Launch HN: Lyrebird (YC S17) – Create a digital copy of your voice

I don't buy the "raising awareness" argument, ethically speaking. To do that, you could release demo files that show the capability without weaponizing it through easy access. It'd be great to increase awareness around our vulnerability to EMP attacks, but we don't need to publish specs and or sell a working prototype to make that case.

This is just one of those areas where the negative implications, I believe, far outweigh the positive ones. Aside from the noble cause of helping the disabled, most of the use cases center around entertainment. As great as that may be, the likely application to fraud and the potential for a catastrophic misuse in matters of war and peace just dwarf any upside.

Seems like a really useful piece of technology. As you said, it's got quite a few applications in the gaming, film, medical and messaging industries.

That said, am I the only one imagining this getting abused by people in those fields as well? Seems like a good way to avoid paying voice actors for future work. Just record the minimum 30 recordings, then use this software to create all their future dialogue.

This could lead to some interesting lawsuits over who a character's voice belongs to and whether a company has the right to use someone's voice recordings to get free work done on future projects. Like how during the production of Trail of the Pink Panther, Peter Sellers' widow sued the film's producers and studio over them using clips of him from deleted scenes in earlier films in the movie.

> Seems from right out of the gate, they are breaking their own ethical guidelines as a cheap promotional tactic. If they care that little about themselves and a former president of the United States, what do they care about your likeness.

We state in our blogpost that we make an exception for Obama/Trump in order to raise public awareness. Both of them are regularly used in Machine Learning benchmarks (for example [0] [1]). Note that we don't allow users to generate from Trump/Obama's voice.

Once again, we care a lot about these issues and that's why we only allow users to copy their own voice.

[0] http://www.washington.edu/news/2017/07/11/lip-syncing-obama-... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk

These issues are challenging and suggestions about how you think the technology should be introduced/regulated are very welcome.

It's still hypocritical and insulting to the reader's intelligence.

You could make Obama say anything. He could say something humourous, something that he's never said before. You would have just as impressive of a demo if you had Obama say "I'm a little teapot short and stout..." and then used overlay text to promote yourself. You chose instead to make a video where he promotes your startup.

That is both hypocritical and immoral and not only using his personal likeness but, also the seat of the Presidency of the United States.

This fast and loose way that Lyrebird treats their technology only makes me think that they don't really think about the massive negative potential of the technology and just want to get scale / profitability as fast as possible.

I'd be interested in this too. I volunteer for a charity that produces a weekly talking newspaper for the visually impaired in the UK (where such things are very popular).

Our current production process requires a group consisting of editors, readers and technicians to get together every Friday morning from 7am to record an hour or more of news which is then mastered onto CD, duplicated hundreds of times and mailed out by 11am.

We usually have four readers each week (from a pool of 30 or so) who take it in turns to read the items. Some readers are better than others and sometimes readers don't turn up. Sometimes there are interruptions or disturbances to recording such as another reader in the studio coughing, rustling of papers, etc.

If we had the ability to digitise the voices of our readers it would enable our new (in development) totally digital production and distribution system (podcasts, streaming, etc.) to be produced at any convenient time and to allow our listeners to choose their preferred reader's voice(s).

The studio software side is using FL/OSS software, with Ardour as the digital audio workstation attached to a Delta 1010 digital input system and an Evolution UC33e control surface.

Being able to program the pre-production phase to generate the audio recordings using favourite readers voices which are then fed to the (automated) studio mastering process would give us some amazing functionality and flexibility to produce programmes on-demand with no studio presence required.

The development experience and final package will be documented and published for other talking services to adopt and adapt.