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Deep-learning text-to-speech tool for generating voices of various characters

15.ai

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Re: Deep-learning text-to-speech tool for generating voices of various characters

#11
post #6

From the about section: > How much does maintaining the servers cost? > It depends on the amount of traffic, but the minimum baseline is around several thousands of US dollars every month. This is expected as inference is very GPU intensive and a sufficient number of instances need to be spun up to handle thousands of requests coming in every minute. Everything is paid out of pocket. Wow, impressive commitment for so…

Yeah, running anything related to AI involves GPU instances. An alternative is to point people to using Google Colab where you can get access to a GPU for free, but that's not a smooth end user experience for most folks.

Re: Deep-learning text-to-speech tool for generating voices of various characters

#12
The results are really impressive. At the moment I'm considering spending a low 3-figure amount for a professionally spoken intro for a new podcast. Some of the lines I generated are in my top 5 easily, human speakers don't have a lot of edge for short generic blurbs of text anymore it seems.

Re: Deep-learning text-to-speech tool for generating voices of various characters

#13
post #10

Welp, after messing around with a few voices I was completely impressed with Glados's. This is really cool because I have no idea how the character's voice was synthesized, but apparently ML can do it for me so props to that.

I'm pretty sure the real Glados voice effect is mostly pitch correction and formant shifting. You can do it with Melodyne at least (which, to be fair, is also computer magic-- just a different kind than this one!) I just found a video on YT with an example of recreating this in Melodyne: https://youtu.be/1oQn66gvwKA

[deleted]

Re: Deep-learning text-to-speech tool for generating voices of various characters

#15
post #6

From the about section: > How much does maintaining the servers cost? > It depends on the amount of traffic, but the minimum baseline is around several thousands of US dollars every month. This is expected as inference is very GPU intensive and a sufficient number of instances need to be spun up to handle thousands of requests coming in every minute. Everything is paid out of pocket. Wow, impressive commitment for so…

Yeah, running anything related to AI involves GPU instances. An alternative is to point people to using Google Colab where you can get access to a GPU for free, but that's not a smooth end user experience for most folks.

> running anything related to AI involves GPU instances

This is not true. A _lot_ of AI applications use algorithms such as logistic regression or random forests and don’t need GPUs - partly, of course, because GPUs are so expensive and these approaches are good enough (or more than good enough) for many applications.

Re: Deep-learning text-to-speech tool for generating voices of various characters

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, running anything related to AI involves GPU instances. An alternative is to point people to using Google Colab where you can get access to a GPU for free, but that's not a smooth end user experience for most folks.

> running anything related to AI involves GPU instances This is not true. A _lot_ of AI applications use algorithms such as logistic regression or random forests and don’t need GPUs - partly, of course, because GPUs are so expensive and these approaches are good enough (or more than good enough) for many applications.

Whoops, sloppy generalization on my part. You're completely right of course, thanks! I've been focusing on deep learning a lot lately, to the point where AI has become an alias for those exciting new GPU-heavy techniques.

Re: Deep-learning text-to-speech tool for generating voices of various characters

#17
post #6

From the about section: > How much does maintaining the servers cost? > It depends on the amount of traffic, but the minimum baseline is around several thousands of US dollars every month. This is expected as inference is very GPU intensive and a sufficient number of instances need to be spun up to handle thousands of requests coming in every minute. Everything is paid out of pocket. Wow, impressive commitment for so…

You just sort of assume that this is correct? The person[1] running this comes across as a severely unstable character, that number is probably hyperbole.

[1] https://twitter.com/fifteenai

Re: Deep-learning text-to-speech tool for generating voices of various characters

#18
post #17
post #6

From the about section: > How much does maintaining the servers cost? > It depends on the amount of traffic, but the minimum baseline is around several thousands of US dollars every month. This is expected as inference is very GPU intensive and a sufficient number of instances need to be spun up to handle thousands of requests coming in every minute. Everything is paid out of pocket. Wow, impressive commitment for so…

You just sort of assume that this is correct? The person[1] running this comes across as a severely unstable character, that number is probably hyperbole. [1] https://twitter.com/fifteenai

Not a hyperbole – I can provide proof if you'd like.

Re: Deep-learning text-to-speech tool for generating voices of various characters

#19

Welp, after messing around with a few voices I was completely impressed with Glados's. This is really cool because I have no idea how the character's voice was synthesized, but apparently ML can do it for me so props to that.

My favorite is Carl Butananadilewski, but I just ended up making him say actual phrases from ATHF in the end. Was hoping to see Meatwad as a character option.
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