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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

#301
post #284
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy shit this is crazy!

Yeah vote me down coward. Because I used a "evil" forbidden word. I even used in a positive context to show how amazed I am about this facial manipulation (much much more then about the voice thing) Flag me ban me I do not fucking care. I can make another account.

[deleted]

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

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK there's a common law thing called "passing off" that's used to protect unregistered IP from impersonation. It's already used to protect unauthorised abuse of voice actors IP.

I'm pretty sure "passing off" requires the seller to be fraudulently claiming the goods are the goods of someone else, that if you up-front say "the voices used are generated by computer algorithm and do not represent any real person" that a claim of passing off would be rendered moot. Trademark/Copyright can't be disclaimed in this way but Passing Off requires active deception AIUI?

Well no.

You're right that being clear to avoid confusion is a good preventative measure, but you're wrong that intent to defraud is required. It's enough that the public is (or is likely to be) confused.

See Reckitt v Borden (1990) judgement referring to the three-part test for claims of passing off (my emphasis):

"Second, he must demonstrate a misrepresentation by the defendant to the public (whether or not intentional) leading or likely to lead the public to believe that goods or services offered by him are the goods or services of the plaintiff"

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

#303
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

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.

Pelevin's novel 'Generation П' is a very interesting read on this kind of theme.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_%22%D0%9F%22

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

#304
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They claim to only need 1 minute of recording. In this age of all the kids sharing everything all the time that shouldn't be too hard to acquire.

Even better, targeted attacks against a person to collect their voice could involve contacting them for an opinion survey regarding a product, survey, or political opinion they value. Gleaning something like that from social media profiles is fairly easy.

"My voice is my passport. Verify me."

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

#305
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

Woah, reminds me of Total Recall for some reason... looks like a special effect from the 80s when actual speaking occurs, but it's very close!

Okay, so on an ever so slightly related note, I've always wondered this ever since I saw that movie as a kid.

...Is it normal to feel bad for the Johnnycab "driver" when Arnie destroys it?

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

#307

Cooler : http://www.dtic.upf.edu/~mblaauw/IS2017_NPSS/ https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.03809

This model is quite cool, but also quite a bit different than what lyrebird.ai is doing. NPSS has a lot of extra information in the control inputs about pronunciation and timing (the part-of-phoneme timer feature) - this means that most of the "hard parts" (in my opinion) for naturalness are control inputs to NPSS/WaveNet style models, rather than variables the model must generate globally and consistently as in lyre…

Hi Kyle, I was wondering if the lyrebird github implementation will be open sourced as currently I am hoping to work on improving the current implementation by incorporating prosody into speech synthesis, thanks!

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

#308
post #246

This 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-…

Avoiding court misjudgment is reasonably possible.

How we're going to fight against people believing whatever sound bytes from fake news they want to believe is a harder question...

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

#309

This 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…

There are human impersonators already. I suppose it's not that easy to fake a visible, high-ranking person for long.

Yes, but imagine a human impersonator who has infinite time to take requests from anyone and generate free recordings of any person with a substantial online audiovisual presence.

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

#310

This 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 don't think the tech will improve fast. I've been watching speech synthesis since the 80s, and progress hasn't accelerated over that time. Speech synthesis is one of those 90% problems - when you're 90% done, you find you only have 90% left to do. This level of synthesis is relatively easy. Getting to the 'Can reliably pass for the real thing" level is going to take a huge amount of extra work. It's not even about…

I was pretty impressed by fake Obama's voice. Obviously it doesn't stand up to close scrutiny, but I think if I heard it playing in the background, I could be fooled. And the biggest giveaway was occasional weird intonation rather than the timbre of his voice. All they have to do is make it to where you say a sentence, and it matches your intonation with the other person's voice.
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