Roger Ebert. He has lost his voice due to surgery, but because of the vast corpus of audio recordings of him, a viable text to speech engine was able to be created.
It’s a bit dated at this point, but I imagine the research has vastly improved since then.
It’s a very good question though. A decade ago this was able to be done for one man. Is it now possible to be done for anyone? Like others, I’d guess the first step is to record everything while you can.
Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?
#20If she has time get here to read the most common english words. Then parse the text and play the audio for the known words and use traditional speech synthesis for the outliers. It will not be perfect but you can then possibly train an AI to pronounce the outliers.