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Having grown up with various levels of automated speech, today's speech synth is really good. At times it takes a few seconds of listening to find a "tell" that

by bane 11y ago

Having grown up with various levels of automated speech, today's speech synth is really good. At times it takes a few seconds of listening to find a "tell" that lets you know it's not a person or a pre-recording of a person. Here's some examples of what I grew up with for comparison: -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ccKPSVQcFk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ccKPSVQcFk -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rR0Ofu0M53g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rR0Ofu0M53g -https://youtu.be/4S3G3veop2w?t=102 https://youtu.be/4S3G3veop2w?t=102 -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ginShVeGpGY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ginShVeGpGY and then suddenly in the last few years you get Siri. With a few more rules, I wouldn't even mind if modern voices read entire books to me. They need to make more pauses, take breaths for example, or they can be exhausting to listen to...but I have the sense that we're pretty close.

teddyh 11y ago
Of the examples you gave, the first one is a real human voice run though a vocoder, and the last one is a real human voice sampled at a really crappy sample rate and played back using hardware never intended for digital sampled audio.
- bane 11y ago
  Speech synthesis is a spectrum of technologies. In the early days there really wasn't much difference between recording somebody and playing back, and using chopped up phoneme recordings or words and reordering to produce speech. It's kind of like those robot voices used by telephone companies and answering machines for years, they're just a prerecording of somebody saying some words and numbers and the machine connects them back in the appropriate sequence. At finer granularity you simply record somebody saying phonemes and reconstruct them back into a voice that can say pretty much anything. Alter pitch and you can have it ask questions or sing. This technique has been around in some way for decades. Here's an excellent interview with the guy who did much of the foundational work in the field. http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-101-forrest-mozer-pioneer-in-digitized-speech http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-101-forrest-m...

by bane 11y ago

teddyh 11y ago

Of the examples you gave, the first one is a real human voice run though a vocoder, and the last one is a real human voice sampled at a really crappy sample rate and played back using hardware never intended for digital sampled audio.

bane 11y ago
Speech synthesis is a spectrum of technologies. In the early days there really wasn't much difference between recording somebody and playing back, and using chopped up phoneme recordings or words and reordering to produce speech. It's kind of like those robot voices used by telephone companies and answering machines for years, they're just a prerecording of somebody saying some words and numbers and the machine connects them back in the appropriate sequence. At finer granularity you simply record somebody saying phonemes and reconstruct them back into a voice that can say pretty much anything. Alter pitch and you can have it ask questions or sing. This technique has been around in some way for decades. Here's an excellent interview with the guy who did much of the foundational work in the field. http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-101-forrest-mozer-pioneer-in-digitized-speech http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-101-forrest-m...