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Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone

lyrebird.ai

31–40 of 311 posts

Re: Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone

#33
post #12

This site has a "demo" section featuring only Soundcloud clips. Uses to much the present tense "In a world first, Montreal-based startup Lyrebird today unveiled" and "Record 1 minute [...] and Lyrebird can [..]Use this key to generate anything" but has no actual product or beta version. Adobe had a much more impressive sneak peek of a similar product called VoCo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3l4XLZ59iw

To be fair, that demo could have been staged whereas we can be pretty darn sure those aren't Trump's actual words.

I agree. My main issue with them is that those clips could have been painstakingly produced using some very far from shipping software with lots of manual tinkering while the copy on the site mostly reads like there's a product out. The part about being far from shipping could also be true about adobe's software, but I think their presented result (assuming it is real) sounded better, and they were more honest about the stage the product is in.

Re: Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone

#35
post #19

It's there any copyright protections for a person's voice? If not, David Attenborough and Morgan Freeman will be lead voice actors in my next game project

The NPR Planet Money podcast did one of their best episodes about this, called Frank Sinatra's Mug:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/12/09/459116467/episo...

There's a transcript here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...

Re: Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone

#36
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Already done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk

Wow that's amazing. Combine the two and soon Hollywood stars will be redundant. Faceless session actors could just manipulate models of real people who've signed release forms with the vocal performed by similarly faceless vocal artists, or maybe even AI generated voices. Actors would lose their uniqueness and so end up being paid a pittance instead of being able to command the vast sums they can today. Another set o…

I wouldn't be comfortable watching a movie scene if I knew I was looking at computer-generated faces and voices.

Re: Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone

#37
post #4

Impressive. But also enabling the next gen of "Mom, I'm in Mexican jail. Quickly wire me $2,000 so I can get out." scams.

The advantage of this method is that you can train on random speech datasets, and then using only a minute or two, find the "voice embedding" of a person, and generate anything with his/her voice. This voice embedding is much like the word2vec word vectors, and have similar arithmetic properties.

Responding to multiple sibling comments.

Re: Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone

#38
post #6

This is pretty cool (although, I have no idea what other technologies exist for this kind of thing), but it's definitely not convincing enough to a human listener. This sounds like it might be convincing enough for some programs like "Hey, Siri" but it's not gonna convince your mom. You can listen to the samples on the page linked here and you can immediately tell that Obama and Trump don't sound quite human.

Well, the question is, do they just need to throw more computational power / training at this algorithm or is that the peak of their implementation? This is something Google has been working a lot on [1] and Baidu also recently posted about their results too [2]. We're definitely pretty close to passing the human detectable level. [1] https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio... [2] http://research…

Google and Baidu have only demonstrated single speaker TTS. Lyrebird's the first to demonstrate being able to generate arbitrary voices. Since this came out of a research lab, I would guess that the quality would only improve if they are given more compute and data.

Re: Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone

#39
post #19

It's there any copyright protections for a person's voice? If not, David Attenborough and Morgan Freeman will be lead voice actors in my next game project

I don't think you can claim that your game was voiced by either of them, but I don't see how using this would be any more infringing than using a tuned synthesizer.

Re: Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone

#40
post #30
post #4

Impressive. But also enabling the next gen of "Mom, I'm in Mexican jail. Quickly wire me $2,000 so I can get out." scams.

If this is anything like adobe's system then you need a fairly extensive library of the target speaking naturally (~20 hours), so to pull off a scam like that you'll want to try and get into alexa, siri, cortana or Google's library and find a heavy user.

It states that it only needs about a minute of someones voice.
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