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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

#111

Post by hammadh »

dejobaan wrote: post #99

I love the voice quality, and have been talking with a bunch of other game devs about how this and other TTS solutions have been making remarkable strides recently (also visited your GDC booth this past week!). Some years ago now, I worked on an experiment that auto-generated a gaming-centric TV show on Steam[1], but one of the big hurdles was that TTS was pretty flat (Amazon Polly); we couldn't get as expressive as…

Thanks for the feedback. We certainly want to support gaming studios of all sizes and are working with few of them to understand the workflows. What we've seen is not everyone wants a high-fidelity clone (which cost more), most of their voiceovers can be done with zeroshot cloning (quick clones that don't cost much).

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

#112

Post by gus_massa »

JohnFen wrote: post #25

This is a good reminder that we all need to have a "safe word" that we can use to verify to the important people in our life that the voice they may be hearing on the phone or elsewhere is really us. Get a panicky call from "me" in the middle of the night? If I don't include my safe word, that call isn't from me.

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 any of your relatives or friends, but an exact voice can be interpreted only as one and it's easier to know that that person is safe.

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

#113

Post by psychoslave »

bitL wrote: post #45
burkaman wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess eventually people will go back to only meeting face to face for important communications. I don't know what the way forward is for news. I truly do not understand people like these founders, obviously they understand the future they're creating. "If not us, someone else would do it" is not an excuse. Neither is "I like money".

There are some cool uses like dubbing movies in foreign languages while keeping the original "voice styles" or having your long dead relatives talking to you in some memorabilia etc. It could also cause unexpected creativity explosion e.g. in games or fan fiction movies. To avoid misuses we might perhaps find the only good use of blockchain.

>long dead relatives talking to you in some memorabilia etc.

It seems a bit weird to me though. I mean, looking back at old records can still pass as mere nostalgic behavior. Wanting new sentences pronounced in disguise of lost relative voices is not great in term of respect for these people to share my own feelings.

Also I guess that now there is not much preventing completely new songs with whatever lyrics staring voices of Elvis, Hendrix and Pavarotti. Actually a continuous flow of on the fly generated lyrics seems perfectly plausible at this level, isn't it?

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

#115

Post by madeofpalk »

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...

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

#116

Post by andai »

burkaman wrote: post #23
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 guess eventually people will go back to only meeting face to face for important communications. I don't know what the way forward is for news. I truly do not understand people like these founders, obviously they understand the future they're creating. "If not us, someone else would do it" is not an excuse. Neither is "I like money".

There's a book I've been waiting years for the audiobook to come out. Plenty of legitimate uses for this tech. Plenty of horrible ones too. It's the same with many technologies, no? I don't think outright banning it makes any sense.

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

#117

Post by gus_massa »

ugh123 wrote: post #94
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?

Do you want to tell us why it should be illegal? Comparing something like this to nuclear weapons is a bit hyperbolic, at least without giving more context.

Nuclear weapons are only ilegal if you don't have them.

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

#118

Post by Dowwie »

I recommend you immediately add identity verification (state-issued identification verification), set up appropriate secrets store for PII, and audit trail EVERYTHING your users are doing, storing the contents in a secure location. Yesterday. This service will be used to harm others, shortly. I do think that there are exciting, honest things that can be done with this service but you need to set up some friction for use. Know-your-customer rules are going to apply to this category in short time.

People here are talking about taking this service offline but I think everyone needs to be thinking about countermeasures, working on those services next. The genie is already out of the bottle. The degree of effort to put this together is low enough that it will be replicated around the world.

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

#119

Post by rtp4me »

manuelmoreale wrote: post #64
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'm with you on this. I can't honestly think a good use case for the average user to generate audio this way. Maybe some niche use case in like movie or tv production where you can generate a missing line without flying in an actor or something. Or maybe for generating dialogues for videogames. But those are business use cases, not things for the genral public.

Personally, I would find this very useful. I (used to) create internal tech training videos for our organization and would routinely stumble when doing voice overlay. Even though everything was scripted out, it took lots of editing time to get the audio and video aligned without the vocal stumbling (ahs, ehs, silence, voice redos, etc). Just my $0.02
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