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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?

#51

Post by cdolan »

happycry wrote: post #14

We 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.

I dont know how to send messages but I researched this space a few years ago. Unfortunately a family member of mine had a surgery result in loss of his speech.

We have a lot of tapes around of his voice, from voice mails to family videos to some things from his work. If you are open to reaching out that would be awesome, I’ll check out the site as well.

Edit: I’ve wanted to make some sort of soundboard + “text to talk” setup for this family member. He often can’t participate in conversations because he writes on a whiteboard, and the speed of chatter moves faster than his writing

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

#52

Post by glenpierce »

glenpierce wrote: post #48
issa wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

I should also point out that learning all of ASL isn't necessary for it to be helpful. "Yes", "No", and "Thank you" are pretty helpful on their own.

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

#53

Post by Rotten194 »

I 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 resources and most universities have classes as well. Plus, you also can experience beautiful Deaf culture, with a rich storytelling and poetic tradition that blends language, gesture, acting, and pantomime in a way thats just impossible to translate to a spoken language.

The downvoted commenter was being a jerk, but I do think learning ASL is an option worth looking into.

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

#54

Post by sharker8 »

tech4all wrote: post #35
ThePowerOfFuet wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Learn sign language, instead of holding on to the past. What the fuck, man?

LOL. Thank you for downvoting that for me. The Internet wouldn't be the Internet if it weren't for asshats!

repeating the trolls is a form of feeding them.

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

#55

Post by joshribakoff »

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.

Seconding this, also, reproducing her voice with an AI may not be something she is on board with, it could make her feel like you don't accept her with or without a voice. It may also be unhealthy for you, similar to how spending too long on social media can become a dangerous source of dopamine.

It might make sense to consider making a recording that is more meaningful, and focus on giving her emotional support rather than building an AI that could be perceived as a replacement.

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

#56

Post by mattlondon »

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 have a large corpus of training data from well-known texts that you can retrain over and over as the tech improves in the future. Might be worth chucking in some other well-known texts to avoid over-fitting on a "kids' story voice" - maybe something plain like inauguration speeches/declaration of independence/magna carta/etc.

Obviously I'd focus on gathering raw material now, and focus on the reconstruction later when you've all recovered mentally and physically to whatever happens. The more data the better when it comes to this sort of thing. There might not be something "simple" right now (e.g. you could probably implement the WaveNet or similar paper yourself today, and training it up on some GPUs in your spare room etc, but in a few years there might be a nice WYSIWYG/SaaS thing for it), but with the recordings safely stored you'll obviously be able to use it in the future.

Best of luck to you both.

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

#57

Post by joshribakoff »

josinalvo wrote: post #33
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/

I think this is backwards... This is a corpus to train speech to text, not text to speech, right?

It's a corpus designed to capture the full breadth of combinatorial nuances of human speech in a general sense.

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

#58

Post by tombert »

grogenaut wrote: post #50
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 tim…

This sounds pretty cool (your brother making the voice model, not your dad losing the voice)...do you have a link to this example? I would love to play with this.

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

#60

Post by pezo1919 »

DaniloDias wrote: post #42
Someone wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Life is complex bro.
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