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Google’s DeepMind Achieves Speech-Generation Breakthrough
- sharemywin 10y agoalways wondered if something like this could be done. Now just train it on an famous individuals wav data and you got a free celebrity endorsement.
- MrZongle2 10y agoI think that something rather different may take place: celebrity voices will be copyrighted (or granted similar protection under law) by the individual themselves or their estate, and licensed for use. David Attenborough, Morgan Freeman and Billy West: call your offices.
- yeezul 10y agoHaving Mr. Freeman tell me which directions to take will definitely make road trips more fun.
- em500 10y agoThis has been a (paid) thing for a long time: https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/sat-nav/maps-services/shop/navigation-voices/ https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/sat-nav/maps-services/shop/navi... Recording: https://youtu.be/2ljFfL-mL70 https://youtu.be/2ljFfL-mL70
- sharemywin 10y agoHow would you copyright it? Neural Nets have weights that mean nothing outside of NN. The samples could be copyrighted. Maybe you train it on a cross between an impersonator and the famous person. Wouldn't that be a derivative work? (Famous training samples, impersonator training samples, copyrightable quote)
- jfoster 10y agoDerivative works are usually subject to the copyrights of the works they are derived from. If you used samples you were not licenced to use, you'd potentially be violating copyright, but I think this is one of those areas where the law hasn't yet caught up to technology. As far as I know, no cases have brought this up yet.
- SyneRyder 10y agoYup! There was a Planet Money episode about this, called Frank Sinatra's Mug. It's all about how Frank Sinatra had the laws in California changed in order to protect the likeness - including the sound - of a celebrity. Apparently it's Section 3334 of California's Civil Code. Quoting from the episode: "Essentially what it says is that you can't take somebody's name, or their likeness, or their signature or their voice, and use it for commercial gain without permission from that person. And if you do that, you're liable." The full episode is here - it's one of Planet Money's best. http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=459116467 http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...
- jfoster 10y agoWhat if they are trained on soundalikes' voices? The tricky part would be that you probably couldn't label it as the celebrity's voice.
- MrZongle2 10y agoAre you implying that there could be a market for synthesized knock-off celebrity voices? :D
- sharemywin 10y agoThe more I think about it even if you used originals you could licensed John Wayne's voice from Disney(or who ever owns clips of it) or something you couldn't imply there was an endorsement it would be fraud.
- inputcoffee 10y agoReally this is natural text-to-speech. 16,000 analyses per second. So, given Moore's law, around the iphone 9?
- mattnewton 10y agoAssuming it's done on device; you could stream it today!
- BatFastard 10y agoThe impression I get from the article is that it takes a supercomputer to generate it right now. So lets say 5 years? till it becomes mainstream.
- aab0 10y ago90 minutes of computation for 1 second of audio on DeepMind's GPUs: https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/773968758519902208 https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/773968758519902208 That's a lot of cranks of Moore's law. Better hope for considerable algorithmic improvements. (Raw is probably overkill anyway.)
- inputcoffee 10y ago54000 seconds! Let's say it halves every year. To get it to one second you need about 12 years. But if it drops by 1/3 every year, it would take 7. Not stating anything especially mind-blowing. Just restating the shocking speed of exponential growth/shrinkage.
- Xcelerate 10y agoThis raises some interesting questions. I've always thought that recording conversations would be sufficient "proof" of what someone said. It seems that soon audio alone will not be sufficient — video will be necessary as well.
- mattnewton 10y agoUntil their pixelCNN/RNN or some other generative model gets to the point where it can make video at sufficient resolution too.
- perseusprime11 10y agoyou mean this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk
- mattnewton 10y agoWow. Alright, can't trust anything anymore. That makes sense that they solved the problem more directly - how do I move someone else face in a video.
- andreapaiola 10y agoNope Do you remember a film titled Rising Sun?
