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Show HN: Neural text to speech with dozens of celebrity voices

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Re: Show HN: Neural text to speech with dozens of celebrity voices

#81

Hate to be that guy but I can't participate in this discussion due to javascript being required for the landing page. As an outlier not running javascript, I'm reaping what I sow, but it would be nice to me and others in the same boat if projects make their landing page viewable without the need for javascript.

Why don't you just turn on JavaScript?

Re: Show HN: Neural text to speech with dozens of celebrity voices

#82
post #8

This is my pandemic side project, and I'll be happy to answer any questions about it.

After some experiments with playing text to people around me, we decided that a huge factor in the perceptive quality of the voice comes from knowing who you are listening to before you get to listen, with the best perceived quality when the listener actually gets to see the picture of the voice's owner. Was it a deliberate choice to add those photographs for this reason?

Re: Show HN: Neural text to speech with dozens of celebrity voices

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minor point. Its nice when people write URL's so that we can just follow as opposed to requiring mouse interactions to cut and paste.

FYI in Firefox, just highlight and right click to select 'Open in new tab'.

Doesn't that still require the mouse?

Re: Show HN: Neural text to speech with dozens of celebrity voices

#84
post #81

Hate to be that guy but I can't participate in this discussion due to javascript being required for the landing page. As an outlier not running javascript, I'm reaping what I sow, but it would be nice to me and others in the same boat if projects make their landing page viewable without the need for javascript.

Why don't you just turn on JavaScript?

I use links. No javascript.

Re: Show HN: Neural text to speech with dozens of celebrity voices

#85

That's super cool. I am worried about the potential abuse of this service, are there any existing services that can help to identify audio deep fakes like this one is for making them? Found Resemblyzer: https://github.com/resemble-ai/Resemblyzer

Such a system will always suffer from false positives and false negatives. On a more positive note, when deepfakes become a problem, we will see the emergence of a culture where unsigned authoritative content is not paid any attention.

Photoshop has existed for a long time, but people still take photos at face value.

Re: Show HN: Neural text to speech with dozens of celebrity voices

#86

Hate to be that guy but I can't participate in this discussion due to javascript being required for the landing page. As an outlier not running javascript, I'm reaping what I sow, but it would be nice to me and others in the same boat if projects make their landing page viewable without the need for javascript.

There’s a text area and a button to say what you typed. Surely you can enable or use a browser with JavaScript when you choose to?

If you don't have javascript you see only "This page requires Javascript", when I would hope, even if the thing requires javascript to operate, I could at least find out if it is worth switching to another machine with X11 and firing up firefox.

Re: Show HN: Neural text to speech with dozens of celebrity voices

#87
post #46

On a more positive side to this technology. I've been wondering about the possibility of using this sort of tech (or the API offerings from Azure or GCP) to provide voice overs in video games. By that I mean for smaller budget Indie development, it would be certainly interesting to either be able to generate voice audio from transcripts in order to add voices to background NPCs and so on (or even the possibility of d…

> On a more positive side to this technology. I'm not sure that making it easier to profit off of the likeness of others is a positive side. If it's legal for indie studios to do, it's legal for 20th Century Fox, Universal, and so forth.

It reduces cost to produce a specific good. I would think it would be measured similar to other technology advancements that do the same. Good for society, bad for the craftsman that were made obsolete, overall net positive.

This is purposefully not counting in the effect of being able to fake people and the damage that does to society, but I think that was implied by the previous poster specifying looking for the more positive side of the technology.

Re: Show HN: Neural text to speech with dozens of celebrity voices

#88
post #25
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are half a dozen startups in this space that provide the tech. They use embedded style tokens or sliders to change the emotion, pitch, timbre, etc. I don't have links off hand, but they're not too difficult to find. These companies tend to focus on off-the-shelf turnkey solutions, so they'll have a suite of a few voice actors to choose from for different character archetypes.

Out of curiosity, are there legal concerns? E.g. training off Schwarzenegger and offering an Arnold transform

Likeness is a legal concept.

Re: Show HN: Neural text to speech with dozens of celebrity voices

#90

That's super cool. I am worried about the potential abuse of this service, are there any existing services that can help to identify audio deep fakes like this one is for making them? Found Resemblyzer: https://github.com/resemble-ai/Resemblyzer

I wonder if at some point we need to create legal requirements that all deepfakes have some kind of human-invisible (or visible?) fingerprint for identification, restriction on frequency range, etc. We have crypto export restrictions, why not put handcuffs on this as well which has the potential for probably larger scale harm?
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