Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare? • Hacker News Board

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

#1

Post by tech4all » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 3:52 PM UTC

My wife will be undergoing significant oral surgery in a few weeks and there is a SMALL chance she may lose the ability to speak. I'd like to prepare, just in case, to have technology to reproduce her voice from keyboard or other input.

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. Unfortunately most articles and tools I'm finding are anti-deepfake. Any recommendations?

Fallback would be recording her speaking "phonetic pangrams" and then using her pre-recorded phonemes to recreate speech that sounds like her. I feel like the deepfake toolkit is the way to go. Appreciate any recommendations... There must be open source tools for this??

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

#2

Post by uberman » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 3:58 PM UTC

This might get you started:

https://speech.microsoft.com/customvoice

I imagine if MS offers custom voices then the other text to speech providers do as well.

Good luck

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

#3

Post by fxtentacle » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 3:58 PM UTC

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/

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

#4

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 4:00 PM UTC

[deleted]

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

#5

Post by kerkeslager » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 4:00 PM UTC

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.

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

#6

Post by david_draco » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 4:00 PM UTC

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

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

#7

Post by Mo3 » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 4:01 PM UTC

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/

This right here

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

#8

Post by tech4all » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 4:01 PM UTC

uberman wrote: post #2

This might get you started: https://speech.microsoft.com/customvoice I imagine if MS offers custom voices then the other text to speech providers do as well. Good luck

Thank you - great lead.

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

#9

Post by arethuza » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 4:02 PM UTC

What about recording messages to other people for future events (e.g. graduation of a child, birth of grandchild etc.)?

Recording a message to a yet unborn grandchild is maybe something we could all do!

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

#10

Post by olivermarks » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 4:03 PM UTC

Mo3 wrote: post #7

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/

This right here

https://youtu.be/0sR1rU3gLzQ

'This AI Clones Your Voice After Listening for 5 Seconds'