To the alarmists here: just look up the internet for "voice cloning ML". There are lilerally YouTube tutorials on it. Stop being luddits, you cannot stop the progress.
Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio
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Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio
#302Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio
#303This is the first startup here where I think the tech should essentially be illegal. It's cool tech, yes I'm impressed at the achievement. Nuclear weapons are impressive too. OTOH this kind of thing is getting easier and easier to do, so what's a realistic way forward?
Cofounder here, What you see in the above demo is a very rate-limited demo of our upcoming model. We realize how dangerous this technology can be and have built a lot of mitigations on our main product (Play.ht) to reduce possible abuse: - We strictly moderate the generated text of any sexual, offensive, racist, or threatening content. It automatically gets detected and blocked. - We built and are offering for free a…
> We strictly moderate the generated text of any sexual, offensive, racist, or threatening content.
This is exactly what makes me so angry about "AI safety" initiatives: they are largely worrying about the wrong thing. People have been so focused on the "this may make some obscene joke, or be biased against some skin colors" that they have completely missed out on the much more serious harms that AI will cause with respect to, in this case, impersonation scams.
Congrats, people can't say the N-word with your technology, but they can say "Hi Bob, just calling to verify that we did indeed change the target account where you should wire your invoice payment."
Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's amazing how many think declaring something illegal will stop criminally-minded people having and using it.
It won't stop it, but will allow enforcement agencies to enforce. Otherwise, they have no legal recourse to do so.
It's already illegal to defraud someone into sending you money.
Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio
#305"Trusted by 7000+ users and teams of all sizes" [posts a bunch of company logos] You've just launched in beta, how can you claim this? I'm always very suspicious of this (I take this from the position of being a tech lead at a multi-billion euro retailer who's logo you'll never be able to use) Is this one developer? A team? Or is this just marketing bullshit for VCs who somehow don't verify if this is true or not?
exactly. i hate this practice of just spraying logos all over with no context. give me 3 logos but each with a written case study or zoom conversation or even a tweet saying what they use it for and you get more trust than 100 logos
Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio
#306This is horrifying in terms of scamming, ransom threats and phishing.
Eg calling as the CEO in the CEO's voice urgently asking for a password, wire or data.
People calling your family saying its you based on some youtube video, asking for immediate financial help.
People saying someone has been kidnapped and they need a ransom. This is uncommon in the US but happens all the time to elderly in places like Mexico. With this tech scammer cartels can control your voice from a prompt to muppet distressed requests to the people you care about. In my opinion, these type of services should be banned by some kind of regulation.
Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio
#307"Trusted by 7000+ users and teams of all sizes" [posts a bunch of company logos] You've just launched in beta, how can you claim this? I'm always very suspicious of this (I take this from the position of being a tech lead at a multi-billion euro retailer who's logo you'll never be able to use) Is this one developer? A team? Or is this just marketing bullshit for VCs who somehow don't verify if this is true or not?
We launched the playground.play.ht in beta to share the new speech model we are working on. We've been operating play.ht for a while and have teams from these companies using the platform.
Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio
#308Great product, giving it a try. Here you saying that 20 seconds is enough, and on a "clone" page there is an instruction about 30 minutes for better result. Is there any kind of instruction about how to create a good sample of the voice? For example, should I speak English, or any language will do? Do you have some stats on corellation between sample length and generation quality? Thank you!
Thanks. What we've shared here is a demo tool to show our new speech model that can clone a voice with few seconds of audio. You can try that with English or non-English recordings, but the generated voice can only speak English at the moment. If you are looking for high-fidelity cloning, you can sign up and try it in our app here - https://play.ht/voice-cloning/
High-fidelity cloning requires at least 20 mins of good quality audio. The more the better.
Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio
#309Hi! Congrats on launching!
We recently evaluated play.ht for TTS but decided against it because you had an async API which was harder to implement. Alternatives have sync APIs (including Google Cloud). Do you have plans to release a sync client for standard TTS?
Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio
#310Come up with a shibboleth for your family group(s) and keep it to yourselves. That will help to combat the scammers.