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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?

#91

Post by y-c-o-m-b »

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.

Was just about to post the same. Not only is this an amazing thing to do for her, but this is one of the coolest threads I've seen on HN in a long time

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

#92

Post by dawg- »

Speech-language Pathology student here. I would recommend going to see a speech therapist. It will likely be covered by your health insurance. Find an SLP who specializes in AAC (Augmented and Alternative Communication) who can help your wife communicate if she loses her speech. Your DIY approach could work, but having support from an SLP to help her learn the system, and come up with other options if it doesn't cover all of her communication needs, will go a long way.

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

#93

Post by KhoomeiK »

You might want to try DIY'ing something like this [1] depending on the extensiveness of her surgery. It basically records electrical signals (EMG) emitted by the vocal chords (subvocalizations) and can convert it to text with ML/other signal processing algorithms. Basically a rudimentary version of the transhumanist Brain-Computer Interfaces that would enable telepathy.

[1] https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/x/2018/03/23/p43-kapur_BRjFwE...

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

#97

Post by audiohermit »

dheera wrote: post #88
grogenaut wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Which generator works the best, qualitatively? I come from a vision/ML background but haven't played with speech at all, so it's completely new to me, and wondering what the state of the art is. I've been wanting to create a TTS of myself so I can take phone calls using headphones and type back what I want to say so that I don't have to yell private information out loud in public locations. Would be nice if during no…

Much of the work in speech synthesis has been about closing the gap in vocoders, which take a generated spectrogram and output a waveform. There's a clear gap between practical online implementations and computational behemoths like WaveNet. As you implied it's hard to quantitatively judge which result is better, papers usually use surveys to judge.

Here's a recent work that has a good comparison of some vocoders: https://wavenode-example.github.io/

Edit: WaveRNN struck a good balance for me in the past but is not shown in the link. Tons of new work coming out though!

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

#99

Post by gnulinux »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #17
david_draco wrote: post #6

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

She's not losing her knowledge of English. The odds are overwhelming that she'll prefer to communicate by English text (where she'll have native fluency) than in a new language .

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 "signs" and then you keep putting them the same order it's in English. Well no, ASL has it's own set of inflections, affixes, suffixes etc.

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

#100

Post by rupalpatel »

My Company, VocaliD (www.vocalid.ai) creates custom AI voices for individuals and organizations. We work with those at risk of losing their voice to bank their voice ahead of time using our online voice recording studio. Once a voice is banked, if needed, we can recreate the AI voice. If you'd like to learn more about our service, please reach out at hello@vocalid.ai If the surgery goes well (which I hope it does), your wife's recordings can be used to create a unique voice for someone who may not have had the time to bank their voice or has had a speech impairment since birth.
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