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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?

#211

Post by DoreenMichele »

Not to discourage you from making voice recordings and all that, but as someone who is handicapped and sometimes has trouble speaking because of it:

1. I spend a lot of time online. It doesn't matter so much there. I do a lot of typing.

2. My oldest son, who had serious output difficulties as a child, is talented at inferring what I need from a gesture and a grunt. This has proven enormously helpful.

3. Consider using her phone as a communication device. It's small and people tend to take their phone everywhere and she can type out what she wants to say.

4. Writing tweets can help a person learn to say things more succinctly. I do freelance writing and figuring out how to say things succinctly is a talent you can develop. (It's something I have to work at -- I'm a "would have written you a shorter letter if I had more time" type of person.) This can help enormously when you face communication barriers.

5. Take some time to deal with the emotional stuff. It matters.

I'm sorry you are facing this. Best of luck.

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

#213

Post by exikyut »

lunixbochs wrote: post #167
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…

I have an open source web service for rapidly recording lots of text prompts to flac: https://speech.talonvoice.com (right now the live site prompts for single words because I’m trying to build single word training data, but the prompts can be any length) You can set it up yourself with a bit of Python knowledge from this branch: https://github.com/talonvoice/noise/tree/speech-dataset There are keyboard shortcuts - u…

Somewhat OT question: after taking a quick look at this I stumbled on the eye-tracking video you made using pops to click... and I'm curious, can eye trackers not detect and report blinking?

Also, I noted the VLC demo says it doesn't use DNS! That's awesome...

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

#214

Post by at_a_remove »

pugworthy wrote: post #210
at_a_remove wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or not. Not everything has to be this super-deep, six whys exploration of how craving and attachment is the cause of all suffering and if you would only stop wanting a solution you would no longer be in pain. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

If it was a cigar he’d just ask the technical question of how to capture and simulate someone’s voice.

"I'd like to prepare, just in case, to have technology to reproduce her voice from keyboard or other input."

He then goes on to say "My ideal would be an open source 'deepfake toolkit' that allows me to provide pre-recorded samples of her speech and then TTS in her voice."

That sounds like wanting to capture and simulate someone's voice.

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

#215

Post by gnulinux »

klyrs wrote: post #185
gnulinux wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most people who are not familiar with ASL don't understand that ASL is an entirely different language with completely different grammar, morphology and semantics. It's linguistically as distinct as it can be from English. It's probably closer to an English speaker learning Chinese than an English speaker learning German or French. Most people imagine it's just a relex of English where English words have "sign…

Personally speaking, as a hearing, native english speaker. I've taken classes in French, Italian, Spanish, and ASL. The romance languages were taught in English, with a strong focus on the rules. Progress was extremely slow. I've had opportunities to practice Spanish and Italian, and that's been way more helpful than those classes ever were (and let's be honest, Spanish and Italian are too similar for my muddled brai…

If you learned French or Chinese the same way you learned ASL you could have made the same argument for these languages. My comment wasn't a point about how ASL is taught or the pedagogy of ASL learning -- these are things I know nothing about. I was just explaining the linguistic properties of ASL. But you're right, in retrospect I should not have used the analogy with Chinese, it really isn't a good analogy since learning a spoken language is a different experience than learning a sign language. I was just trying to point out the "linguistic distance" between English and ASL.

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

#216

Post by lowercased »

what dangers are there of someone 'stealing' your voice to impersonate you later? it seems mostly theoretical right now, but perhaps the more high-profile you are, the bigger the dangers might be, even today? if you had a large body of your voice already recorded (prepped for voice processing systems), is that data high-risk?

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

#217

Post by daanzu »

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…

I wrote a simple little Python GUI app to record training audio. Given a text file containing prompts, it will choose a random selection and ordering of them, display them to be dictated by the user, and record the dictation audio and metadata to a .wav file and recorder.tsv file respectively. You can select a previous recording to play it back, delete it, and/or re-record it. It comes with a few selections of sentences designed to cover a broad diverse range of English (Arctic, TIMIT). Pretty simple and no-nonsense.

https://github.com/daanzu/speech-training-recorder

Originally intended for recording data for training speech recognition models [0], it should work just as well for recording to be used for speech synthesis.

[0] https://github.com/daanzu/kaldi-active-grammar

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

#218

Post by sesuximo »

quiet_hacker wrote: post #136

I have a progressive neurodegenerative disease and lost most my ability to speak about 3 years ago. What you are proposing is super cool, but you might be overthinking this. These things (text to speech, etc) are more awkward than practical in real life. Also, make sure your wife is completely on board. Seeing old clips and hearing my voice is actually kind of depressing to me. Here is my actual advice: Outside of so…

That’s terrible about the call centers who need verbal confirmation. Crazy that they didn’t set up an alternative.

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

#219

Post by kerkeslager »

pugworthy wrote: post #130
thaumasiotes wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> his wife is an adult who can tell him if he guesses wrong She can, but she might not. A lot of that depends on how he presents the idea to her -- it might seem like something that's important to him.

It's sad that people trying to discuss the emotional side of this are being down voted. Honestly there is no doubt a very large emotional/personal side of this, irrespective of who's idea it is and who supports it. Technology isn't the solution for all problems and challenges in life.

People are being downvoted because if you cannot possibly have an informed opinion on a subject, it's completely arrogant to form opinions on that subject, and even more arrogant to criticize someone publicly based on those opinions.

Literally the only person on this thread who knows anything about the OP's wife is the OP. Everyone else sharing an opinion on "the emotional side of this" is vocally ignorant.

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