Launch HN: Lyrebird (YC S17) – Create a digital copy of your voice

Hi HN!

We are the co-founders of Lyrebird (https://lyrebird.ai/) and PhD students in AI at University of Montreal. We are building speech synthesis technologies to improve the way we communicate with computers. Right now, our key innovation is that we can copy the voice of someone else and make it say anything. The tech is still at its early stage but we believe that it is eventually going to make possible a wide range of new applications such as:

- reading loud text messages with the voice of the sender,

- reading audiobooks with the voice of your choice,

- giving a personalized digital voice to people who lost their voice due to a disease,

- allowing video game makers to have more customized dialogs generated on the fly, or avatars of their players,

- allowing movie makers to freeze the voice of their actors so that they can still use it if the actor ages or dies.

Yesterday we launched a beta version of our voice-cloning software: anyone can record one minute of audio and get a digital voice that sounds like them.

We know that many on HN are concerned about potential misuses surrounding these technologies and we share your concern. We write further on our ethical stance on this page: https://lyrebird.ai/ethics/.

Our blogpost about the launch: https://lyrebird.ai/blog/create-your-voice-avatar that features the first video combining generated audio and generated elements of the video.

There was a thread about us on HN when we launched our website four months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14182262) but at that time, no one could test our software yet and we did not really answer any question of the community. So this time we are ready for questions and would love some feedback!

The innovation I'm waiting for is

>> reading audiobooks with the voice of your choice, AND the speed of my choice.

Sounds amazing! Just to add a usecase - for many people, creating a decent voiceover is one of the big sticking points for producing youtube videos or educational courses. If I could write a script, and have software generate a decent enough voiceover, it would be amazing.

It's not even necessary to copy anyone's voice, as long as there's a selection of the most comprehensible and human-sounding ones.

Then, you could even automatically generate slideshow presentation from a few illustrations and headlines, and that would make "rendering" articles into videos very fast and easy. I'm sure a lot of people would pay for such service.

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By the way, recently I've encountered Deep Voice 2, a similar research project by baidu:

http://research.baidu.com/deep-voice-2-multi-speaker-neural-...

Results are very impressive.

Hey.. how does lyrebird handle accent? I work in education space and due to accent of people in my country, the content doesnt work well with global audience.

are you open for beta? would like to try out your api on education content.

For now, it works better with American English accent but it is still able to adapt to other accents.

Our upcoming versions should be more robust to different accents and we also plan to extend it to other languages.