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Audio is the one area small labs are winning

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Re: Audio is the one area small labs are winning

#61
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of saying that without backing it up? Either you think it's so obvious it doesn't need backing up (in which case you don't need to say it), or ...? The reason it matters is that soon, any time somebody sees a comment they don't like or think is stupid, they'll just say, "eh a bot said that," and totally dilute the rest of the discussion, even if the comment was real.

We are *quickly* approaching a Tuesday where "bot detected, opinion rejected" is going to be a default assumption.

It's monday today so I approach we just have to wait for 24 hours for tomorrow.

I do feel like AI has made us distrust each other at such a massive scale seen nothing like before. Previously there could still be bot-like comments but they were still written by human or so. Not anymore now and things are getting more sophisticated. I 100% believe that its possible to not have --. You are absolutely right and some other things that I have associated with Ai writing so at this point, AI might write such a way that I can't filter out if its written by AI or not.

It's a real psychosis inducing thought imo all while AI is inducing job insecurity from top to bottom.

Re: Audio is the one area small labs are winning

#62
post #30

Can someone reccomend to me: a service that will generate a loopable engine drone for a "WWII Plane Japan Kawasaki Ki-61"? It doesn't have to be perfect, just convincing in a hollywood blockbuster context, and not just a warmed over clone of a Merlin engine sound. Turns out Suno will make whatever background music I need, but I want a "unique sound effect on demand" service. I'm not convinced voice AI stuff is sustai…

https://elevenlabs.io/sound-effects With the prompt "WWII Plane Japan Kawasaki Ki-61 flying by, propeller airplane" and setting looping on and 30 sec duration manually instead of auto (the duration predictor fails pretty bad at this prompt, you need to be logged in to set duration manually) it works pretty well. No idea if it's close to that specific airplane though it sounds like a ww2 plane to me though.

are there any open source alternatives to this as well if I may ask?

Re: Audio is the one area small labs are winning

#65

Good article and I agree with everything in there. For my own voice agent I decided to make him PTT by default as the problems of the model accurately guessing the end of utterance are just too great. I think it can be solved in the future but, I haven't seen a really good example of it being done with modern day tech including this labs. Fundamentally it all comes down to the fact that different humans have differen…

Check out Sparrow-0. The demo shows an impressive ability to predict when the speaker has finished talking:

https://www.tavus.io/post/sparrow-0-advancing-conversational...

Re: Audio is the one area small labs are winning

#66
post #47

OpenAI and google are too scared of music industry lawyers to tackle this. Internally they without a doubt have models that would crush these startups over night if they chose to release them.

What about Disney's lawyers? GenAI for images exists ...

Re: Audio is the one area small labs are winning

#67
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of saying that without backing it up? Either you think it's so obvious it doesn't need backing up (in which case you don't need to say it), or ...? The reason it matters is that soon, any time somebody sees a comment they don't like or think is stupid, they'll just say, "eh a bot said that," and totally dilute the rest of the discussion, even if the comment was real.

We are *quickly* approaching a Tuesday where "bot detected, opinion rejected" is going to be a default assumption.

And it will have second-order effects where real humans will reduce their participation because they believe there are only bots or tired of accusations of being one.

Re: Audio is the one area small labs are winning

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are *quickly* approaching a Tuesday where "bot detected, opinion rejected" is going to be a default assumption.

It's monday today so I approach we just have to wait for 24 hours for tomorrow. I do feel like AI has made us distrust each other at such a massive scale seen nothing like before. Previously there could still be bot-like comments but they were still written by human or so. Not anymore now and things are getting more sophisticated. I 100% believe that its possible to not have --. You are absolutely right and some othe…

> AI might write such a way that I can't filter out if its written by AI or not.

This is precisely the point for "farmers" that have no other motivation than to make money. They're not trying to troll us or promote a political view or sell something. They farm accounts and sell them on a secondary market for people who do use them nefariously. An aged, well-upvoted account has value for those groups. So they have every incentive to blend in by parroting back the most popular or neutral talking points.

Re: Audio is the one area small labs are winning

#69
It's amazing how good open-weight STT and TTS have gotten, so there's no need to pay for Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, Eleven-Labs etc.

Sharing my setup in case it may be useful for others; it's especially useful when working with CLI agents like Code Code or Codex-CLI:

STT: Hex [1] (open-source), with Parakeet V3 - stunningly fast, near-instant transcription. The slight accuracy drop relative to bigger models is immaterial when you're talking to an AI. I always ask it to restate back to me what it understood, and it gives back a nicely structured version -- this helps confirm understanding as well as likely helps the CLI agent stay on track. It is a MacOS native app and leverages the CoreML/Neural Engine to get extremely fast transcription (I used to recommend a similar app Handy but it has frequent stuttering issues, and Hex is actually even faster, which I didn't think was possible!)

TTS: Kyutai's Pocket-TTS [2], just 100M params, and amazing speech quality (English only). I made a voice plugin [3] based on this, for Claude Code so it can speak out short updates whenever CC stops. It uses a combination of hooks that nudge the main agent to append a speakable summary, falling back to using a headless agent in case the main agent forgets. Turns out to be surprisingly useful. It's also fun as you can customize the speaking style and mirror your vibe and "colorful language" etc.

The voice plugin gives commands to control it:

    /voice:speak stop
    /voice:speak azelma (change the voice)
    /voice:speak prompt 
[1] Hex https://github.com/kitlangton/Hex

[2] Pocket-TTS https://github.com/kyutai-labs/pocket-tts

[3] Voice plugin for Claude Code: https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/plugins-detai...

Re: Audio is the one area small labs are winning

#70
Audio models are also tiny, which is probably why small labs are doing well in the space. I run a LoRA'd Whisper v3 Large for a client. We can fit 4 versions of the model in memory at once on a ~$1/hr A10 and have half the VRAM leftover.

Each of the LoRA tunes we did took maybe 2-3 hours on the same A10 instance.

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