221–230 of 338 posts
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Nit: this is more design/engineering than science. There is no hypothesis being tested about how the world works.
Did you know that there's an entire field called Computer Science - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science
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I legitimately think this could be huge for self-published authors. It takes a skilled professional about forty hours of work to produce an audiobook from a novel-length manuscript. Tacotron could do it in minutes.
I don't see that coming soon. The voice is one thing, but the performance goes far, far beyond that. Without understanding the text, you can't get good prosody out of a single sentence, much less developing a character for a whole performance. You'd have to "direct" this on a word-by-word basis: "Put the emphasis here. Speed up 10% here. Decrease vocal intensity 25%". You'd end up producing a whole "score", and it wo…
Saw this on Minute papers last night and had a discussion with my partner about if we needed a secret password or not to tell if it were really one or the other on the phone. I figured that we had enough shared history that that wouldn't be a problem. Then we realized that there's no such thing as a simulated sense of humor yet and that that would be the best natural encryption to any communication.
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I’m convinced that POTS is already a dead man walking. The younger generation has no interest in talking on the phone in the first place, and with the amount of spam calls my phone number is absolutely the worst part of my phone. Texting and apps is a much more pleasant way to interact with someone, and bonus of no hold times and much can be automated. I think business texting is an upcoming startup unicorn which wil…
>business texting You mean Slack?
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I’m convinced that POTS is already a dead man walking. The younger generation has no interest in talking on the phone in the first place, and with the amount of spam calls my phone number is absolutely the worst part of my phone. Texting and apps is a much more pleasant way to interact with someone, and bonus of no hold times and much can be automated. I think business texting is an upcoming startup unicorn which wil…
>business texting You mean Slack?
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I live in Houston. I recently read a Houston Chronicle article describing very similar scenario. I don't have the exact link (it was from 2019), but here's one from 2013 [0]. Combined with the inability to verify the actual phone number displayed on caller ID has led me to tell all of my family to not ever accept a phone call from a number they don't recognize. There's literally zero trust in our phone system upon wh…
Given caller ID spoofing, they really shouldn't even accept calls from numbers they do recognize... especially with tech like this. Let it go to voice mail then return the call afterwards.
Unfortunately, not everyone can do that. Some people are legally required to answer the phone, even if they don't recognize the number. And unfortunately many businesses only communicate via the phone system.
So, unfortunately, our entire country is built upon a system in which we're told to implicitly trust but doesn't have any capability for us to verify.
My bank's (HSBC) telephone banking offers the option do away with a PIN and instead a 'my voice is my password'phrase system. I'm glad I never opted in.
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People had the exact same concerns when digital image manipulation software became popular, including the "we will never be able to trust an image again" question. To answer your question, I think the biggest step we took in adapting to the ever-present risk that an image may have been manipulated is acknowledging that it's possible. As soon as people knew that something could be faked, they realized that having a pu…
Luckily now people don't ever believe photographs as sole evidence in the court of public opinion, and always corroborate that evidence. Wait. No. I had that backward. How long has photo manipulation been around? And people still fall for it every minute of every day. I have zero faith these tech developments will lead to anything good, or that we'll even learn how to deal with them effectively.
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,…
It doesn't have to be about creating audio of specific text with 's voice; it can be much more about creating audio of specific text with a wide variety of believable people's voices. I could see this, if it becomes commercially viable, potentially being a huge boon to indie game creation, for instance, since hiring a load of voice actors to record the dialogue for an entire game is vastly more expensive than, say, h…
Cheaper games vs distressing phone calls in this case.
I'm open to better use cases but for now I haven't heard any.
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.
If anyone's interested in the project, feel free to contact me at iamjsonkim@gmail.com.