41–50 of 244 posts
Woah, the Madison voice is quite clearly Julia Whelan.
I wonder how this works with her ???.
Will we see this level of voice synthesis in the public domain? Maybe I am out of touch but I found those examples very impressive - more impressive than the jobs vs rogan demo a few months back. But I am also saddened at a future where all this is locked up in corporate hands - obviously there is money needed and (licensed) data needed too which Apple can get at. Honestly I would rather eschew the ethics of it and j…
"Digitally narrated titles are a valuable complement to professionally narrated audiobooks" Yeah, right. What a lame attempt to deflect the (fully warranted) criticism that this will put audiobook narrators out of work.
I think the cat is already out of the bag, and the death of human narration is imminent. The fight now seems to be whether this transformation happens only in production, or companies like Apple succeed in breaking the total Audiobook price apart into "license" and "production", only buying the license and have the production done on their proprietary servers. Overall, I agree it's inevitable that this results in a s…
Until AI is so good that it can mimic emotion, I think there will be a market for human narrators. Of course it will be smaller than what it is now, but I think people will specialize.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Unfortunately the AI completely faceplants, placing an enormous pause right in the middle of the phrase "all places wild". It actually changes the meaning of the text, making it sound more like "...the beauty he saw in all places. Wild!" I disagree for 2 reasons: 1. There's a perfectly fine reason to put a pause between "places" and "wild": to put emphasis on "wild". Bill doesn't see beauty in all places, but speci…
I disagree with both reasons. 1. A long pause between "places" and "wild", to me, signals their dis-association, that "wild" does not link with "places". However, the lack of punctuation in the written text implies the phrase "all places wild", the "all wild places" you refer to. I'm with the GP here, the AI didn't convey the meaning I'd expect from the text. 2. Also, the preceding text seems to discuss a certain "in…
But that long pause is still way shorter than the pauses at actual periods! Look at the waveform[0]: the ovals are the periods, the rectangle is the pause between "places" and "wild". I guess due to the length of the pauses at the actual periods, my brain automatically discards the possibility of "all places. Wild!" and then the best interpretation clearly is "all places wild" for me.
But hey, the fact that at least two people interpreted it differently says something. Maybe this was more of a faceplant than I initially realized.
Will we see this level of voice synthesis in the public domain? Maybe I am out of touch but I found those examples very impressive - more impressive than the jobs vs rogan demo a few months back. But I am also saddened at a future where all this is locked up in corporate hands - obviously there is money needed and (licensed) data needed too which Apple can get at. Honestly I would rather eschew the ethics of it and j…
There is https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en though I’m not sure where and how is it being used.
While there is/was a voice synthesis project at Mozilla it was rudimentary like 3 years ago
Will we see this level of voice synthesis in the public domain? Maybe I am out of touch but I found those examples very impressive - more impressive than the jobs vs rogan demo a few months back. But I am also saddened at a future where all this is locked up in corporate hands - obviously there is money needed and (licensed) data needed too which Apple can get at. Honestly I would rather eschew the ethics of it and j…
https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS
You can also clone someone's voice by finetuning a pretrained LJSpeech model and training a vocoder from scratch, I've had great success with as little as 15 minutes of speech.
I am surprised it’s taking so long for big tech companies to roll this out. I suppose there’s too much money in audiobooks? Perhaps licensing issues? If anyone can get a “celebrity reads aloud” feature that would be Apple and that could be big.
The quality needs to be very high for it not to be jarring. I stay with podcasts if the host has a "good radio voice". ("Not even all human voices are good enough for me.") It's just a very intimate medium to have someone's voice right in your head. If the voices have annoying quirks, those audiobooks will not be loved. Yes, it needs to be tens of hours of perfectly good narration.
It was a famous author too.
And now this announcement.
"Digitally narrated titles are a valuable complement to professionally narrated audiobooks" Yeah, right. What a lame attempt to deflect the (fully warranted) criticism that this will put audiobook narrators out of work.
There are so many books I have that don’t have an audiobook version because the economics just aren’t there.
This is an easy way that technology can expand human experience.
Even in situations where the author reads the book, I expect it will be cheaper to train an AI to sound like the author than to put the author in a studio for 50 hours (or whatever).
I thought it was a really dumb ruling when Amazon was forced to remove the text to speech function from kindle.
I also think that screen readers are hobbled to avoid this legal issue. I want to send any text through a narrator bot and have it read it to me. There is zero need to compensate anyone other than the developer who writes the AI (and hopefully it will have open source versions donated by developers).
If I’ve bought a book, I should be able to use it as I like.