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Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?

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Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?

#151

Post by da39a3ee »

This is probably a really stupid suggestion but just in case.

Do you and your wife drink alcohol a bit? If so might it be worth having a couple of drinks in a quiet setting with her one evening with microphones running? I'm not suggesting getting wasted! I'm just wondering whether it might help to catch her getting more animated or "natural" in conversation. I was thinking this might help make the resulting synthesized speech capture even more of her personality than reading children's books or subsets of AI corpora etc.

Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?

#152

Post by [deleted] »

Alex3917 wrote: post #78
rimliu wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends. I'd be horrified to listen to my own voice when I am not speaking. Keep in mind, what we sound very different to ourselves.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?

#153

Post by stevewillows »

It might also be worth recording normal conversations you have around the house as a fallback. You can always cut it up later and feed it into these systems.

Best of luck to the two of you. I really hope you don't ever need this technology.

Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?

#154

Post by meristem »

All sorts of feels here. I had a positive outcome from exploratory throat surgery that had a chance of obliterating my voice. Prepping the way you are doing is amazing. Please balance it with time well-spent with your wife, being present in the moment. Sounds trite and yet takes focus to not just concentrate in the possible negative future outcome.

Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?

#157

Post by mattlondon »

Zenbit_UX wrote: post #133
mattlondon wrote: post #56

I don't know if you have kids/grandkids/nieces or nephews (or plan to have those) but it might be nice to record your wife reading some books out loud. Not only will you have your own personal "audio books" of Harry Potter/The Hobbit/Chronicles of Narnia/Oi Frog/Alice in Wonderland/Roald Dahls etc etc for any kids/grandkids/relatives etc that will hopefully be something treasured in its own right, but you'll also hav…

I like this idea but the specific examples you give would almost certainly be a terrible idea. A voice trained on Tolkien or old American legalese like the Magna Carta would train a model with a lot of thee, thus, therefore and though art and undertrain it with modern English. His wife would sound like the second coming of Jesus or Shakespeare and less like a normal human being.

From what I understand, it is not the words themselves (thee etc) but the sounds that make the words - so the "th" and the "ee" are still legit sounds in modern English words. The network would just be synthesising the words you tell it to - it won't be picking the words for you.

I might be wrong though.

Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?

#158

Post by core-questions »

vervez wrote: post #87
audiohermit wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in pathological speech processing/synthesis so I'm unfortunately familiar with your father's position. It really sucks that these people didn't know that archiving their voice would've been useful. I hear snippets that people manage to glean from family videos right after listening to their current voices and it makes me really sad. On the upside, your father can choose any celebrity he wants to voice him! Ton…

Is Morgan Freeman the most used celebrity?

I'd go for Stephen Hawking, myself.

(Not using his voice synth, reconstructed using ML, because it should sound more natural that way ;-)

Re: Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare?

#159

Post by core-questions »

Veedrac wrote: post #146
audiohermit wrote: post #38

Hey, speech ML researcher here. Make sure you have different recordings of different contexts. fifteen.ai's best TTS voices use ~90 min of utterances, some separated by emotion. If you're having her read a text, make sure it's engaging--we do a lot of unconscious voicing when reading aloud. Tbh, if she has a non-Anglophone accent, you're going to need more because the training data is biased towards UK/US speakers. I…

Also buy a (half) decent mic! They're much cheaper than you might expect.

Seconding this, it's worth a hundred or so for at least a Yeti or something, considering it's not like you'll get another chance to do this.
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