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Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

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Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#141

Post by gonzobonzo »

mentalgear wrote: post #108

While impressive, the paramount question stands: Why do we even need "emotional" voices? All that emotionality adds is that you get the illusion of a friend - a friend that can't help you in any way in the real world and who's confidentiality is as strong as the privacy policies & data security of the company running it - which often ultimately trends towards 0. Smart Neutral Voice Assistants could be a great help, b…

You answered the question yourself - "faking rapport and in general make you 'addicted' to loop you in babble with it."

Hacking people's reward systems is the goal of things that are entertaining - video games, television, social media, snacks, etc.

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#142

Post by wongarsu »

pjc50 wrote: post #103
wongarsu wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most immediate application for this might be in replacing call centers in various roles. And most of those are very conversational. For example tech support is in large parts about making the caller feel heard and getting them to do trouble shooting steps without feeling stupid. Sales is in large parts about getting the right person to talk to you and to keep them talking to you.

As is fake tech support. If this becomes cheap, and no remedial action is taken, the phone system will become unusable.

In many places tier one tech support is "fake" tech support. The kind where you ask users "what color is are the contacts if your power plug" because rebooting may solve the issue but most callers will lie about performing or having performed that step.

It's much better for specialized products. But products and services with a large and broad customer base spend the early stages of tech support filtering out the routine issues, and that lends itself to automaton

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#143

Post by SamPatt »

thfuran wrote: post #60
dmix wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are extremely well tuned to detect authenticity in communication. Especially younger generations raised on mass marketing. This is good in a way a scifi movie shows a tech, sounds cool and demos futuristic possibilities. But not quite passing the real human vibe yet. But I'm sure some people might find it preferable to a more to-the-point system like GPT or Siri/Alexa in certain niche cases not requiring immed…

>Humans are extremely well tuned to detect authenticity in communication. I think the long-standing success of advertising and propaganda suggests that people really aren't all that good at that.

I suspect success of advertising is less about people falling for deception and more about information availability. If you know nothing about two brands except you've heard the name of one 50 times in ads, you'll probably try it first.

I think propaganda is a better example, although again I think often people aren't deceived, they simply agree with the message or don’t care about the underlying truthfulness of the message and just use it as a way to align with their tribe, etc.

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#144

Post by orbital-decay »

mentalgear wrote: post #108

While impressive, the paramount question stands: Why do we even need "emotional" voices? All that emotionality adds is that you get the illusion of a friend - a friend that can't help you in any way in the real world and who's confidentiality is as strong as the privacy policies & data security of the company running it - which often ultimately trends towards 0. Smart Neutral Voice Assistants could be a great help, b…

Emotions convey a ton of meaning in human communications, not necessarily an illusion of friendship. It's a huge side channel and there's a clear use case for an assistant to not sound lifeless and robotic. Scams, addictions, privacy loss and many other things deviating from the idealistic sci-fi portrayals will stay regardless of the tech if not treated on the cultural level (which is way harder to do and nobody likes doing it, preferring to shift the responsibility onto someone else).

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#145

Post by kaiwen1 »

martingoodson wrote: post #104

I played with this last night with my four-year old daughter. We had fun with asking Miles to explain what bones are made of etc. Today, she asked "where has that robot guy gone?". Crying now because I won't let her talk to Miles anymore. She has already developed an emotional connection to it. Worrying indeed.

Tangential, but... when my daughter was 8 or 9, we read _I, Robot_ together, and both both cried when Gloria's parents decided to separate her from Robbie, her robot companion. Such a fond memory to this day.

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#146

Post by Workaccount2 »

keiferski wrote: post #80
thekevan wrote: post #10

It's good, but it still sounds fake to me, but in a different way. The voice itself sounds like a human, undoubtedly. But the cadence and the rhythm of speaking are off. It sounds like someone who isn't a podcaster trying to speak in the personality of a podcaster. It just sounds like someone trying too hard and speaking in an unnatural way.

I tried the demo and could tell it was fake in the first five seconds. IMO it sounds like it was trained on Northern California founders giving a pitch for their startup. Way too enthusiastic and trying too hard to sound natural.

For all they talk about diversity, you can pretty much pinpoint every tech product to SV because they are all using the same cultural cookie cutter.

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#147

Post by noodlesUK »

I tried the demo, but I decided to not say anything. It desperately tried to make me talk. The entire experience was bizarre and unsettling - another commenter described it as a northern Californian startup CEO’s level of strange fake enthusiasm. As a Brit, I found the level of synthetic bubbliness in the voice extremely off-putting. I’d hate to live in a world where that was the way everyone behaved in real life.

The entire thing felt like it was a hyper advanced engagement hack. Not there to achieve anything (even my enjoyment), just something to keep my attention locked on my device.

AI products in the future should have a clear objective for me as a user - what can they help me do? Some simulacrum of a person that is just there to talk to me at length is probably going to be a net negative on society. As a tech demo, this makes me afraid for the future.

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#148

Post by Workaccount2 »

hereonout2 wrote: post #79
energy123 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now here's a little thought experiment. What does the world look like in 5 years when everyone is talking to these things that are indistinguishable from a real person? They will be funnier, more compassionate, less judgemental, smarter, and superficially "better" in every respect.

Thinking a bit further ahead, what does the world look like in 30-40 years when a generation has been accustomed to this type of interaction from birth. Feels like trying to imagine the societal impacts of the internet in the early 90s.

Would be cool if we could finally kill off false information. Not that I trust big tech to do so, but at least the possibility for the most trusted entity in a persons life to be strongly grounded in reality is there.

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#149

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

smusamashah wrote: post #126

I played around. Asked mile to tell a story about a screaming and a whispering guy in very dramatic tone. It couldn't do it as expressively as the voice samples on the page. It was plain reading mostly. I could hear that this generation is text based. I was expecting (based on quality of sound) that it's not narrating next like that. Example: it was saying "two dude-us" while trying to tell a melodramatic story. Whic…

> Example: it was saying "two dude-us" while trying to tell a melodramatic story. Which I assume was originally "two dude...s" or something.

Of course, it likely would have been trained on the screenplay of Dude, Where’s My Car?.

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#150

Post by [deleted] »

RockRobotRock wrote: post #122
lucw wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one thing: language learning

When I meet people in VR who are ESL, I can tell based on their accent and mannerisms that they learned English by playing video games with westerners or watched a lot of YouTube. Do we really want to dilute the uniqueness of language by making everyone sound like they came out of a lab in California?

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