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Deep-learning text-to-speech tool for generating voices of various characters

15.ai

71–80 of 88 posts

Re: Deep-learning text-to-speech tool for generating voices of various characters

#71
post #28

I don't usually expect much from demos like this, but I'm kind of surprised how impressive the results currently are. They're definitely not perfect, you're definitely getting some odd clipping and noise, but this shows a large amount of promise. Being able to generate voices for games would enable a lot of interesting indie projects. IMO people should be paying more attention the market implications of products like…

> people should be paying more attention the market implications of products like this than to the social implications. People will absolutely suffer harm from this tech, but hey, think about the dollars that could be made! No, we should absolutely be paying more attention to the social implications.

Musicians Union?

Re: Deep-learning text-to-speech tool for generating voices of various characters

#73

The security implications of this kind of tech are scary. Going forward it will become really easy to reproduce the voice of anyone! It seems not a lot of training data is required to achieve reasonable results (e.g. Spong Bob is just 27min of voice, Half Life Black Mesa Announcer is just 1.9min!!). This stuff could be easily leveraged for scams and deep fakes (along with deep learning models that could also tweak li…

It's already happening:

A Voice Deepfake Was Used To Scam A CEO Out Of $243,000:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessedamiani/2019/09/03/a-voice...

Re: Deep-learning text-to-speech tool for generating voices of various characters

#75
post #70
post #6

From the about section: > How much does maintaining the servers cost? > It depends on the amount of traffic, but the minimum baseline is around several thousands of US dollars every month. This is expected as inference is very GPU intensive and a sufficient number of instances need to be spun up to handle thousands of requests coming in every minute. Everything is paid out of pocket. Wow, impressive commitment for so…

Out of curiosity, as I have no visibility about the infra actually required- but at that cost, would it not be easier to just have a machine under a desk somewhere?

Not for the kind of inference running here, I'd imagine.

There are few key reasons why most realtime inference is done on the cloud:

- Scale. Deep learning models especially tend to have poor latency, especially as they grow in size. As a result, you need to scale up replicas to meet demand at a way lower level of traffic than you do for a normal web app. At one point, AI Dungeon needed over 700 servers to support just thousands of concurrent players.

- Cost. Related to the above, GPUs are really expensive to buy. A g4dn.xlarge instance (the most popular AWS EC2 instance for GPU inference) is $0.526/hour on demand. To hit $3,000 per month in spend, you'd need to be running ~8 of them 24/7. Prices vary with purchasing GPUs, but you could expect 8 NVIDIA T4's to run around $20,000 at minimum, plus the cost of other components and maintainence. To be clear, that's very conservative--it's unlikely you'll get consistent traffic. What's more likely is you'll have some periods of very little traffic where you need one or two GPUs, and other high load periods where you'll need 10+.

3. Less universal of an issue, but the cloud gives you much better access to chips at lower switching costs. If NVIDIA releases a new GPU that's even better for inference, switching to it (once its available on your cloud) will be a tweak in your YAML. If you ever switch to ASICs like AWS's Inferentia or GCP's TPUs, which in many cases give way better performance and economics than GPUs, you'll also naturally have to be on their cloud.

However, there is a lot that can be done to lower the cost of inference even in the cloud. I listed some things in a comment higher up, but basically, there are some assumptions you can make with inference that allow you to optimize pretty hard on instance price and autoscaling behavior.

Re: Deep-learning text-to-speech tool for generating voices of various characters

#76

I don't usually expect much from demos like this, but I'm kind of surprised how impressive the results currently are. They're definitely not perfect, you're definitely getting some odd clipping and noise, but this shows a large amount of promise. Being able to generate voices for games would enable a lot of interesting indie projects. IMO people should be paying more attention the market implications of products like…

I wonder if there are any legal concerns with using the voices of well known characters/actors like this in a commercial context.

Re: Deep-learning text-to-speech tool for generating voices of various characters

#77
post #76

I don't usually expect much from demos like this, but I'm kind of surprised how impressive the results currently are. They're definitely not perfect, you're definitely getting some odd clipping and noise, but this shows a large amount of promise. Being able to generate voices for games would enable a lot of interesting indie projects. IMO people should be paying more attention the market implications of products like…

I wonder if there are any legal concerns with using the voices of well known characters/actors like this in a commercial context.

I don't think a voice can be copyrighted, but IANAL so you shouldn't bank on that.

If a voice could be copyrighted, or if this was a trademark issue or something, I strongly suspect that this site would not fall under fair use regardless of whether or not it was commercial. But again, IANAL, so I don't feel confident making any kind of strong claim about that either.

Re: Deep-learning text-to-speech tool for generating voices of various characters

#78
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there are any legal concerns with using the voices of well known characters/actors like this in a commercial context.

I don't think a voice can be copyrighted, but IANAL so you shouldn't bank on that. If a voice could be copyrighted, or if this was a trademark issue or something, I strongly suspect that this site would not fall under fair use regardless of whether or not it was commercial. But again, IANAL, so I don't feel confident making any kind of strong claim about that either.

> I don't think a voice can be copyrighted, but IANAL so you shouldn't bank on that.

The audio content (which includes voices) of the source work is copyrighted, and a mechanical transform of that work (which deep learning to mimic the voices clearly is) would seem to be a derivative in at least the literal sense.

Re: Deep-learning text-to-speech tool for generating voices of various characters

#79
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are looking at the current implementation and not thinking about the implication. One, this tech absolutely could be used to fool someone. Not everyone will be listening with a critical ear. Played back over a phone or injecting a phrase or two in otherwise spoken samples will fool many people. I guarantee you someone will be using this to make their own MLP episodes on YouTube specifically designed to scare chil…

> One, this tech absolutely could be used to fool someone. The problem I have here is that it's already not hard to fool people. I don't think it's feasible for us to say that we're going to put something that could be highly beneficial on hold just because we don't want to deal with social education efforts that we kind of already need to tackle anyway. Per your example, if we get rid of deepfakes, it's not clear to…

> If people today don't realize that voices can already be convincingly faked, then that's a really serious problem, and if democratizing that ability causes society in general to become more aware of the potential of disinformation, then honestly that might even be a good thing that we should be encouraging.

I've wondered about that angle as well. You can't put the genie back in the bottle, so maybe the best way to combat the threat of deepfaked misinformation is actually to take the opposite approach and make it as easy as possible for normal people to generate their own deepfakes; that way it becomes common knowledge that such things are possible (similar to how photoshop is common knowledge today).

Re: Deep-learning text-to-speech tool for generating voices of various characters

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think a voice can be copyrighted, but IANAL so you shouldn't bank on that. If a voice could be copyrighted, or if this was a trademark issue or something, I strongly suspect that this site would not fall under fair use regardless of whether or not it was commercial. But again, IANAL, so I don't feel confident making any kind of strong claim about that either.

> I don't think a voice can be copyrighted, but IANAL so you shouldn't bank on that. The audio content (which includes voices) of the source work is copyrighted, and a mechanical transform of that work (which deep learning to mimic the voices clearly is) would seem to be a derivative in at least the literal sense.

IANAL and I would say no. Anyone is free to imitate any else. A machine doesn't make that different. It would be a violation to claim you were someone else while doing the imitation.
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