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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

#261

Post by dspig »

microtherion wrote: post #141
i336_ wrote: post #131

Earlier 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…

I think what it does is mask/smear the fine detail - the texture of the sound - but in a way that we are used to, so still sounds natural.

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

#262

Post by anigbrowl »

Excellent work. This will find widespread application in the film/tv/music industry and beyond (and we're not that far away from being able to do the same thing for video). Unfortunately it will also be widely abused, but given the near-inevitability of such technological development I'm already reconciled to that :-/

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

#263

Post by anigbrowl »

knowaveragejoe wrote: post #252
eadz wrote: post #101

Combined 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

To my knowledge, both of these particular projects are still a ways away from being used in any practical sense, let alone succeed at deceiving anyone. You are right that we'll have to worry about this soon though. Likewise, verifying the identify of people we think we're talking to over video calls for example.

I would use this (the audio tech from the OP) for some edge cases in film production right now. It would also be easy to combine this with Twilio and a chatbot to scam people over the phone.

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

#265

Post by anigbrowl »

proaralyst wrote: post #260
nihonde wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Crypto would still work, and this tech isn't going to work face-to-face.

Neither will insulate you from a deception which you wish to perpetuate upon yourself, and identifying the latter is a trick that con artists specialize in.

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

#268

Post by anigbrowl »

qeternity wrote: post #45

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.

I've been editing audio professionally for ~20 years now. This is short of perfect, but it's already good enough to be used in some kinds of editing emergencies - coincidentally exactly the ones where you're likely to have audio problems in the first place.

For example, in a movie with a busy action scene involving gunfire/helicopters/storms the production audio is usually useless because there were fans and other loud machinery on the film set to create visual illusions of powerful winds and so on. In this situation the audio is either not recorded or used only as a guide track to match timing on a high-quality track recorded later in the studio. Actors hate re-recording dialog by lip-syncing in front of a screen and producers hate paying for it. This solution is already good enough to use for incidental characters in scenes that are going to be noisy anyway. I give it about 5 years before it's good enough to use in ordinary dialog scenes - not for the intimate conversation between the two Famous Actors flirting over a romantic dinner, but fine for replacing the waiter or other background characters.

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

#269

Post by anigbrowl »

pjc50 wrote: post #172
i336_ wrote: post #131

Earlier 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!

> "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.

Yeah, that's a real issue. You can already fake audio very very easily. People don't realize how constructed movie soundtracks are, and I don't mean in terms of special effects but just people talking in every day situations.
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