RealTalk Speech Synthesis

I suppose, we'd want bots distinguished (by tone, etc). Where's the practical value of not being able to discern an algorithmic speaker, e.g., on the phone. There's probably some value in being able to do so, regarding liabilities and so on. (A contract arises from an agreement of intents. We may not be sure, if such an agreement has actually been reached, or if we were just witnessing a behavioral pattern triggered by a Markov chain. We may also question the nature of the intent or who's intent this actually is.)

It seems a little off to me, but perhaps that's because I already knew it was fake. I'd be interested in how this holds up in a blinded study.

Still, it's impressive that the model seems to need such a sensitive test to judge its believability.

So I've seen multiple of these ML speech synthesis projects, when am I going be able to use one of these for a screen reader? I'd like to listen to wiki articles with a synthesizer using modern methods, not Microsoft Sam.

> have produced the most realistic AI simulation of a voice we’ve heard to date.

No you didn't. Please do not lie.

There are a number of projects replicating Google's Tacotron 2 research from December 2017 that achieved human parity in text-to-speech as measured by MOS score. Google's Tacotron 2 model was then successfully deployed by Google in a service called Duplex.

Following up on this research, there are a number of open source and commercial projects that have used Google's Tacotron 2 human-parity TTS research:

Open source projects:

- https://github.com/mozilla/TTS

- https://github.com/Rayhane-mamah/Tacotron-2

- https://github.com/NVIDIA/tacotron2

Commercial TTS projects:

- http://deepzen.io/

- https://wellsaidlabs.com/

- https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natur...

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> he didn’t actually endorse our work like this, it’s a clip from the video the team created featuring their work. Video and more after the jump!

It's absolutely unresponsible/illegal to clone a person's voice without consent. To use Joe Rogan's likeness for your publicity stunt without his consent is unethical in its self. It's Joe Rogan's legal right to control his own likeness.

Furthermore, this presents a number of safety risks to Joe Rogan including the possibility of identity fraud.

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Finally, at this time, TTS human parity technology is at human-parity when tested on phrases and sentences similar to those in the training set. Google's Tacotron-2 models showed a significant decrease in performance reading 37 news headlines. They mentioned in their evaluation:

> This result points to a challenge for end-to-end approaches – they require training on data that cover intended usage.

So, on one hand, I see people hyping half-baked AI through the roof, cherry-picking good examples, refusing to study and discuss its limitations and even outright dismissing the idea that AI failures are, in fact, failures, rather than some kind of "different way of thinking".

On the other hand, I see the same crowd engaging in ridiculous alarmism that's not grounded in reality. They place technologies in far-fetched scenarios, completely ignoring that the same scenarios can already be enacted without AI. The usual conclusion is always that technologies needs to be kept out of the hands of the public.

Someone is drinking too much of their own Kool-Aid. But regardless of how much they believe in what they're posting, this behavior is disgusting and unethical.

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>Here are some examples of what might happen if the technology got into the wrong hands

Since when do we start a discussion with the assumption that a piece of software will be restricted in distribution? Software tends to get in the hands of everyone who wants it.

>Spam callers impersonating your mother or spouse to obtain personal information

News flash: this is already happening without AI. All you need is a bad phone connection and someone who sounds vaguely like the person being impersonated.

Moreover, it's already trivial to change the pitch of your voice in real time. With some simple audio engineering, you can alter timbre as well (e.g. filtering, equalization). If that's such a big deal, why is no one using this already? It's way, way, way easier than collecting lots of voice samples and training a model.

>Impersonating someone for the purposes of bullying or harassment

Why would someone need to impersonate someone else for bullying or harassment? Bullying or harassment seems to work pretty well as is.

>Gaining entrance to high security clearance areas by impersonating a government official

If someone can get access to a place simply by using voice coming from computer speakers, it's clearly not a "high security clearance area".

>An ‘audio deepfake’ of a politician being used to manipulate election results or cause a social uprising

Media organizations already do this every day, in plain sight, via selective editing.