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Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio

#321

Post by throwaway675309 »

JimmyRuska wrote: post #306

This 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…

Useless gesture considering that this type of technology using repositories such as tortoise and taco Tron Will be wildly available running from one's own personal computer within a few short years. Might as well air the dirty laundry in public so we can determine how to deal with the threat instead of pretending it doesn't exist by banning it, and have it appear in stealth a few short years later.

Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio

#322

Post by gus_massa »

JohnFen wrote: post #211
gus_massa wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That scam was popular here in Argentina a few years ago. We call it "virtual kidnaping" https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/virtual-kidnapping , nobody is kidnaped, it's just a scam using a phone call. It's not very important that the voice is similar to the supposed victim. Usually the person in the call is weeping and it's very difficult to recognize the voice. Moreover a confusing voice at 2am may be interpreted as a…

Some scammers tried to pull this scam off on my stepfather years ago. He got a call that, through the wailing and tears, told him that I'd been thrown into a Mexican prison and needed bail money immediately. He was 90% convinced that it was true, but my mother made him call me before doing anything, which saved him about $10k. She thought it was suspicious that I would have left the country without mentioning it to h…

At least here, most were just calling random telephone and letting people guess who is the kidnaped person

> Bububu. Hi, I'm ... bububu

> John?

> Bububu. Yes, I'm John. bububu. I'm in bububu ... the jail in ... bububu

> Mexico?

> Bububu. Yes, In Mexico. bububu. And I need money ... bububu

There are other that research the victim and have more data for a targeted call, but it's more difficult so most cases where random calls where they don't have a sample voice of the victim.

Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio

#323

Post by throwaway675309 »

scrollaway wrote: post #106
rockemsockem wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything written can be listened to with this tech. Any news article, any short story, a draft of a piece of writing you're working on. There is too much text for human beings to read it all.

> There is too much text for human beings to read it all. so your logic is that all that text should be audio and people will consume more? Because I got news for you, reading is faster than listening.

Oh yeah, how does reading work out for you while you're driving a car? smh...

Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio

#324

Post by nmfisher »

barking_biscuit wrote: post #317

What we really need is something on par with this or Eleven Labs that's open source. Then the real fun will begin. At this point I think it's just a matter of time.

Join the LAION Discord #audio-generation - some of us are literally working on this right now.

Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio

#325

Post by mahmoudfelfel »

gwerbret wrote: post #319

Given the very ( very , VERY) obvious concerns associated with malicious deployment of this tech, and the minimal/largely ineffectual countermeasures deployed by the founders, what surprises me the most is that YC gave this startup its stamp of approval. It used to be that they offered at least a basic sanity check to anything they funded. Is this now getting lost as they scale up their funding operations?

What is in this demo is a very rate-limited, early version of our new model. We have many mitigations in place to increase the safety of our main product (Play.ht); I mentioned some of that here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35331310

Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio

#326

Post by croes »

alexb_ wrote: post #175

It's astounding to me how quickly HN turned into "We need to track people who use technology in case they use it for crime" when it comes to this. No we don't! Technology does not need to be relentlessly tracked by government agencies "for your protection" - haven't you learned anything?

The same applies in reverse. Technology must not be allowed to do whatever it wants without control. Haven't you learned anything?

Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio

#327

Post by nmfisher »

madeofpalk wrote: post #115
phkahler wrote: post #18

This 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?

I have a "large" (~40K 10s lines) corpus of captioned dialogue from a video game that I briefly investigated training a model similar to this to "clone voices" with, but pretty quickly came to the realisation that doing so would be pretty unethetical to all involved. It became more apparent to me how icky this is as the voice actor of one of the most iconic characters in the game died suddenly 10 days ago...

There’s a repository with a VITS model for English/Chinese/Japanese voice cloning that was pretrained on Genshin Impact voices.

I’m not actually sure whether that’s illegal (in the civil/IP sense), provided you’re not using the original voices to synthesise text.

Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio

#328

Post by [deleted] »

hammadh wrote: post #238
h1fra wrote: post #233

Congrats on launching. People already made a lot of feedback on the product itself so I'll keep mine. Just a few note on the UX: - Recording your own voice should contain a script too, that could help increase the quality of the sampling because I struggled to say anything relevant. - Recording again, there is no time so it's hard to say when it's okay to stop - You enforce the checkbox "not [...] to generate any sex…

Thanks, we intended the playground to be merely a testing tool for the new model we're building. We'll improve based on your feedback!

[deleted]

Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio

#329

Post by erichocean »

jascii wrote: post #53

I'm having a hard time coming up with a non-nefarious use case for this.

I'm using this kind of technology for temporary voice tracks in animated shorts.

I'd really like something like Img2Img for voices so I can translate a performance to an arbitrary (synthetic) voice.

Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio

#330

Post by [deleted] »

coreyisthename wrote: post #316
cpill wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, we should just make all AI research illegal. I mean, without gate keeper the world will fall apart! Did you know that you can draw and write _anything_ with a pencil! We need to get onto that next. And the internet, you can publish anything you want on there!

You seem to be intentionally missing the point.

[deleted]
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