211–220 of 279 posts
If I didn't know better I would have thought it was recorded by a person who was uncomfortable having their voice recorded.
Still insanely impressive though.
I can't tell if I'm starting to get that old person "new things are scary" instinct or if my gut level of fear about the implications of these things is warranted. As impressive as a lot of these models are, I can't help but feel like they're going to end up making an incredible amount of sterile soulless content that makes everyone's lives worse . We're already drowning in ad dominated cynical soulless computer gene…
I agree with this completely. Technology has always made us trade quality for low-quality quantity in exchange for convenience. People now interact more through technology which removes a lot of body language and other enriching experiences. The most dangerous aspect of this is that each step seems relatively harmless: right now, ChatGPT and DALL-E are amusements, but each small step is building a monstrous and as yo…
Technology evolves. Even if it may start with some low quality aspects, it doesn't need to stay that way.
> People now interact more through technology which removes a lot of body language and other enriching experiences.
Which is just different communication, not better, nor worse in general. Of course this kinda sucks for people who do not know the new communication-code well enough. But people do evolve communication to replace relevant missing parts. Body language for example was mostly replaced with emojis and memes, which can be better, or worse.
> we will forget what it's like to even be human.
You can't forget what you are. You are you everyday, ever minute, every second of your existence. What you speak about is people having a different culture from the one you know and understand. That's something completely different.
> technology is ultimately evil
Technology is a tool, is can't be evil or good. It's up to the users how they handle it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want to agree, but I searched on their website and found their narration service with 2 full book examples. I listened to the first one for a while and it's the first time an Ai narrator was good enough to keep me listening: https://www.audiostory.ai/2065785/11707800-alice-s-adventure...
It's noticable worse than the examples in the blog post. I mean, it's good enough for listening, but no better than the competition.
What is the competition that you are referring to?
Hey - developers behind ElevenLabs here. Thank you so much for the constructive and positive feedback - we’re taking it onboard! We’re currently focused on researching and deploying a different way for speech synthesis that can generate nuanced intonation and emotions by understanding text and taking context into account. Additionally, we provide creators with a way to clone their own voice based on very short sample…
Hi! Are your models english only, or do you plan on tackling other languages?
The “narrative” example is pretty good, but the “conversational” example is rather unpleasant to listen to. (Especially if you know how well Meryl Streep delivers that monologue in the original: https://youtu.be/Ja2fgquYTCg )
Let's talk about this "Narrative" example. When I listened to it, my first impression was that it must be the real actor they included for comparison purposes but that they failed to label it correctly. I thought it is not machine-generated. I couldn't tell the slightest artifact except what sounded like a low-bitrate sound encoding (maybe using a codec geared toward speech). Can you tell anything "off" about it? As…
Imagine if in-game voice chat automatically converts player speech into the voice of the character they're playing -- this would resolve a lot of the gender-based harassment problems arising from competitive games requiring vocal communication, since now _everyone's_ default is hiding the actual player's voice, contrasting the "just use a voice changer if you're a girl playing" suggestion which themselves draws atten…
I’m looking forward to NPCs having dynamic responses with real voices Doesn't have to be prerecorded, just trained
Imagine if in-game voice chat automatically converts player speech into the voice of the character they're playing -- this would resolve a lot of the gender-based harassment problems arising from competitive games requiring vocal communication, since now _everyone's_ default is hiding the actual player's voice, contrasting the "just use a voice changer if you're a girl playing" suggestion which themselves draws atten…
Interestingly, some of the robot styles take a very obvious and dramatic fake breath. I say "fake" since a robot doesn't need to breathe and it's not exactly considered a phoneme. The fake breaths don't really make the robot sound more convincing. When you listen to the first example labelled "Narrative" you can tell where a human speaker would have inhaled (which is something the AI could have picked up on from copi…
(ElevenLabs dev here) The generative voices and the way they sound is very much a function all the training data, sampling and interpolation as you also pointed out. As a lot of these do involve deep breaths, that why synthesized voice will also have it present albeit at sometimes different times than human. Interpunction is the biggest influence on where those pauses will happen. From the users so far they found it…
As a developer, can you tell the difference between "Narration" and the human speaker? What can we listen for or what gives it away? For me I listened to the "Narration" clip many times and as a native British English speaker also confirms in another comment, it seems very difficult/impossible to tell the first clip is generated. Congratulations on such an achievement!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with this completely. Technology has always made us trade quality for low-quality quantity in exchange for convenience. People now interact more through technology which removes a lot of body language and other enriching experiences. The most dangerous aspect of this is that each step seems relatively harmless: right now, ChatGPT and DALL-E are amusements, but each small step is building a monstrous and as yo…
There's no lack of revolutionary tech that has made life overall better with higher quality. Even like, a bic light is so much better quality than a flint and steel or fire sticks. Smart phones are fantastic quality computers that enable cool stuff like meeting up with friends without first having to leave a note at their house some amount of time beforehand Dishwashers and laundry machines and modern quality clothin…
> enabling feminism
Thats all it took?
So if theres no electricity - its back to square one?
Okay can I ask a question that has been bothering me for a long time? Why do seemingly all these text-to-speech programs attempt to produce spoken voice based solely on raw text ? Why don't they consume a MIDI-like text-markup language where you can write phonetic pronunciations along with markup about the emotion, volume, speed, etc.? I feel like this is a huge unnecessary roadblock holding back this kind of technol…
ElevenLabs dev here - we believe this is a 2 step process and agree it is needed! First, we want to the quality you get out-of-the-box to already by brilliant by taking context into account. Granted, that gets you sometimes 98% there and are working to add manipulation possibility to get you to that 100%; for long-texts though the quality you get is great. For second part, currently TTS providers give complicated tog…
I wonder, though, how much training people would need to understand what adjustments need to be made. Experienced actors and narrators should have a good sense of what to fix, but many people might have trouble identifying what sounds strange in the initial TTS output and how it needs to be changed.