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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?

#61
post #51

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 tal…

Feel free to shoot me an email: zohaib[at]resemble.ai

We also have an API that you might find useful for the soundboard project: https://app.resemble.ai/docs

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

#62

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…

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! Tons of celeb data is publicly available (VoxCeleb 1 & 2).

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

#64
post #36

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.

From a different perspective, I'd be brokenhearted if I could not speak to my son or my wife in something they could recognize as their father or husband's voice. I know modern TTS systems are a fair sight (voice?) better than Microsoft Sam, but it would be emotionally valuable to me to have a self-trained TTS library.

I'm not sure there's a correlation to other senses, I can't see for my future self or move on his behalf. I suppose there are things I would want to taste or smell if I was going to lose those senses, but those are experiences for me, not things I'd use to communicate with loved ones.

After losing my voice in an accident, I'd be willing to spend many, many hours transcribing my own speech in the handful of scratchy family videos, voicemails, and phone logs of ordinary conversations. If I could spend a couple days prior to the event reading some books, a TTS training corpus, or anniversary/birthday/wedding/etc greetings and congratulations into a microphone and have a personal text-to-speech voice I'd be all over that.

It would be a little weird if someone else used it as their narrator, but that's not OP's goal.

Speaking of recording books and training corpuses, my grandparents (who have their voices) got a special kind of joy from reading children's books that they once read to me and that I once heard as a child to their new grandson. OP, if you and your wife have or might have kids (and she can handle it emotionally), it might be nice to record video/audio of reading children's books to future grandchildren. Even if your future grandchild knows that grandma can't read books out loud, I'd bet Grandma would be happy to silently turn the pages for a toddler on her lap until those digital recordings got worn and scratchy like an old VHS.

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

#67

Some (decades old) research on this involved a research team creating a video of JFK saying "I never met Forrest Gump". I found a writeup in Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=mQtGVQeQplcC&pg=PA208&lpg=... > We evaluated our Kennedy results qualitatively along the following dimensions: ... naturalness of the composited articulation; ... Obviously the state of the art will have advanced, but maybe this ca…

There is a YouTube channel called "Speaking of AI" that makes short fake speeches of some US public figures. The quality is quite good and a bit frightening.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCID5qusrF32kSj-oSGq3rJg/vid...

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

#68

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'll push back on this. The quality of the read speech should be a higher concern than having parallel data. Unless OP's wife is a teacher or actor/voice actor, if LibriSpeech transcripts are boring, it will come out in the speech.

I think OP would ideally want the model to pick up on more natural intonation, instead of monotone dictation. Record everything from now on, as best you can with similar recording context, and hopefully that data will be enough to cover more natural nuances.

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

#69
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.

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.

> 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.

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