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Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone

lyrebird.ai

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

#81
post #74

While all of these vec2speech type models are impressive, I get the feeling that most of the comments didn't listen to any of the samples. It's still distinctly robotic sounding, probably has quite a bit of garbage output that needs to be filtered manually (as many of these nets often have) and is a far cry from fooling a human.

It doesn't sound too different from a voice coming over a walkie talkie or some kind of intercom. The problem might be that high frequencies, especially overtones, aren't properly constructed, but I'm certain that can be improved.

The main problem is that the algorithms don't yet know what to stress in a sentence. The problem is semantic, and not so much about the sound of the voice itself.

You can synthesize someone's voice perfectly, but if it's stressing words incorrectly or not at all, it's not going to fool anyone.

Then again, that's probably easier to work around by having humans annotate the sentences to be read.

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

#82
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…

Have you seen the movie S1m0ne (2002)? I felt that it only scratched the surface of the topic (and the tech wasn't exactly at today's level), but it's otherwise pretty good.

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

#84
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Text to speech is still pretty distinguishable as not-human, and that seems like an easier problem (only has to work for one specific voice, not an arbitrary voice). So just on the basis alone I wonder if this isn't still a ways out

Interesting thought: is it easier or more difficult to make a synthetic voice undistinguishable from a human one, compared to producing speech copying a real voice? To me, at least, the voices I heard in Lyrebird's demo actually sounded more 'real' than Microsoft Sam for example.

Of course, the voices produced by Lyrebird sound more "real" than Microsoft Sam, since I would define realness as sounding humanlike. However, I would strongly prefer Microsoft Sam over something generated by this algorithm for general use because this algorithm produces voices that are still in an uncanny valley, because it is almost human but not human enough, whereas Microsoft Sam is obviously not human.

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

#85
I wonder how accurately this would reproduce dead musicians voices. I've had this idea for about 8 years called the Notorious BIG project. I have about 20 acapellas that I was originally going to manually chop into a song. Neural Nets can pretty much solve this now.

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

#86
post #80
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Black mirror's "would you like to speak with your dead husband again?"

Forget dead husbands, with this tech, it will be hard to trust anything a politician said. Basically, once they master adding this to video, ANYTHING could be construed against anyone. Want a video of a politician saying "Hitler was right" to cheering masses? Want a video about a president saying it's time to start Nuclear War One? You can make that.

I can't wait to hear the new cassetteboy songs.

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

#87
post #11

I was wondering when CG Sir David Attenborough would get here and start narrating my day to day.

I imagine Sir David Attenborough would basically just cite the intro of "The Gods Must Be Crazy" movie, casually explaining how humans technological progress is futile in regards of happiness. That text seems to holds up to present day.

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

#88
post #80
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Black mirror's "would you like to speak with your dead husband again?"

Forget dead husbands, with this tech, it will be hard to trust anything a politician said. Basically, once they master adding this to video, ANYTHING could be construed against anyone. Want a video of a politician saying "Hitler was right" to cheering masses? Want a video about a president saying it's time to start Nuclear War One? You can make that.

In the future: PGP signed speeches.

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

#89
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.

Interesting that companies are trying to get us used to taking to our computers.

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

#90
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very impressive I velt -- though there were robotic artifacts here and there (well every several seconds), much of it was fairly natural and reasonably lo-fi quality convincing. There was a HN post a few weeks ago from Google of their most TTS algorithm which was the best I've heard I think, quite quite human (whose techniques were published and could be integrated into Lyrebird).

you got a link anywhere?

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