171–180 of 338 posts
If acting was ever a good career choice, it isn't now. I am becoming convinced that actors will be replaced wholesale.
No, actors are still going to act. But their voices will be just an input feature to the speech engine.
I think this is a good thing for the field and gives a whole lot more people access to the opportunity they strive so hard to achieve.
Do papers like this have code to play with anywhere?
Lyrebird has had similar technology for a few years now. https://www.descript.com/lyrebird-ai
This method has much clearer audio, but seems to lack generality / TTS capability.
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Philip K Dick wrote about people going to commune with artificial personality constructs of their deceased loved ones. Unfortunately, it's been a long time since I read it, so I don't remember which book it was in. Maybe someone who's read him more recently can remember. Update: Apparently, lots of other people wrote about this too, but PKD wrote about this before any of the ones mentioned so far, as he wrote about t…
Ubik? Though that is not about artificial personality constructs, it's about communicating with loved ones in half-dead states.
But I'm thinking of a different PKD book where there were actual artificial personality constructs instead.
At first glance there seems to be more more malicious uses than good ones with voice. Yes, hearing someone dear to me say things he/she never said maybe comforting. Anything else? Maybe some movies with the deceased actor's voice? But what if someone who wants to hurt me sends me files (or phone calls) from the deceased person saying horrible things like: - "I am still alive but left as I was tired of you" - "oh Jan,…
Anybody else notice how that Scottish male reference voice sounds considerably more English in the synthesized versions.
Yeah, maybe it's just having a more sensitive ear to the Scottish accent but that to me was the furthest from the reference by far.
It was that and the Swedish-accented English ("Sentence in Different Voices" section, middle recording) made it struggle. No traces of the Scandi-lilt were left in the synth version.
Final note would be the French speaker at the bottom of the page seems to be English first language, despite having very good spoken French. Not quite as pure a test of that last part as I'd have liked, despite the ability for the speaker to perhaps read the synthesized version in English back in English. That could be fun.
Now we can have audiobooks read by anyone we like! They can direct us to our destination! They can speak at our funeral, being long dead themselves (as long as there is sufficient training material recorded). The future is awesome.
It seems that we aren’t far from being able to take those recordings and spin it into a reading of anything. Fascinating. It’s kind of scary though. Grandma’s voice can read anything. Anything.
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When I interviewed Ray Kurzweil we talked about the obvious-in-hindsight insight that his life’s work was essentially trying to build an AI to bring his father back to life.
Except no matter how good it is, it will only reinforce that it’s not real and that he’s gone. Perhaps that’s the therapy he needs to move on? Note: this is different from listening to recordings from the actual person. Having loved ones die is one of life’s universal terrible qualities.
In the end, I don't know if any of that works. But what's being subscribed doesn't seem too far outside the norm. Deprivation often leads to desperation for even a taste, however imperfect it may be.
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It means you can make someone talk, non-stop, for an indefinite amount of time. Now I want to make an art piece that's just a valley girl droning on, and on, and on, and on about believable and obnoxious life experiences. The stores they go to, how they feel about certain colors, what "too spicy" is. It just never stops.
This sounds like a brilliant idea, and I'm almost wanting to build it myself. If we can tack on a visual head and sync up the lips to the words, it'd be amazing and would likely go viral.