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Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

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Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#151

Post by Workaccount2 »

therein wrote: post #19
bloomingkales wrote: post #11

This is so good that it's disarming. People are going to blabber everything to it, so we need a local private model. It's a lot to ask, I know. Incredible tech.

Same, I have been trying it for the last few minutes, and it is crazy. Try asking if it if it speaks a different language. It will pretend like it can and then give you some humor. But then you probe a bit more and it tells you it is really good at listening and can listen to you in other languages. I tell it alright I'll talk to you in a different language but you will reply back in English. It says you got it and t…

We were playing with it last night and it could understand Spanish, but it couldn't speak it.

My assumption is the LLM can translate no problem, but the audio model can't do Spanish. It seemed like there was an external catch to stop the model from trying too.

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#152

Post by spoaceman7777 »

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…

To accurately imitate human speech?

You could type something, and it could be read like a human.

There are plenty of other reasons, but they're equally as obvious. I don't understand what purpose you have in attempting to make this point.

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#153

Post by raus22 »

noodlesUK wrote: post #147

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. Th…

> I found the level of synthetic bubbliness in the voice extremely off-putting.

My thought exactly, it was to the extreme in its, as you say, bubbliness. I would not be able to use a tool that had this behavior.

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#154

Post by danielbln »

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?

Why would that be? In Elevenlabs Reader I can already choose a bunch of different accents, including southern English, Australian and so on.

The people behind this demo already said their publishing different languages and accents soon along with open models you can run yourself.

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#156

Post by gunsle »

gonzobonzo wrote: post #141
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.

Can already see this in the hordes of lonely dudes using the AI girlfriend apps on the app stores…can’t imagine how hooked people are gonna get when it actually sounds and talks like a real person. The chatbots now are so limited idk how anyone enjoys them.

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#157

Post by brendaniribe »

Hey, it’s Brendan from Sesame. The feedback is spot on. We still have so much to do to make it good. Inspiring but still many steps away from a great experience. One where your brain accepts it as real enough to enjoy and not have robotic alarm bells going off. Today, we’re firmly in the valley, but we’re optimistic we can climb out.

Verbal communication is complex. There’s a big list of interesting challenges to tackle. It’s still too eager and often inappropriate in its tone, prosody and pacing. The timing of when it responds is wrong more often than right. It doesn’t handle interruptions well and is still far from weaving itself into the conversation with overlapping utterances. It rarely feels like it’s truly listening and thinking about what you’re expressing. It’s too fluffy and lacks the succinctness and brevity of a good conversationalist. Its personality is inconsistent. Then add in hallucinations, terrible memory, no track of time, lack of awareness…

The list keeps going.

I believe the community can make meaningful progress on all of these.

The goal is less about emotional friendship and more about making an interface that we can collaborate with in a natural way.

Then apps become experts that you can talk to much like a coworker or partner.

The models are already powerful enough to do so many things. But finding the right prompt is often tricky and time consuming.

Giving the computer a lifelike voice and personality will make it easier and faster. Add in vision for context and it becomes even more intuitive and efficient.

I’m more convinced than ever that we’re at the cusp of a new interface.

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#158

Post by nmstoker »

orbital-decay wrote: post #144
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 lik…

Can't say I've missed emotions in Google Search or Excel. In chat from something designed to help you, there's a fairly narrow range of emotional cases that are relevant and useful:

- Confidence/confusion: if the bot thinks it misheard or cannot understand you or it lacks confidence in the ability to reliably respond then it's a handy channel

- Dangerous/Seriousness: an update for something genuinely serious, with major negative implications or costs

Most others are fairly annoying (would anyone want a bot to surface frustration or obsequiousness or being overly agreeable / "bubbly" as here?!)

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#159

Post by pzo »

richrichardsson wrote: post #94

Still suffers the same problem that all Voice Recognition seems to suffer; cannot reliably detect that the speaker has finished speaking. This was almost worse though because it did feel like a rude person just interrupting instead of a dumb computer not being able to pick up normal social cues around when the person they're listening to has finished.

It's even hard to detect when humans stopped talking when talking to human while having high latency especially at the beginning of the call when you testing how big latency it is.

Re: Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice

#160

Post by pmarreck »

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #64
pmarreck wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Awareness will inoculate people. “Authenticating” someone via the mere sound of their voice was always broken, anyway… Ever see the great movie Sneakers (1992)?

Do you live in reality? Because that clearly isn’t happening.

And phones enable scams. So your idea is to… Abandon all telephony??

You should not judge a tool by the worst use someone can come up with it

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