Just have her carry a good microphone at all times to record everything she says until that point, to have a maximum amount of samples. If you can't "deepfake" it today, maybe you will be able to do it tomorrow, but at least you will have the data.
Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?
101–110 of 229 posts
Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?
#102https://dathudeptrai.github.io/TensorflowTTS/ is the state of the art and feels natural enough
Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Keep in mind, what we sound very different to ourselves. This is less of a problem with modern high-quality mics than it was, say, with answering machines 30 years ago. Your voice might still sound not exactly the same, but it hopefully shouldn't be unbearably grating either.
Turn the bass up a bit It's because reproduced audio doesn't have the bass the same as you hearing it conducted through your jawbone (though of course this will sound too bassy to everyone else!)
Makes sense. I think also until YouTube and podcasting became popular, most of the mics that the typical person would accidentally stumble on were probably bright rather than warm.
Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?
#104You might look at resources for ALS patients.
Since ALS (aka Lou Gehrig's disease) is a degenerative motor neuron disease, people with ALS can pretty much count on eventually losing the ability to speak. So "voice banking" is apparently pretty common.
Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?
#105This is very much a short term solution if they are unable to talk immediately after surgery, for up to a few days. My wife used a small portable whiteboard and magic marker to write messages on in the same situation. It worked really well. Even with our 2 year old, it helped her to understand something unusual was going on.
Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?
#106My first thought was to spend some time together not speaking. See how it goes, so there’s less fear going into it. Maybe take a couples mime class or something! Just making it real and not living in fear is the point.
Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?
#107Just have her carry a good microphone at all times to record everything she says until that point, to have a maximum amount of samples. If you can't "deepfake" it today, maybe you will be able to do it tomorrow, but at least you will have the data.
Agree, voice recorders are cheap. Every sound she makes for these last few days can be edited and used later if needed. Or if now just throw it away.
Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?
#108I would also suggest looking into learning American Sign Language (of course alongside this project). While communicating via keyboard is workable and good for communicating with the wider world, ASL would be much more convenient for communicating between you two -- and a very interesting language to boot. It is a foreign language thats not related to English besides a few loan words, but there's tons of online resou…
I think your answer misses the point of the question. Learning ASL can be done after the surgery if she lost her voice. The question was what can be done now before the surgery. The kind of things which, if it comes to the worst and she loses her voice, cannot be done after.
Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?
#109Just have her carry a good microphone at all times to record everything she says until that point, to have a maximum amount of samples. If you can't "deepfake" it today, maybe you will be able to do it tomorrow, but at least you will have the data.
“This conversation is being recorded for training and quality assurance purposes.” Should be stated before each new interaction. The legal requirement will vary by jurisdiction but a lawyer can advise on that. And yes, I’m joking.
Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?
#110Just have her carry a good microphone at all times to record everything she says until that point, to have a maximum amount of samples. If you can't "deepfake" it today, maybe you will be able to do it tomorrow, but at least you will have the data.
This will probably sound a lot more natural than sitting there reading a training corpus. Given that advances in AI are tending to eliminate manual feature engineering, predetermined training corpuses may soon be a thing of the past anyway.