How many people here have a different "reading voice" vs their normal conversational voice? Can conversational models be trained even if much of the training data sounds "scripted"?
Common Voice
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Re: Common Voice
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you autistic? I ask because this is HN where lots of people are, and choosing to speak the literary norm in countries with diglossia is often associated with autism. For example, foreigners in Finland are urged to quickly get to grips with puhekieli (spoken Finnish) because speaking kirjakieli (the literary norm) in everyday contexts, or writing it in chats, is “something only autistic people do”.
Not to my knowledge, though I may have some traits. That said, in Norway the literary form is/was spoken on e.g. TV and radio similar to how RP (received pronunciation) is/was spoken on the BBC, more so (in both cases) before than now where dialects are more broadly tolerated. On top of that, in affluent areas of Western Oslo and adjoining affluent areas the dialect sits mostly within what is "allowed" in Bokmål, and…
Riksmål is the word you are looking for.
Re: Common Voice
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
[comment removed]
Frankly this does seem like a massive barrier to me. It's certainly causing me to lose interest, and I suspect it's driving away a lot of people, not least because it was not at all obvious to me there was some way of speeding up getting a language in the first place. It was already off-putting not to be given a way to write sentences or record right away. But now that I know, I have no interest in wasting time contr…
> it was not at all obvious to me there was some way of speeding up getting a language in the first place.
Yeah, that's the biggest failing of Common Voice in my opinion. Getting a new language up to speed could be much improved by simply adding a few links to documentation, but even the existing links are broken, which I reported in March 2022... https://github.com/common-voice/common-voice/issues/3637
> I have no interest in wasting time contributing to a UI translation I actively don't want to be subjected to
Translating the UI may still help you get other people to record, even if you don't want to use it yourself.
> I'll see if I can submit some sentences at least
If you want to go faster, there's also a project to extract sentences from Wikipedia etc. in small doses Mozilla's lawyers and Wikimedia's lawyers have agreed are fair use. I think you'd only need to define how Norwegian Bokmål separates sentences. (E.g. after a period but not if it's a common abbreviation like "etc." in the preceding sentence.) https://github.com/Common-Voice/cv-sentence-extractor
Re: Common Voice
#74With recent events in AI and deepfake technology, I would need to see some assurances before I agreed to “donate my voice” to something like this. It seems like the project is for voice recognition, not generation, but it’s not immediately clear.
I don't know if assurances is the right term, but everything around machine learning and generation seems to be quite liberal with respecting people's property, so indeed something called "donate your voice" made me pause. Mozilla is probably the right organization for that. Their main product however is dwindling, and I'm not sure what will happen to their data if they ceased to exist. There is a tendency for dying…
The recordings are available for download, so if a company wants to use them for less noble causes, they can already do that.
Re: Common Voice
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to my knowledge, though I may have some traits. That said, in Norway the literary form is/was spoken on e.g. TV and radio similar to how RP (received pronunciation) is/was spoken on the BBC, more so (in both cases) before than now where dialects are more broadly tolerated. On top of that, in affluent areas of Western Oslo and adjoining affluent areas the dialect sits mostly within what is "allowed" in Bokmål, and…
Riksmål is the word you are looking for.
When I was growing up Riksmål was far more conservative than what I spoke despite the fact that I spoke fairly conservative Bokmål, and it was still somewhat more conservative than how I wrote. I've not paid much attention to Riksmål, but I'm vaguely aware they've moderated themselves quite a bit.
However a quick check with Det Norske Akademi's dictionary shows that both my spoken and written Norwegian is still not full match for Riksmål, though I see they've pretty much "surrendered" and even accepted some -a endings, so it's getting close-ish.
Maybe in another couple of decades.
Re: Common Voice
#76FF's TTS is an important project for anyone who wants a trivial to use text-to-speech system. It's built into the browser so you can just run wss = window.speechSynthesis; for (let i = 0; i
Do you know if it’s been extracted into a standalone library? The state of the open source TTS seems to not be great. Presumably the data for a voice is harder to put together than training a speech to text system like whisper.
This is a reasonably good open source local TTS that's fast enough to use in home automation: https://github.com/rhasspy/piper
Re: Common Voice
#77Amazing.
One of my hopes with OpenAI were that they were going to be truly open.
Open datasets, open code, open models, open evaluation.
But it is now a Microsoft puppet running on corporate profit goals.
This and HuggingFace are great to see. I hope HuggingFace isn’t acquired by Microsoft like GitHub did.
Re: Common Voice
#78FF's TTS is an important project for anyone who wants a trivial to use text-to-speech system. It's built into the browser so you can just run wss = window.speechSynthesis; for (let i = 0; i
Is there a handy demo website somewhere to access that?
I extracted Narrator module from Firefox'es reader mode. It's not so good in other browsers though. On macOS, I'm using Alex voice.
Re: Common Voice
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a handy demo website somewhere to access that?
I extracted Narrator module from Firefox'es reader mode. It's not so good in other browsers though. On macOS, I'm using Alex voice. https://tts.cns.wtf/ https://github.com/python273/tts-app
I've tried this on Linux+Firefox, but it doesn't sound very good yet, I'm afraid.
Re: Common Voice
#80How many people here have a different "reading voice" vs their normal conversational voice? Can conversational models be trained even if much of the training data sounds "scripted"?
I remember when they (Mozilla’s CV team) solicited feedback before they got started, I brought up that issue and proposed a different approach to gathering conversational speech data, but it wasn’t picked up. The belief that it’s better to have more but crappy data rather than less data matched to what you actually want to solve is quite pervasive.