Earlier quoted context omitted.
..then they'll finally be able to play audio of republicans contradicting themselves! :p
No need for that, they're already doing fine.
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Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone
241–250 of 311 posts
Re: Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone
#242Lol, I totally called this.
Re: Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone
#243This 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.
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
I would argue that it depends on the sample rate. Over the telephone there are several TTS voices that are very convincing because the audio quality is lower.
Re: Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "potentially suspicious" History is now doomed. Crackly recordings are obviously fakeable. Children will listen to JFK's "We shall not go to the moon" speech, proof that the moon landings are a liberal conspiracy and all that grainy footage is just CGI with a noise filter.
This idea hit me harder than I expected -- I am reminded of the scene in Interstellar, where the main character's daughter's teacher asserts that we never went to the moon. I don't recall whether she genuinely didn't believe it, or whether she felt it was better to lie to the kids to keep them motivated in the present, but apparently we are getting much closer to having gatekeepers of knowledge be able to actively su…
This is nothing new.. "History is written by the winners..." comes to mind...
Re: Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Then again, that's probably easier to work around by having humans annotate the sentences to be read.
Or by starting with a recording of someone else reading the sentence. Then you get the research problem known as "voice conversion", which has been studied a fair amount, but mostly prior to the deep learning era - and mostly without the constraint of limited access to the target person's voice. (On the other hand, research often goes after 'hard' conversions like male-to-female, whereas if your goal is forgery, you can probably find someone with a similar voice to record the input.)
Anyway, here's an interesting thing from 2016, a contest to produce the best voice conversion algorithm, with 17 entrants:
Re: Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone
#246This is pretty basic at the moment and it's terrifying. Yeah, it has an MS Sam feel to it, but as the tech improves and we know it will, you could use a service like this to put words in someone's mouth. Think about how you could trip up a CEO or a Politician by playing some random clip that they never said. When that gets into the Zeitgeist judgments will be made in the court of public opinion devoid of facts or rea…
I actually have somewhat of an opposite opinion on this. As HN readers and being "in" the cutting edge front of tech, we know that things like this is possible (I first learned of this seeing Adobe demo it a while ago), but this is not mainstream knowledge yet.
The sooner we can get to a point where everybody knows stuff like this (voice impersonation) is possible, the sooner we can avoid real damages (of courts mis-judging with an impersonated voice recording as accepted evidence).
Yes, we lose an entire area of evidence that can be used in court (all voice recordings, possibly), but the tech was going to get here sooner or later and it was going to be a problem we'd have to deal with. I'd rather be at a place where everyone knows voice recordings are unreliable, than actually having harm done because of impersonated voices because people didn't think it was possible.
Re: Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone
#247While 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.
I imagine that even at the point where it had been improved to such an extent that a human could not tell the difference it would still be possible to train a simple ai to tell which ones were non-human nevermind the original speaker.
Re: Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh. That means that recordings of speeches/performances from concert halls are potentially suspicious. Know of any other instances of reverb covering things up? This is interesting!
I haven't worked extensively in voice adaptation, but I learned working in text-to-speech that adding a bit of reverb is quite effective at covering up artifacts. Something similar seems to be going on in live vocals. If you lack confidence in your own voice, adding a bit of reverb can make it sound much better. Not sure what's going on — whether the reverb jams the critical listening facilities in one's brain or som…
Adding a bit of autotune has made whole careers...
Re: Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone
#249Combined with Face2Face[1] live video impersonation, it is truly time to be very careful verifying videos or even live streams. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk
Without a doubt, our concept of personal identity will be completely unreliable within a few generations. Forget about privacy--we will soon have literally no way to verify who we're talking to.
Re: Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the first clip, I'd say 80% of the soundbites were obviously robot-like, but one or two of the "Obama" quotes were startlingly clear - "The good news is, that they will offer the technology to anyone" - I can't hear anything wrong with that in the first clip at all. If they were all that quality I'd say we'd be easily fooled. As a proof of concept this is pretty big.
I can definitely hear issues with that phrase. It has quite robotic drop-offs. Though coming soon: Neural networks to determine whether speech is NN-generated? :P
This is likely part of how the speech-generating NNs are trained (ie. there's a generated-speech-detector and the network is trained to fool it, while it is also trained): https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661