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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?

#41

Post by kerkeslager »

Someone wrote: post #30
kerkeslager wrote: post #5

I don't have any answers to give you, but I want to say that this is a really loving and beautiful thing you're trying to do.

Is it? My first thought was “is your ideal also her ideal?” . We cannot rule out she wants to spend quality time with her partner instead of spending time in a recording studio, so that, if the worst outcome comes, her husband can remind her of what she lost.

Presumably the guy is better at guessing what his wife wants than you are, and his wife is an adult who can tell him if he guesses wrong.

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

#42

Post by DaniloDias »

Someone wrote: post #30
kerkeslager wrote: post #5

I don't have any answers to give you, but I want to say that this is a really loving and beautiful thing you're trying to do.

Is it? My first thought was “is your ideal also her ideal?” . We cannot rule out she wants to spend quality time with her partner instead of spending time in a recording studio, so that, if the worst outcome comes, her husband can remind her of what she lost.

By all means, let’s have hacker news expand this technical question into an evaluation of this guys marriage.

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

#43

Post by cabite »

aerovistae wrote: post #18
fxtentacle wrote: post #3

Record 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!

or better, rent a recording room for the time it takes.

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

#44

Post by kerkeslager »

rimliu wrote: post #36
kerkeslager wrote: post #5

I don't have any answers to give you, but I want to say that this is a really loving and beautiful thing you're trying to do.

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.

Presumably the guy is better at guessing what his wife wants than you are, and his wife is an adult who can tell him if he guesses wrong.

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

#46

Post by jfkebwjsbx »

asveikau wrote: post #23
fxtentacle wrote: post #3

Record 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/

Is she on board with this? I can imagine a lot of people being severely put off by being asked to record "a corpus of approximately 1000 hours" in advance of what sounds like a stressful surgery.

They have 500 hours left, so that would be impossible.

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

#47

Post by daveFNbuck »

Someone wrote: post #30
kerkeslager wrote: post #5

I don't have any answers to give you, but I want to say that this is a really loving and beautiful thing you're trying to do.

Is it? My first thought was “is your ideal also her ideal?” . We cannot rule out she wants to spend quality time with her partner instead of spending time in a recording studio, so that, if the worst outcome comes, her husband can remind her of what she lost.

I think the idea here is that she could use her own voice instead of a generic voice with text to speech devices. I doubt he intends to taunt her with it.

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

#48

Post by glenpierce »

issa wrote: post #32
david_draco wrote: post #6

Learn sign language, instead of holding on to the past.

Ignoring how rude this comment is, I don't think embracing a technological solution could count as "holding on the the past".

Sign language is a pretty good option. There will be times when access to the technology used to produce her voice might be inconvenient or even unavailable. American Sign Language (ASL) is also probably much faster than typing in a lot of cases. I grant, this probably won't be as helpful out in the world where most people won't understand it, but in the comfort of home, being able to converse at the dinner table without a keyboard at your side might be preferable. I suggest you don't ignore this as a supplimental tool.

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

#50

Post by grogenaut »

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 came here to say this. My brother has a PhD in chemistry and no coding experience. He was able to create a voice model of himself using basic nvidia example generators in a week. My dad lost his voice and it would have been very nice to have a TTS that was much more close to him. I personally would think it would be worth it to have that database.

But obviously also attend to the human matters as well, eg spend time.

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