- andreapaiola 10y agoA book by Michael Crichton
- rm_-rf_slash 10y agoBut that's just playing catch-up. Eventually video will be machine-made. It is hard to imagine given that need and the broader trends of society that we will someday NOT be living in a perpetual survellience state. However then the only way to ensure objective fairness is to make this information free and open to all. The second you close a door on access, corruption will explode. Or, alternatively, we do not go that route and as a result the burden of truth is diminished to the point where factual information will no longer be enough to make a definitive judgement. This Pandora's Box is staying open. Let's all hope for the sake of civilization that we use its powers responsibly.
- perseusprime11 10y agoHere are some fun samples for curious https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio/ https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio...
- e0m 10y agoHere's the link to the paper: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3cxcnOkPx9AeWpLVXhkTDJINDQ/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3cxcnOkPx9AeWpLVXhkTDJINDQ... And the WaveNet site with audio samples: https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio/ https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio... The comparison against state of the art Parametric and Concatenative methods are pretty mind blowing. Particularly listen to the music samples. That's a generated piano piece that sounds quite musical. They even include breaths and other auditory signals that really make for a convincing speech sample.
- exDM69 10y ago> Particularly listen to the music samples. That's a generated piano piece that sounds quite musical. That blew my mind. I've heard computer generated music before, but it's been just synthesized with usual methods while the computer is just the "composer". I find the crackling and buzzing a bit awkward, though. It's probably an artifact of the algorithm and can probably be mitigated with some simple filtering.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ChuckMcM 10y agoThanks for the links. It is definitely an improvement from the previous state of the art, although it seems surprisingly similar to artificial methods. And by that I mean that a number of RNN based network solutions for things like image classification or speech recognition produce output that is very unlike the non-RNN previous solution. This feels like they were training the system using artificially generated speech so that it could automatically generate artificially sounding speech.
- tlb 10y agoThe speech samples suffer from common flaws in prosody. When it says "The Blue Lagoon is a 1980...", it omits the pause after Lagoon. When giving a definition, there should be a comma-length pause after the term. The pacing would be correct for a non-defining sentence later in the same article like "The Blue Lagoon is a popular subject for parodies, including ..." Fixing that requires higher than sentence-level learning, since it has to know that it's introducing a potentially unfamiliar term which can only be known from the sentence's context within the article.
- runesoerensen 10y agoAlso https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12455510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12455510
- aab0 10y agoThis Bloomberg article adds nothing, and is less informative & interesting (doesn't have the audio samples for starters) than the original DeepMind blog post, and shouldn't be on the front page.
- rocky1138 10y agoWhat's the point of authoring an article like this and not including samples so we can listen to it?
- Jarwain 10y agoThe original blogpost has samples and everything, resulting in a much better article https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio/ https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio...
- nxzero 10y agoIt'll be interesting to see once "true" voice emulators become main stream how it's exploited for good and evil. Reminds me of "virtual" kidnapping scams where an attacker knows the victims phone will be unreachable and the attacker calls a relative demanding they wire funds or the victim will be killed. Attacker plays back a voice sample they've captured from the victim that makes it sound like they're in trouble an need help; basically the attacker calls the victim and say something like "May I help you?" repeatively until the victim responds with something like "No, I don't need your help!" an panicked voice - which is then edited to say "Help! I need your help! Help!"
- byebyetech 10y agoOn the fluff note: If this system is called WaveNet. The next weather prediction system based on deep learning should be called SkyNet.
- jacobkranz 10y agoSpaceX's server farm is called exactly that. Supposedly Elon hates the name...
- mtgx 10y agoI can almost hear him: "SkyNet is no joke, guys..."
- asah 10y agoI want to see WaveNet used to create a synthetic William Shatner, trained on old episodes of Star Trek, TJ Hooker and priceline.com commercials!!!
- mtgx 10y agoPatrick Stewart and Morgan Freeman's voices should definitely be replicated.
- imaginenore 10y agoAlso - Morgan Freeman - Alan Rickman - Liam Neeson - David Attenborough - John O'Hurley - Denzel Washington